Zoning in the United States

Based on Wikipedia: Zoning in the United States

The Invisible Lines That Shape American Cities

Here's something that might surprise you: one of the most powerful forces shaping where Americans can live, how much they pay for housing, and even who their neighbors are isn't market forces or personal choice. It's a set of invisible lines drawn on maps more than a century ago, often with explicitly racist intentions, that continue to determine the character of nearly every American neighborhood today.

These lines are zoning laws.

And the story of how they came to dominate American urban planning is far stranger—and darker—than most people realize.

What Zoning Actually Is

At its core, zoning is simple: governments divide land into districts, and each district has rules about what you can build there. One zone might allow only single-family homes. Another might permit apartment buildings. A third might be reserved for factories and warehouses.

Think of it as a giant coloring book for cities, where each color represents a different type of permitted use. The idea sounds reasonable enough. You probably wouldn't want a slaughterhouse next to an elementary school, or a chemical plant in the middle of a residential neighborhood.

But here's where it gets complicated.

In the United States, zoning has evolved far beyond simply separating incompatible uses. It has become, in the words of the New York Times, "practically gospel"—a system that dictates not just what kind of buildings can exist, but how dense neighborhoods can be, how tall structures can rise, how many cars must have parking spaces, and whether your city can grow to meet the needs of people who want to live there.

The Chinese Laundry Problem

The first zoning law in America wasn't about skyscrapers blocking sunlight or factories belching smoke. It was about laundries.

In 1885, the city of Modesto, California, passed an ordinance banning "wash houses" from certain areas. Nineteen years later, in 1904, Los Angeles followed suit with Ordinance 9774, which prohibited laundries from operating in three newly designated residential districts.

Why laundries? What possible nuisance could a business that cleans clothes pose to a neighborhood?

The answer lies in who owned those laundries. In late nineteenth-century California, laundry work was dominated by Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans. The "wash house" ordinances weren't really about land use at all. They were about keeping Chinese residents confined to certain parts of the city.

This pattern would repeat itself across America for decades.

When Zoning Became Explicitly Racial

In December 1910, the Baltimore City Council passed something far more direct than the California laundry laws. They created residential zoning based explicitly on race, designating which blocks could be occupied by Black residents and which were reserved for whites.

The motivation was straightforward. A neighborhood called Druid Hill had become predominantly Black, and white residents in adjacent areas demanded formal barriers. Baltimore's approach was crude but transparent: different races, different zones.

Richmond, Virginia, followed just months later. Then came a wave across the South: four more Virginia cities, one in North Carolina, one in South Carolina, and Atlanta. By 1918, race-based zoning ordinances had spread to New Orleans, Louisville, St. Louis, and Oklahoma City.

This might seem like ancient history, a relic of a different era. But the legal challenge to these laws would shape American zoning in ways that persist to this day.

The Supreme Court Steps In—Sort Of

In 1917, the United States Supreme Court struck down Louisville's racial zoning ordinance in a case called Buchanan v. Warley. The court ruled that explicitly race-based zoning violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

Victory for civil rights, right?

Not exactly.

The court's reasoning was revealing. The justices didn't rule that racial segregation was wrong. They ruled that the Louisville law violated property rights—specifically, the "right to contract" and the right to sell property to whoever you wanted. The problem wasn't racism. The problem was government interference with the real estate market.

And cities quickly found workarounds.

Atlanta responded by drafting a new racial zoning ordinance, arguing that the Supreme Court had only found technical defects in Louisville's specific law. Even after Georgia's state supreme court struck down Atlanta's ordinance, the city continued using its racially based zoning maps anyway. Florida cities like Apopka and West Palm Beach drafted their own race-based rules. Birmingham, Indianapolis, and New Orleans passed new racial zoning laws. In some cases, these practices continued for decades after Buchanan supposedly made them illegal.

The Berkeley Innovation

If explicit racial zoning was legally questionable after 1917, creative minds in city planning departments found another approach. Instead of saying "this neighborhood is for white people only," they could say "this neighborhood is for single-family homes only."

Berkeley, California, is widely believed to be where single-family zoning first originated. The goal wasn't openly stated, but historians believe the intent was clear: by requiring expensive single-family homes and prohibiting apartments or duplexes, cities could effectively exclude people who couldn't afford such homes—who, due to centuries of economic discrimination, were disproportionately racial minorities.

This approach had a crucial advantage. It was race-neutral on its face. A law that says "only single-family homes allowed here" doesn't mention race at all. It just happens to produce racially segregated outcomes.

This is the origin of what urbanists call "exclusionary zoning," and it remains the dominant form of land use regulation in American cities today.

The Equitable Building and the Birth of Modern Zoning

While California cities were experimenting with residential restrictions, New York was dealing with a different problem: the sky.

In 1915, the Equitable Building rose at 120 Broadway in Lower Manhattan. It was massive—at the time, the largest office building in the world by floor space. And it was built right up to the edge of its lot, covering every square inch of available land, casting neighboring buildings into perpetual shadow.

The Equitable Building still stands today. If you visit, you'll understand why it caused such outrage. It's a sheer cliff of masonry and glass that blocks out the sun for blocks around it. Neighboring buildings lost natural light entirely. Property values plummeted. Something, people agreed, had to be done.

In 1916, New York City adopted the first comprehensive zoning regulations in American history. The law established height restrictions for the entire city, expressed as ratios between maximum building height and the width of adjacent streets. In residential zones, buildings couldn't rise higher than the street was wide. The law also regulated which uses could go where, preventing factories from encroaching on retail districts.

The man behind these regulations was Edward Bassett, a lawyer and city planner who would become known as the "father of American zoning." His work in New York would soon become the template for the entire nation.

How Zoning Went National

In 1921, Herbert Hoover became Secretary of Commerce under President Warren Harding. Hoover had a vision: he wanted to increase home ownership in America. To accomplish this, he created the Advisory Committee on Zoning, tasked with drafting model legislation that states could adopt.

Edward Bassett, fresh from his work in New York, served on this committee alongside other prominent planners. Together, they produced the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act, first published in 1924 and revised in 1926.

This document became the genetic code for American zoning. Almost every state adopted it with minimal changes. The New York approach—with its separation of uses, its height restrictions, its residential districts—spread across the country like wildfire.

The effect was profound. Architect and illustrator Hugh Ferriss famously drew what the new regulations meant for skyscrapers: buildings that stepped back as they rose, creating the distinctive "wedding cake" silhouettes that defined the American urban skyline for generations.

But the most lasting effect wasn't on skyscrapers. It was on houses.

The Single-Family Gospel

Today, in most American cities, the majority of residential land is zoned exclusively for single-family detached homes. Not apartments. Not duplexes. Not townhouses. Just houses, one family each, on their own lots.

This is unusual. In fact, it's nearly unique to the United States.

Low-density residential zoning is far more predominant in American cities than in comparable cities in Europe, Asia, or even Canada. The result is that American cities sprawl outward rather than building upward, consuming enormous amounts of land, requiring extensive car-dependent infrastructure, and making housing far more expensive than it needs to be.

The economics are straightforward. When zoning restricts the supply of housing—by mandating that most urban land can only have one home on it—prices rise. Study after study has confirmed this. Strict zoning regulations constrain the supply of housing, inflate prices, increase homelessness, and contribute to what economists call "spatial misallocation"—people can't live where the jobs are because housing there is too expensive.

Some estimates suggest that restrictive zoning costs the American economy between hundreds of billions and over a trillion dollars per year in lost economic output. That's not a typo. A trillion dollars. Every year.

The Politics of Zoning

If zoning causes so much economic harm, why does it persist?

The answer lies in who benefits from it and who has political power over it.

Zoning is controlled locally—by city councils, planning commissions, and zoning boards. And the people who show up to zoning meetings are overwhelmingly homeowners. Not renters. Not people who might move to a neighborhood if housing were available. The people who already own property there.

For existing homeowners, restrictive zoning is often a good deal. It limits competition, keeps neighborhoods "stable" (a word that often carries racial undertones), and protects property values. A new apartment building nearby might bring more people, more traffic, more change. Blocking it keeps things the way they are.

Research has found that support for local zoning against multifamily housing is concentrated among white, affluent homeowners. And here's something interesting: there's no substantial difference between liberal and conservative homeowners in their opposition to dense housing in their neighborhoods. Political ideology matters less than economic interest.

However, when you look at the broader public and elected officials, a partisan divide does emerge. Democratic constituencies are more likely to support dense, multifamily housing. But even Democratic-controlled cities often maintain restrictive zoning, because the homeowners who dominate local politics cross party lines.

The One City Without Zoning

Houston, Texas, stands alone among major American cities. It has never adopted a zoning ordinance.

This isn't for lack of trying. In the 1920s, Houston's mayor appointed a planning commission and hired consultants to draft zoning laws. Will Hogg—son of a former Texas governor and co-founder of the elite River Oaks development—chaired the effort. But by 1929, even Hogg concluded there wasn't enough support for zoning, and he resigned.

Houston voters rejected zoning referendums in 1948, 1962, and 1993. The city remains the largest in America without formal zoning.

Does this mean Houston is a chaotic free-for-all? Not quite. Houston relies heavily on private deed restrictions—legal covenants that property owners place on their land, limiting future uses. These restrictions function similarly to zoning in many neighborhoods, especially wealthy ones like River Oaks. The city also has other land use regulations: building codes, parking requirements, and rules about lot sizes.

But the absence of formal zoning has made Houston more flexible than other cities. Housing construction has been easier, and the city has remained more affordable than comparable Sun Belt metros like Dallas or Phoenix—though affordability is relative, and Houston still has significant housing challenges.

The Constitutional Question

When zoning spread across America in the 1920s, many people thought it was unconstitutional. General P. Lincoln Mitchell called zoning laws "an advanced form of communism." Others argued that telling landowners what they could build on their own property was an unjust restriction of private action.

The question reached the Supreme Court in 1926, in a case called Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co.

Euclid, a suburb of Cleveland, had adopted a comprehensive zoning ordinance. Ambler Realty owned land there that the village had zoned for residential use. The company argued this was unconstitutional: if they could lease the land to industrial users, it would be worth far more money. By restricting the land to residential use, the village had effectively taken their property without compensation.

The trial court agreed with Ambler. The judge found that zoning was "an illegitimate device to facilitate social and economic segregation." Zoning, the court ruled, was unconstitutional.

But the Supreme Court reversed that decision. In a landmark ruling, the justices held that zoning was a valid exercise of the government's "police power"—the authority to regulate for the health, safety, and welfare of the public. Zoning, the court said, was essentially a way of preventing nuisances. Just as the government could prohibit a slaughterhouse in a residential area, it could designate entire zones where certain uses were forbidden.

The Euclid decision gave constitutional blessing to zoning across America. The case gave its name to "Euclidean zoning"—the traditional American system of strict separation between residential, commercial, and industrial uses.

The German Connection

American zoning didn't emerge from nothing. Its intellectual roots trace back to nineteenth-century Germany.

Urban planner Reinhard Baumeister developed early systems of land use separation that influenced later zoning practices. Frankfurt's zoning plans became models not just for American cities but for urban planning across Western Europe.

This German influence is ironic, given that modern German cities are far less restrictive about housing density than American cities are. The student has surpassed the teacher—in the wrong direction.

The Human Cost

Behind the legal history and economic statistics, there's a human reality. Zoning determines where people can live, and where they can't.

The housing shortage in many American metropolitan areas is severe. In cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Boston, housing costs consume enormous portions of workers' incomes. Teachers, firefighters, and nurses often can't afford to live in the communities they serve. Young people delay starting families because they can't afford homes. Low-income workers face brutal commutes because they've been priced out of neighborhoods near their jobs.

Homelessness has risen in high-cost cities, driven partly by the inability of housing supply to meet demand. When zoning prevents the construction of apartments and affordable housing, people who can't afford single-family homes have nowhere to go.

And the racial segregation that zoning was designed to enforce? It persists. American cities remain deeply segregated by race and income, with zoning continuing to shape who lives where. The invisible lines drawn a century ago cast long shadows.

Signs of Change

In recent years, the politics of zoning have begun to shift. The housing crisis has grown too severe to ignore. Young voters, many of them locked out of homeownership, have become a political force.

Several states have taken action. Oregon effectively banned single-family-only zoning statewide in 2019. California has passed numerous laws overriding local zoning restrictions. Minneapolis eliminated single-family zoning within city limits. Other cities and states are considering similar reforms.

The arguments for reform cut across traditional political lines. Libertarians and free-market conservatives oppose zoning as government interference with property rights. Progressives oppose it as a tool of segregation and inequality. Environmentalists oppose it because sprawl increases carbon emissions and destroys habitat. Economists oppose it because it constrains growth and makes workers poorer.

The defenders of restrictive zoning remain powerful—homeowner associations, neighborhood groups, and the politicians who depend on their votes. The invisible lines have powerful guardians.

But for the first time in a century, those lines are being questioned. The gospel of single-family zoning faces heretics. Whether American cities will change remains to be seen. The battle over the invisible lines has only begun.