Land Use without Zoning

By Bernard H. Siegan

Book Overview

The conversation about zoning has meandered its way through issues ranging from housing affordability to economic growth to segregation, expanding in the process from a public policy backwater to one of the most discussed policy issues of the day. In his pioneering 1972 study, Land Use Without Zoning, Bernard Siegan first set out what has today emerged as a common-sense perspective: Zoning not only fails to achieve its stated ends of ordering urban growth and separating incompatible uses, but also drives housing costs up and competition down. In no uncertain terms, Siegan concludes, "Zoning has been a failure and should be eliminated "
Drawing on the unique example of Houston--America's fourth largest city, and its lone dissenter on zoning--Siegan demonstrates how land use will naturally regulate itself in a nonzoned environment. For the most part, Siegan says, markets in Houston manage growth and separate incompatible uses not from the top down, like most zoning regimes, but from the bottom up. This approach yields a result that sets Houston apart from zoned cities: its greater availability of multifamily housing. Indeed, it would seem that the main contribution of zoning is to limit housing production while adding an element of permit chaos to the process.
Land Use Without Zoning reports in detail the effects of current exclusionary zoning practices and outlines the benefits that would accrue to cities that forgo municipally imposed zoning laws. Yet the book's program isn't merely destructive: beyond a critique of zoning, Siegan sets out a bold new vision for how land-use regulation might work in the United States.
Released nearly a half century after the book's initial publication, this new edition recontextualizes Siegan's work for our current housing affordability challenges. It includes a new preface by law professor David Schleicher, which explains the book's role as a foundational text in the law and economics of urban land use and describes how it has informed more recent scholarship. Additionally, it includes a new afterword by urban planner Nolan Gray, which includes new data on Houston's evolution and land use relative to its peer cities.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1538148633
• ISBN13: 9781538148631
• Release Date: January 2021
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Length: 298 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Houston, Texas has NO 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).