Book Review: Arbitrary Lines

Arbitrary Lines is the best recent primer on zoning in America. However, it is not without its faults.

In Arbitrary Lines, author M. Nolan Gray provides a history of zoning, its purpose, and the problems it causes. He goes on to advocate for fixes to zoning to solve those problems, and the eventual elimination of zoning altogether. This might sound dry and boring, but as is discussed in Arbitrary Lines, zoning has become an increasingly popular topic and the book is artfully written to remain engaging throughout.

The book starts with a history of the American city and the changes brought about by industrial revolution technologies. The technology people often think of is the car, but the steel frame building and the elevator, as well as the streetcar are equally important in the way our cities have changed. It is these technological changes that we’re still grappling with today, and just another example in the long history of how society, and especially our cities, change with new technology.

The book continues with a history of how cities responded to these changes, culminating with zoning, which only dates back about a hundred years. Once the original history and purpose of zoning is established the bulk of the book discusses the problems created by zoning. Here is one of the areas Arbitrary Lines falls short. In describing the problems brought about by zoning, it ignores the many other causes of the identified problems. That is not to say that zoning isn’t a factor in any of the identified problems, but it is by no means the only or even primary factor for many of them. There simply seems to be an overfitting of changes in American society over the past 40 years to changes in zoning starting in the 1970s as their cause. This is especially true in Chapter 4, regarding the wealth we’ve lost. 

M. Nolan Gray spends a lot of time in the book discussing high housing costs, and people not moving to productive cities because of those costs. Here, again, the book falls a bit short. The language used confuses the issue, and conflates high costs and lack of supply of housing. People are not moving to more productive places because high housing costs will eat up any wage growth they may have, as the book argues. Instead, people are not moving to more productive places because there are not enough homes in these places. While these two issues are related, they are distinctly different. If all of the people who wanted to live in more productive places move to them, many of those people would be homeless no matter how much they were willing to spend for their housing simply because there’s not enough housing to go around.

Overall, these are minor quibbles in the scheme of the book. These issues do not change the underpinnings of the argument for reforming zoning. While the identification of the issues caused by zoning may be correct, the solution to these issues feel like a leap. In many ways, this feels like the same problem Karl Marx had in Capital, where the identification of the problems with the capitalist system were right on, but his prescription for fixing those problems were off base. 

Towards the end of Arbitrary Lines, after talking about possible reforms to zoning, M. Nolan Gray uses the lack of local zoning in Japan and Houston to make the case that zoning should be abolished everywhere. While this was an interesting discussion, it both seems like too few examples to use when discussing discarding the cornerstone of American planning, and too far of a leap for cities to undertake in a single bound. 

Instead of the more than 50 pages given over to exploring abolishing zoning, expanding the appendix to be the final third of the book would have been a much better use of paper and ink. The appendix covers many of the societal changes that have compounded the issues surrounding zoning but weren’t mentioned in the body of the book. In fact, the appendix provides a good basis for a deeper and more holistic understanding of how our cities are developed. As the author says in the appendix, zoning cannot build anything, it can only stop things from being built. Instead of focusing on abolishing zoning, it would have been interesting to look at all of the ways our cities get built, from comprehensive plans that set a vision for a city, to how developments get financed to determine what gets built. 

Arbitrary Lines is a great book for people that want to understand zoning in America. The overview of the history of zoning, the changes to our cities due to industrialization, and the problems that zoning creates are must reads for anyone interested in making our cities work better. It will likely be the first book I share with my Planning Commission colleagues in the near future.