Land Use Without Zoning

A major city without zoning? This was news to me! Bernie Siegan studied Houston's non-zoning approach to land use. Siegan's point is that all land use control is by its very nature "exclusionary", and it is especially the poor and middle class who are hurt by it. A 1971 comparison of rents in Houston and Dallas revealed renters' costs to average 15% higher in Dallas; the two cities are comparable in every way except that Dallas has had zoning ordinances since the 1930s while Houston has never had one. Siegan says that government "solutions" to land use and housing problems have been primarily political moves that imposed huge costs upon the middle and low income people who could least afford them. Environmental nuisances have been permitted to continue and even expand, but nonagressive uses of land are prohibited in order to satisfy polically powerful minorities. Anyone living near a BFI landfill is familiar with the politics of zoning and land use. Studies indicate that in addition to boosting renter's costs, zoning imposes other hardships that are less easy to identify. And rent controls, building codes, rehabilitation subsidies, and public housing all hurt rather than help low-income families. Siegan believes that "the least fallible of city planners is the free market". He would like to see the creation and enforcement of voluntary building codes, voluntary covenants to restrict land uses rather than zoning, and landowner planning within a framework of land and environmental property rights. For more information, I believe this author did some work for the Association of Rational Environmental Alterntives (AREA) headed by Dick Bjornseth. I also recommend Seymour I. Toll's "Zoned American" (NY: Grossman, 1969).