Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World

Bronin, a professor of urban planning at Cornell University, debuts with a lively survey of the arcane regulations that shape American cities. Central to her exploration is the inequity and monotony caused by America’s many neighborhoods zoned to exclude anything but single-family homes. She begins with the case study of Houston versus its tony suburb West University Place, which demonstrates how both deregulation and restrictive zoning end up harming the poorest. As Bronin explains, Houston’s famously unregulated construction keeps housing cheap but allows for building in dangerous flood zones and promotes environment-destroying sprawl; meanwhile, West U is exclusive and upper-class, with a total ban on new multifamily housing. Bronin argues instead for zoning that is both safety and environmentally conscious and pro-multifamily, as well as for undoing policies that make cities more pleasurable for visitors than for residents. Her proposed solutions range from deregulation—like eliminating parking requirements for new construction—to more regulation, like using zoning to corral the nuisance sprawl of clubs and bars linked to the South by Southwest festival in Austin. While Bronin analyzes the classist and racist effects of zoning, she makes an off-key effort to downplay the classist and racist motivations behind their persistence (she chalks it up to “inertia”), unhelpfully obfuscating the political component of the zoning battle instead of tackling it head-on. Still, it’s a brisk, informative overview of America’s urban planning woes and wins. (Oct.)