Brace yourselves, cucks. Pull up your socks and grab some fucking popcorn. Put away your teddy bear and buy that yogurt-maker you’ve been looking at online. Dress a horse in capri pants and lock your deformed stepson in the basement, ‘cause we’re about to talk about goddamned, motherfucking ZONING!!!
It’s the piece I pitched for years but could never get on Last Week Tonight; it was deemed too boring for a show that -- I shit you not -- almost did a 20-minute piece on school lunch. Even though I would argue -- hell, I’m about to argue, so put on a cup, Nancy Drew -- that zoning has the highest impact-to-attention ratio of any issue in American politics.
It’s hard to think of a major issue in American politics that zoning doesn’t touch. Class mobility? Check. Education? Duh. Climate change? Hells yes. Homelessness? You know it, asswipe. Racial inequality? F’in a, Gramps. Difficult to quantify quality-of-life considerations?
Let's get this party fuckin' KRUNK: Let's address Richard Kahlenberg's recent op-ed in the New York Times.
Kahlenberg argues that ending restrictive zoning policies -- things like minimum lot sizes, parking requirements, and restrictions on multi-family homes -- is the opposite of housing discrimination. I think he’s right. And I think it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on just how racist housing policy in this country has been. If racism can be measured on a spectrum from Adele’s Jamaican-inspired outfit on one end to Hitler’s Rally at Nuremberg at the other, then the history of American housing policy is probably close to the 1925 Klan rally on the National Mall: A step shy of Nuremberg, but only due to a dearth of style points. That racism often took the form of ticky-tacky local ordinances forbidding high-density housing that might attract “the wrong element”. It was a remarkable shit sandwich of policy: Racist, classist, and it definitely fucked over middle-class people of all races by forcing them to bid against each other for the same 20 split-level ranches. What I’m saying is: I can’t watch The Brady Bunch without thinking: “That house is built on a pile of bones.”
The remarkable thing about the Kahlenberg column is that it sparked a debate among my fellow Zone Drones (I’ll work on that name) about whether it’s better politics to frame zoning as a racial justice issue or an economic growth issue. I see that as a sign of zoning’s potential as good politics: How often is it that we get to choose whether to frame an issue as anti-racist or pro-economic-growth, and both arguments poll well1 and have the added benefit of actually being true?
Arguments for pro-growth zoning policies can be made from most points on the political spectrum. I’ve already endorsed Kahlenberg’s argument that less-restrictive zoning promotes racial integration, but if that case doesn’t butter your biscuit, here’s a straight-up Chamber of Commerce-style argument that would be right at home at U Chicago in the ‘70s: Exclusionary zoning creates a market distortion. It’s the government selectively regulating economic activity, thus restricting capital flows and causing artificial shortages. That argument is practically wearing a bowtie and quoting from The Fountainhead. But if neither the College Republican argument nor the Social Justice Warrior argument works for you -- if you demand talking points designed for middle-of-the-road, ordinary, every-day working stiffs -- then fine: Good zoning makes it easier to live near work, so John and Jane Q. Normie can spend less time commuting and more time with their boring-ass kids, coma-inducing network TV singing contests, and dumb-as-dogshit superhero movies.
Everyone happy now?
The exciting development of the moment -- and I’m sure we can all agree that this is exciting as fuck -- is that zoning is finally getting national attention. Matt Yglesias was among the first to tap into the nation’s insatiable demand for hot zoning content by writing a best-selling book about it. Some of my favorite neoliberal shills have started banging the zoning drum. And, in a major development, Biden’s American Jobs Plan includes a $5 billion grant program to entice localities to loosen their zoning laws. That’s something; the most Obama did was to release a white paper at the end of his term, which Trump then took down, which means Obama basically wrote “build more!” on a napkin and then lit it on fire. Now, we have an actual policy with honest-to-God US currency behind it to rally around. Better yet, the most consequential thing that’s likely to come from the Summer of Zoning -- as it’s surely soon to be known -- will be to shift the conversation from hyper-specific local decisions, where the politics of zoning are often scrambled, to a more macro level, where the battle lines are more clear.
There was a split second last summer when I thought the politics of zoning might snap into focus. It was when Trump started ranting about Democrats “wanting to destroy our suburbs” -- it was part of his stump speech for a few weeks. He was talking about zoning, or at least he was trying to talk about zoning, but he knew so little about the details that this talking point quickly got dumped into the already-overstuffed “what the fuck is he talking about?” file. So, Trump didn’t become the face of the anti-upzoning movement. Which is a shame, because Trump typifies the constituency I consider to be upzoning’s natural opponents: wealthy bigots.
If you’re a wealthy bigot, I get why you’d want zoning to be as exclusionary as possible. I mean, hey: You got yours, right? You own your house; how great would it be if it was the last house ever built? Plus, you don’t want those grubby Italians taking over the neighborhood, unless you are Italian, in which case: same point but swap out the ethnicity. You’ve really got to hand it to wealthy bigots: They’re not being irrational here. Opposing inclusionary zoning does serve their terrible, terrible interests.
What drives me insane is that the most ardent opponents of inclusionary zoning are sometimes progressives. Far-left Democrats keep killing an important upzoning bill in California, a state that -- not coincidentally -- continues to suffer an intense housing crisis. In Brooklyn, an upzoning proposal in the heavily-Hispanic neighborhood of Sunset Park was killed amidst “concerns about gentrification” (as the Times put it) raised by an activist group that appeared to be mostly white. Even my long-time State Senator, the uber-progressive Brad Hoylman, is trumpeting his opposition to building skyscrapers in Midtown Manhattan. Brad...buddy...friend...Midtown Manhattan hasn’t been a quaint Dutch fishing village for 250 years now. I lived in your district: Hand-built canal houses and one-story shoppes in which local artisans carve wooden clogs out of driftwood are thin on the fucking ground these days. To oppose building skyscrapers in a place that is literally world-famous for skyscrapers -- THE GODDAMNED EMPIRE STATE BUILDING IS THERE!!! -- demonstrates an anti-development mindset bordering on pathology.
Progressives elsewhere have it right. Oregon and Minneapolis have effectively ended single family zoning (meaning you can build single family homes but don’t have to), and Washington state might soon do the same. I admit: I don’t have a unifying theory as to why the left is so split on this issue. But I’ve noticed that the narratives that turn progressives against inclusionary zoning tend to be highly localized.
Local zoning battles are never about the concept of zoning, generally; they’re usually about a specific project. And the project inevitably involves -- cue ominous music -- a developer! Ah yes, developers, the black-hearted, cigar-chomping bastards who bulldoze entire neighborhoods as part of their never-ending quest to turn the world into a playground for the rich. If that narrative sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the plot of The Goonies. I honestly think zoning reform is being hindered by The Goonies and Goonies-adjacent movies. Of course, in real life, developers can’t just bulldoze random neighborhoods -- they have to own the land -- and in many cases, they’re building on a vacant lot or some other under-used property (that’s why the investment made sense in the first place). So there: I just explained why The Goonies isn’t real. Still, the presence of a developer can be enough to ignite progressive backlash. I don’t know who progressives think is building all these houses and apartments people live in -- Jimmy Carter, maybe? The Amish? A rag-tag bunch of smiling, singing mice and birds, like in Cinderella? I’m really not sure. But building involves developers, and to some people “developer” = “bad”.
Local zoning fights can also become fights over historic preservation. Obviously, historic preservation is a legitimate concept. I wouldn’t support bulldozing Independence Hall to put up a Chipotle, and I really like Chipotle. But historic preservation is ridiculously overused. In one example -- highlighted in Matt Yglesias’ One Billion Americans -- residents in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of DC managed to get historical preservation status for the country’s first strip mall. Here it is:
Yes: That’s a historically-preserved Target. And European Wax Center. And California Tortilla, which is a poor man’s Chipotle. On prime real-estate next to a subway stop in the city with the fifth-highest average rent in the country. In an article a few years ago, an advocate for this legendary strip mall discussed future plans for the site (which don’t seem to have happened), including: “...a patio partially extending into the parking lot...so visitors could get up close to the structure and see the stone walls, the copper-covered cupolas, and other intricacies of the historic site.”
Respectfully: This is insane. But it demonstrates two things. First, it shows how twee lefty narratives about “neighborhood character” can take precedence over things that people on the left are supposed to care about, like affordable housing, racial integration, and social mobility. Second, it shows how the priorities of one neighborhood can stymie the priorities of the city at large. Because while Cleveland Park residents might be strip mall aficionados, my wild guess is that most DC residents would rather have better housing than the opportunity to sit in a parking lot and gander at the stone walls and copper-covered cupolas of a motherfucking Target.
There will be no discussion of cupolas in the National Conversation on Zoning. It will, instead, be a balls-out, take-no-prisoners debate in which provincial hand-wringing over specific projects will take a back seat to the understanding that empowering people to live where they want to live should be a top priority. My hope is that a macro view of zoning clarifies the tradeoffs so that big-city progressives stop aligning themselves with Donald Trump. So lace up your girdle and name all your house plants. Fart on a cabbage and expose a monkey to Shakespeare. Dox your grandma and have a sex dream about Rowlf from The Muppets, because the national conversation about zoning is mother-to-the-fucking ON, bitches!
Though the economic argument polls better.
It seems that part of why restrictive zoning rules exist is because local governments can use them to extract concessions from developers in exchange for exceptions from those restrictive zoning rules. You want to be the only convenience store in a neighborhood, or the only heavy industry in town? Could be lucrative to be the only option for that, but you'll have to give the local officials their cut.
I think this is related to what you were talking about in "Making Policy By Choke Point is Cheating"
I am memorizing “That argument is practically wearing a bowtie and quoting from The Fountainhead.” If it works on a first date she’s a keeper.