Author's Forum:Arbitrary Lines

so welcome to on the park bench a public square conversation brought to you by the congress for the new urbanism on the park bench presents interactive conversations with thought leaders and new urbanism and allied industries providing the audience an opportunity to engage in real time the webinar series is a platform for cnu members to engage debate and collaborate on pressing issues of the day today we have an author's form on the book arbitrary lines with author m nolan gray an interviewer mary madden so share your thoughts on on the park bench www.tinyurl.comt feedback and author m nolan gray is a professional city planner with experience working on the front lines of zoning policy in new york city he is an affiliated scholar at george mason university gray is also a regular contributor to the blog market urbanism and his writing has appeared in bloomberg city lab the atlantic and forbes he regularly appears on national local radio podcasts and television to discuss city planning issues he is the host of a new youtube series pop culture urbanism and mary madden our interviewer and moderator is an urban designer and city planner with madden planning prior to that she was principal with farrell madden llc for more than 20 years and she is one of the most experienced practitioners in form based codes and code reform she is active with cnu's project for code reform and she also worked for hud and the mayor's institute on city design i'm rob studiville editor of cnu's public square and arbitrary lines how zoning broke the american city and how to fix it is probably one of the most talked about urban planning books this year the timing is good because many states and cities have recently taken some fairly sweeping steps to reform zoning and zoning is being called into question uh now in a way that it really hasn't been for most of the last century but the book is more than just a call to abolish zoning it also looks at steps to how to reform zoning codes and land use codes and i think importantly examines what planners could do if they weren't spending most of their time overseeing zoning so the plan the panelists um we're going to have a presentation by uh by nolan gray and then a discussion among nolan gray and mary madden and then we're going to get to q a from the audience so please use the q a function of zoom to ask the questions as they occur to you and now i am going to pass this along to nolan gray yeah good morning um let me get my screen share set up here uh it's a pleasure to be here uh thank you to justine you and thank you rob for helping to coordinate this it's nice to be here with you too mary uh and thanks to everyone for joining i'm gonna be talking about new book arbitrary lines um how zoning broke the american city let me get my my notes up here uh fantastic i've done this about a thousand times as a course instructor ta at ucla and uh i'll figure it out right when we go back full day in person okay so um arbitrary alliance right one of the special things when you write a book um is you pretty quickly figure out that a lot of what you want to say and a lot of what you think has already been written uh in some cases you know a dozen or so times that is unless you're really really smart in which case you're actually paving out new territory or you just haven't done the research and don't realize that that other people have had the same uh clever thoughts that you've had but when i was doing the research for the book of course one of the one of the resources that i kept coming back to thinking about zoning reform and thinking about what we want lightness planning to do was the new urbanist movement a lot of the ideas that i cover here uh really were explored in the in the 80s and 90s at first by some of the new urbanest so i'll move through some of the stuff that i think will be more familiar to this audience and try to focus on some of the stuff that i think will be interesting and i'm sure totally uncontroversial um so the first part of the book there's i'm trying to do three things with the book um the first part is really just to explain what zoning is and where it comes from uh you know one of the things that we're living in this beautiful moment right where everybody cares about zoning when i first started getting into zoning uh zoning was the type of thing where if you say to someone at a party um uh that you are a zoning researcher they would politely have to use the bathroom uh or go fill up their drink right now it's this thing that everybody wants to talk about everybody has feelings about uh presidential candidates are expected to have a platform on it you can open up the editorial pages for any major paper on any given day and see articles about zoning but i found that even people who had opinions that i thought were broadly correct about zoning had only a very vague sense of what zoning was so first a little bit of background right um the zoning is separate from from city planning city planning is something that of course humans have been doing for many thousands of years of course here's the the 1600s plan for philly uh planners have been planning out streets and public spaces and doing more of the physical planning work uh that the tip people typically think of as planning uh since basically the dawn of civilization um but so zoning comes into the picture in the early 19s uh first modern zoning codes are adopted in 1916. uh and i think you know one narrative that we that we get for what zoning was where it comes from what it was trying to do was this notion was cities are chaotic uh cities are you know have use incompatibilities cities have growth that's happening untethered from infrastructure investment and if we get all the smartest people in the room uh together they can come up with a plan uh that will allocate land uh and cap and control densities you know over a span of something like 20 30 40 years um in the book i i try to tell the early story of zoning through the lens of the two cities that are two i think very indicative cities that adopted zoning in 1916. uh the first is uh of course new york city very famously um uh and i sort of dive into some of the baptist and bootlegger politics that gets you zoning in new york city right so of course you have that sort of uh proto-modernist framing of let's get the smartest people in the room together and come up with a plan uh but of course you also have people with financial interests in zoning right or people who uh maybe are pursuing what we might you know with a modern lens see as anti-social objectives so i talk about you know the attempt to have some sort of class-based segregation in the early 1916 codes and a lot of this early zoning history focuses on new york city but i really wanted to highlight berkeley as well berkeley california which of course at this time was a booming suburb and berkeley is is much more interesting as a zoning origin story to the extent that berkeley uh is the first city to have single-family zoning uh so of course this is zoning that strictly prohibits anything but a detached single-family home um and in both of these cases you know there is there are the baptists right of the coalition the people who are making this this this high ideological argument about the need for city planning but there are also people who are fairly explicitly saying yeah i want to protect my property values i want to keep people who don't look like me or don't earn as much as me out of my neighborhood and then of course a little bit of the story here i'm going to move a little bit quickly through this because i want to get to the discussion uh but the story of how the federal government uh basically over the last 100 years heavily promotes incentivizes and eventually mandates the adoption of zoning codes um so what is zoning uh there are two key documents with zoning the first is the zoning text uh which sets the rules for what you can and can't do in every single zoning district and then the zoning map uh which uh maps that onto every single parcel in the city so assigning each parcel to a zoning district uh and these districts are defining in broad browse trips two things and it's really important how i define zoning because i think you know there's this is maybe i think where some disagreement will will flow um i'm defining zoning in a much more euclidean sense of trying to do two things uh the first is segregate land uses right so the typical u.s zoning code uh segregates cities into residential commercial and industrial districts broadly speaking and of course there are a dizzying array of subcategories within each of those categories so within residential you might have uh mostly single-family detached district right or you might have duplexes small apartments within commercial you have maybe more local neighborhood retail regional uh light and industrial right this stuff should be pretty familiar to many people who are practicing planners uh then the second is restricting density right so of course here you have on the right especially uh floor area ratio which is the preferred way that we basically set a sort of i would argue an arbitrary cap on the amount of fluoride that can be built on any given lot uh and then of course a sort of strange cocktail of rules determine the actual massing of that building things like step backs and lot coverage um i don't have to tell the new urbanists um what's wrong with a lot of those ways of doing it uh i want to separate zoning off from i think other forms of land he's planning right uh so in the book i'm i'm careful to say you know i'm not really dealing with historic preservation or not really dealing with subdivision ordinances or maybe things like environmental review or things like streets plans uh although i talk about that near the end of the book um i'm really trying to talk about this notion that local governments can and should a segregate cities on the basis of land use and b uh place strict limits on density by way of stuff like floor area or unit counts on each lot so this is i think where many people are really familiar with the discussion uh or or certainly you know so right so so my parents might not be so familiar with how zoning works but they've certainly heard that zoning raising houses prices for example uh so on the left here is a map of los angeles uh i think something like 77 percent of los angeles excuse me 75 percent of residential areas in los angeles are exclusively restricted to single-family detached housing right so this is the first way that zoning increases housing prices by simply just not allowing a lot of housing to be built uh the second way that these zoning codes increase housing prices uh is by mandating that the housing that is built uh be uh built maybe to a a higher standard than developers and consumers might otherwise have preferred so here's a fantastic illustration by by some friends at the parking reform network showing that uh if you have a two parking space per two bedroom apartment unit parking requirement you're basically doubling the amount of space that needs to be consumed uh and in the california context each one of those structured parking spaces cost eighty thousand dollars um as my mentor at ucla is always eager to say there's no such thing as free parking all of that gets priced into to higher housing prices and then the third way that i argue zoning increasing housing prices is simply just all the delays that it adds to the process right so one of the things that's happened since the beginning of zoning and it's a subplot in the book you might say is we've moved away from a much more as of right system to a much more discretionary system so right so the notion is that you're not entitled to your permit increasingly you're not entitled to your permits but you have to go through this process where you may or may not receive them and this of course leads to a very long owner's process involving public hearings uh which are quite possibly the least productive way to gauge the community's feelings on something a lot of public hearings a lot of paperwork right i highlight the uniform language for read procedure which ironically is probably one of the better attempts to navigate this by setting clear parameters on how long the process can go but even in that case it can take six months to get a rezoning for a project that you know everybody would agree a city like new york needs um the second big cost that i highlight is the economic costs um so you know i think an underrated feature of cities is their function as extremely thick labor markets right so there's a reason why humans historically have flock to cities even despite their their many costs uh and it's not just purely for consumption it's also because when you're in a thick labor market that allows you to be as productive as you can possibly be and we know that of course historically genius is not spatially geographically randomly distributed it's concentrated in certain places at certain times certain regions uh just make people much more productive and connect people with the ideas and and colleagues who are working on the same issues as them and this is how we make really big leaps and this is why we we talk about a place like silicon valley or we talk about wall street so much of the way that we talk about how economies work is place based uh because place matters the strange thing about the way we do language planning in the u.s is we actually make it hardest for americans to move to those places that are most productive where they could most dramatically increase their earnings right so for example here where i am in los angeles up in the bay area places like boston new york city uh historically americans moved from poor less productive places to richer more productive places they improved their quality of life and then of course made us all collectively richer by everybody being more productive and more innovative um now they do the opposite and we're all poor as a result and there's some pretty striking estimates there's a debate going on about the methodology but one estimate puts the total gdp cost between 1964 and 2009 at 36 percent uh another estimate uh estimates that if even our three most productive cities were to liberalize their zoning codes uh real gdp per capita would increase by eight percent uh you know like i say there's a debate among economists on what the exact figure is but there's no real debate that these things are a dramatic uh extreme drain on on economic growth um third piece here which i think is was on top of mine when i was writing this of course in 2020 as the george floyd protests were underway is the relationship between zoning and segregation um so i get part of partly into this in my introduction on where's when it comes from uh but i i think there's this popular ocean among some planters that that you know segregation was a sort of misuse or misapplication of zoning uh i argue that the historical record is very clear that this was a core function of zoning uh from the very beginning zoning codes euclidean zoning starts to spread after bk and v warley in 1917 when the supreme court says we're not going to tolerate explicitly racial zoning so what euclidean zoning uh does is it comes in and says well we're still going to allow you to engage engagement segregationist zoning practices but you have to do so through the lens of class right and so this is relatively straightforward if you can say for example everyone who lives in this neighborhood has to have a single family home on a ten thousand square foot lot you effectively have the power to determine who can and can't live in that neighborhood uh on the basis of class and then of course in the u.s context that tracks pretty closely onto race specifically white black segregation um and you can see you know some of these paradoxes even to this day right so on the right is a photo that i took in in austin texas of uh a sign that many people i'm sure you all have been used to saying since 2016 uh you know the all are welcome here sign next to a sign that uh is opposing uh zoning liberalization in austin right and you can see this and and i use this example to emphasize this is not just the thing that is an issue in a city like birmingham of course where it's very well documented or in a conservative suburb uh but even in theoretically progressive inner suburbs zoning is used to uh thor new housing production uh particularly affordable housing typologies uh which has the effect of keeping people out no matter if the yard sign says all are welcome here um the last big piece which uh i think is is equally important is the relationship between zoning and sprawl or zoning and environmental considerations uh right so you know a huge reason so much one of the things that's great about zoning is when you when you understand zoning and i'm i'm sure mary feels this when you understand zoning you can walk around the city and you can understand why things look the way they do to a huge degree uh you know this is my like pitch for for getting into zoning it's not just this wonky thing that you read about and you never apply it's this wonky thing that you read and then it's like they live you know you put on the sunglasses and you can understand why things look the way they do but of course the u.s cities are infamously very sprawling and um of course i obviously i would suggest that that's by design right so of course you have things like single family zoning which suppress residential densities in many cases below what's necessary to support uh frequent transit uh but even then within single family zone uh you have rules that say you must consume so much surplus land right you must have lot sizes of at least this size you must have setbacks of at least the size uh nothing wrong with requiring open space or public space but we do so in a very strange way of saying everybody has to have so much on their lot uh rather than maybe saying let's just have large parts or let's have regular parts uh of course car ownership is written into many zoning codes just that's an assumption right uh so for example you're not allowed to build commercial or retail or residential in many u.s cities increasingly less uh without a car uh and then also too the the issue of youth segregation so on the right here if you if you've lived in dc you might have seen this you have many formerly commercial properties uh properties that might have once been a corner grocery or some other daily necessity like a barber shop or a doctor's office either now legally cannot be used for that commercial use we've concentrated all of these into different zones completely building the city around this notion that you will you will get in your car and you will drive between different land uses um more broadly too i you know i highlight this in the book part of what this national reshuffling is doing is it's also reshuffling americans from more temperate regions to to more uh energy-intensive regions right so families moving out of california and into a state like uh nevada or arizona are going to dramatically increase their energy consumption um so what can we do about this uh i'm fairly certain that everyone here has thoughts on the matter and i'm excited to hear them in the q a but i want to highlight some of the reforms or some of the ideas that i think are maybe underrated in this discussion so the first is uh gotta get a plug in here for for northwest arkansas uh [laughter] really exciting things happening there so i think in the near term absolutely we can do things to make zoning less bad uh we can reform zoning and um remove the more destructive elements that stand on the way of building uh more affordable integrated equitable and sustainable cities uh at the local level for example a lot of cities are eliminating minimum parking requirements right so i highlight here i always love to highlight fayetteville because i think people are used to hearing the story about oregon or maybe they're not terribly surprised to hear it about buffalo but when you say to them hey you know like a a an upper south state uh i especially love it because i'm from lexington kentucky and fayetteville is a great comp hey you know cities even smaller mid-sized cities uh in regions not historically associated with being on the planet cutting edge are doing exciting things on this front um so you know that's of course a positive uh reform that's underway here in california our focus uh has been on state level preemption so this is setting up state guard rails around what local governments can and can't do i think the most successful iteration of this has been accessory dwelling units uh right so this is the picture in the bottom left uh one in four homes that's being built in los angeles now is an adu and that's partly an indictment of how little housing we build in los angeles also partly uh a credit to the success of this program set clear rules uh and allow anyone to build accessory dwelling units uh and and you get production um and also too i think uh another element piece of the reform program is the role of the federal government so this is something that of course we've been having conversations with uh policymakers over the last year or so what is the role of the federal government i think there's some people who would say well lions playing in the u.s is purely a local issue maybe a state issue the federal government has no role to play as i argue earlier in the book the federal government played a huge role in promoting drafting promoting and spreading zoning and i think it's reasonable to say that the federal government has some small role to play in incentivizing cities pulling back on some of these rules getting rid of the most egregious policies like single-family zoning or prohibitions on single room occupancies or manufactured housing the most overtly exclusionary uh policies there are mechanisms like cbdg funding or surface transportation grants and then i argue we can look abroad right so many other developed countries do something that kind of sort of looks like zoning in the u.s i highly like the example of japan as a country that has relatively liberal zoning code uh you know i don't know how much of that system we can just import into the us but there are certainly lessons there for example their most restrictive zoning district uh it is it will have you know for example a low a density rule that effectively requires low rise development but it might allow for small multi-family or might allow for small inoffensive uh commercial operations uh another process feature of the japanese zoning system that i think is really interesting is that the zoning districts that can be mapped are defined by the federal government so you don't have a system where every single local government is ad hoc developing an entirely new zoning code which of course makes it very hard for developers to build um but but why not completely uh abolish zoning i mean we can make zoning less bad and i think that's absolutely the way to focus your energies uh in the near term i mean that's certainly how i spend my time talking to state local federal policy makers trying to help make zoning less bad um but i think you know i think there are a few things here the first is that the past three reform are tough so if you want to go the local reform route part of the problem is that u.s local governments is incredibly fragmented laney's planning happens at the municipality level uh even though they're creatures of the state uh they have a lot of deference from state governments uh for example here in los angeles we have at least 350 municipalities each of which has the power to engage in zoning and there's very very very little coordination among them it's going to be really hard to uh do city by city reform at scale uh the second element here is well we could do more state preemption and sometimes state preemption if you set the parameters right as i think we've done with accessory dwelling units or we're trying to do with with the with the statewide duplex bill uh you can get good results but in many cases right cities will try to find ways to use their zoning power to bypass um these rules right so here in california another institution that we have is the regional housing needs assessment which says to each local government you have to allow you have to plan for at least this much housing um and then of course what we get is them doing playing games like this where they map all of their multi-family on one lot that's at the armpit of two freeways um so you know cities will find ways to i think cities that want to engage in exclusionary behavior as long as they have zoning powers will find ways to uh engage in this behavior and i would contend to that you know this is the argument that i elaborate more on the book uh this isn't just that you know zoning has been misused i think zoning has just not achieved what we want lenny's planning to do which is to separate incompatible uses and coordinate density with growth um in many cases zoning solves the problem of incompatible uses by putting the most offensive uses uh near uh lower income populations or or in many cases the worst places that they could be uh and then of course many cities engage in zoning without any coordination with their master plan uh so in some states of course there's a requirement to engage in comp planning and a consistency requirement uh but even in the best of cases that might be weakly enforced and then of course in many cases those provisions don't apply i argue you know and i go into much more detail about it in the book zoning just hasn't got the goods from what we want lainey's plan to do now what i'm thinking about what comes next um houston's a bit of an interesting example for an urbanist right uh because on the one hand houston made uh so houston is interesting as america's fourth largest city and the largest uh the only large u.s city that doesn't have zoning right um and houston doesn't have zoning because unlike every other city they put it to a referendum three times and all three times uh it was rejected this is the beautiful zoning kills dreams um poster board in the top left uh i i want i want to track her down and figure out what the dreams were um but houston's a weird example because in one sense right houston made just about every other planning mistake that you could have made in the 20th century right i mean like every other u.s city they built the freeways um they even instituted some elements of zoning uh like parking requirements um they you know engaged in some ill-conceived urban renewal uh but as i argue in the book zoning or houston did not make one really really big mistake which they didn't adopt uh zoning uh and i think this is uh it's not an accident then that houston remains one of the most affordable and diverse and rapidly densifying cities in the country right so it's very easy for example in a place like houston thanks in part to reforms that have cleared up some of the remaining lingering elements of quasi-zoning rules to take a single-family home and turn it into three uh townhouses or to take former industrial commercial lots and turn them into uh mixed-use mid-rise the type of development that americans need to be building american cities need to be building today to remain affordable i agree in the book i think they do a few things that make this work right so of course you have uh nuisance rules uh you have rules uh uh engaging in the actual specific behavior that upsets people you have uh rules that require that the most offensive uses maybe like sexually oriented businesses or certain uh oil related industries do have to be physically separate from schools or residences and then of course they yield to a system of if people want to voluntarily opt into certain forms of lineage planning for that for that minority that really really actually wants something that looks like an r1 zone you can do the work of getting your neighbors to agree to it and you can mainly cover the cost of keeping that system up but the city's not going to do that on your behalf and that's a compromise that gives you a city that has some of the most liberal land use planning rules uh in the country again i'm not offering houston as a sort of copy and paste this into your city but it's an interesting model in that it's a city that didn't engage in zoning and it's actually been extremely successful there's more details on that if you're interested in the book uh so of course this isn't just a i think there's a there's a there's a superficial reading of the book which is just a very crass uh you know anti-planning anti-ladies planning book uh but of course i'm a trained planner and i think a lot about what we what we can be doing and what we're good at doing i don't think we're very good at micromanaging the number of parking lots and strip malls i don't think we're very good at deciding where fourplexes should be as opposed to detaching single-family homes uh to the extent that we're good at these things i don't think that they're things that actually the state has any role in doing uh but we can be doing things that actually people actually care about right like really focusing on the impacts that bother people the specific impacts uh that make urban life unpleasant uh issues like noise or light pollution or uh parking for example right uh so in many cases we micromanage the use and development of private land and then the public realm is just kind of left to kind of chaos right no on street parking pricing no management no incentive for private landowners to consider how much traffic they generate other than you know maybe getting yelled at at a public hearing uh i think planners should really think of themselves as stewards of the public realm and i'll talk more about that in a minute the second is of course i think we have a really important role to play in desegregating the american city a city that's been so segregated by a century of bad policy not the least of which includes zoning uh we need to be at the forefront of uh helping communities uh that are experiencing housing costs stay in their communities and then also incentivizing and encouraging the desegregation of cities but you know back to that that physical planning piece i mean i think what planners are actually very good at is is is is this bigger picture uh stewardship of the public realm of this psychophysical planning that has really fallen by the wayside uh in planning because we spend so much time doing things like writing a 300 page environmental review or tinkering on the margins with zoning i think the planner's role should be to think big picture and think where is the growth going to happen how do we coordinate the infrastructure with that growth as opposed to trying to put that growth in a straight jacket and plant it around streets uh or you know what are the specific impacts that bother people how can we operationalize that and measure that and effectively mitigate those impacts um you know the the book is what i if nothing else what i'm trying to do with the book is i'm trying to restart a conversation that i think has basically gone dead uh with the exception of i think pockets like the new urbanist on what we want ladies planning to do uh and what we want a laney's planning uh system to look like um i've sketched out a little bit of of what i think that might look like here uh but uh part of the reason i'm excited to be giving this talk is i'm sure that a lot of people here have clever thoughts so with that uh i look forward to the questions in the discussion thanks nolan um you covered a lot really quickly and uh i think uh touched on uh a lot of issues that i think people may want to ask about i think you're uh especially highlighting some of the things that i know people have have questions about um i i think probably most of the cnu audience agrees with your your history and your critique you know 90 maybe 98 of of what you've identified especially with the conventional euclidean zoning um one of the things i think cnu as a group is known for is we need to figure out how to get things done and does that mean we need to work within the existing system or does it mean we need to you know break the system and figure out a different way um from from my background that that specifically was part of the genesis of form-based codes a couple of decades ago um and so because you chose to so narrowly focus zoning being about density and and segregation of uses um partially i want to say well you know there you have it form-based codes are really the solution that that your book is asking for but um i think there's a lot more than that and and uh this is a convoluted question because all of this stuff is so interrelated um because you've defined it so narrowly one of the things that i think form based codes have attempted to do is remind people and you touched on things being place based form-based codes really try to be about place making you know mixed-use compact walkable that has sustainability issues it has um public health issues etc etc um but but in the book a couple of times and i didn't hear you touch on it today so i wanted to start with this um you've clearly defined zoning very narrowly but a couple of times you mentioned design in passing and you almost always say including the one paragraph where you mentioned form-based codes that it's about aesthetics it's about aesthetics and i think those of us who have a design background would argue yes it impacts or it affects the aesthetics but design is a is a way of problem solving it's about figuring out how the pieces fit together with form-based codes it's not about architectural style ie aesthetics you know it's about making sure that you have street oriented buildings that people don't build blank walls on the street because in fact we all know private market will build blank walls on the street um so so i guess the question is because it's so narrowly defined i have a concern or fear that people here get rid of zoning abolish zoning we don't need it it's a disaster and we can agree with that but i think people can latch on to that and it and may be concerned that you're advocating get rid of all development regulations at all um so as i said convoluted question and i know you've kind of touched on it along the way um but you know a lot of us feel like if we get well-designed buildings well-constructed the uses will change over time uh it's not about how many units there are it is things like parking etc but it's not just about cramming a lot more units design is fundamentally important the whole concept of missing middle housing is that you can have a lot more units if you will you know have good design and they have more relationship to that place making in the public realm etc convoluted question and i'm not sure it may be five questions all together yeah no i appreciate all that and uh yeah i i mean i'll say this i think i actually think form-based codes the the the theory behind form-based codes actually attracts a lot with many of the arguments that i'm making in the book right which is that the zoning focus on the land use the use that happens inside the building or maybe just an arbitrary number amount of square footage or number of units in the building uh it's just not really the way to approach laney's planning uh and i think that the path forward is a ladies planning that's much more focused around the actual impacts that people care about um and so to the extent that form-based code does that i think it's actually a step in the right direction and you know i would say even in a place like houston right like they're engaged in form-based type uh lannies planning around transit stops to say hey if you you're going to build near a transit station the parking has to go uh behind the building or you have to have certain design features that make that space more amenable uh to to walking and bicycling uh and you know i think all that's perfectly appropriate i mean you know i hope i wasn't too flippant in certain sections of the book but i think it's appropriate that's exactly the type of the uh i think piece of regulating what people actually care about uh which in many cases is not antagonistic uh to the need for more housing production uh or building more integrated communities and actually might be conducive to it if you say hey uh we're gonna control these things that people actually do care about and feel very strongly about uh but then once we have those rules in place we're going to allow for growth to happen and it's not going to happen maybe uh micromanaged on every single margin i think where sometimes it's i think foreign-based thinking has gone wrong or been misused is where it's essentially just an overlay on top of the existing zoning system and then they end up clashing and they end up not really working well together right so you'll say well yeah we're going to keep all of those old use rules and all those kind of arbitrary density rules and then we're going to on top of that layer some form-based elements um you know i think i would prefer to see strip away a lot of those rules that actually were making your development uh take on a form that nobody really liked and you can add some of those rules back um but you know so i think to the extent that it's actually regulating what people care about i think is actually very much uh uh simpatico with the argument that i'm making in the book yeah i i think a lot of us would acknowledge part of what you just said which is definitely people uh calling things form-based codes that we would say have been bastardized at best so uh i i appreciate hearing hearing that we all know we we aim for the perfect and hope we can end up with the good um and another piece and i'm gonna let a bunch of people been sending in questions so i'm gonna just maybe ask one one other and and open it up um one of the one of the things that you this is way down in the weeds but i was kind of curious about it because we've been dealing with it a couple of communities you identified the idea of communities sort of defaulting back to covenants and deed restrictions um and i would i was curious about how you kind of reached that i know it's within the houston context that you highlighted it and and i've i've seen a couple of different things um one being many many many city attorneys say those are private contracts we want nothing to do with them we have no role to play so that that's one hand uh and another community um actually i can tell you it's in in louisville kentucky they're kind of exploring the idea can the city actually do something to prevent new development from having covenants because they're finding that the covenants that avoid the blatant discrimination come back and and and more subtly achieve the same ends by things like you can't have commercial vehicles in the driveway still having minimum square footage still having maximum lots that are way more restrictive even than the single-family zoning um so i know you i don't think you mentioned this at all but i want to it's one of the things i was really curious about that you you identified covenants as being a potential way forward and one other community here where i am in northwest arkansas actually that was built as planned retirement communities bella vista they're now trying to deal with they have all these covenants in place that the city can't get rid of and it's really impeding growth because those are private contracts and they're trying to figure out how to get around them so um again a whole lot about a narrow issue but i was really curious because as a solution i i i was a little dumbfounded by that proposition yeah well so i mean just the kind of place where i think the role that restrictions play in the book uh there's a certain puzzle right like why did houston not adopt zoning um and i think a key part of the story is that the constituencies that had the most extreme preference for something like zoning were basically able to get it through something like deed restrictions um and that tracks with like the early history of zoning right so a lot of the d restrictions that were written in the late 1800s early 1900s uh were basically dead restrictions kind of naturally go away if you don't design them the way we do today and so people wanted these lane use rules and when deed restrictions didn't offer them those rules uh they started pushing for the government to essentially socialize their preference for exclusion and that's when we started getting zoning um but houston i think operated on you know that pre-zoning model of if you want to engage in these practices i think it's unfortunate that some people want to but if you want to engage in these practices uh we're going to at least you know we'll tolerate uh people engaged in that behavior if they want to go out and actually do the organizing and maintain these things themselves but the city government's not going to come in and do that for you and you know as i argue in the book i think this is a this is a no perfect solutions policy space and you need to find a way to maybe buy off that person or give that person who wants r1 zoning and out without basically dragging down the entire city with them and i think that's what what houston has been able to do i mean i would say i i this is something that i spend a lot of time thinking about now mary which is um how do we how do we make private forms of language planning work because i think they are extremely dysfunctional uh and if you really want to get uh you know like one in three americans riled up just say the word hoa i think a few things one is we can stop mandating them so in many u.s cities you cannot legal they will not give you the permits to build maybe a plan unit development uh or a new subdivision without having a d description regardless of whether or not the developer feels that's appropriate and whether prospective consumers want that um so stop mandating them let people voluntarily opt into them and now i think we need to actually reform the way that these things work right so one of the problems with deed restrictions is originally they were written to where they lasted for a term of 30 years at the end of 30 years they had to be affirmatively renewed or they went away now we essentially write them uh in such a way that they last forever unless they're affirmatively abolished uh so we place the essentially the default is that these things last forever and so in many us cities even in you know historical cities uh that where these there's layers and layers of of these private covenants and deep restrictions of course there's this thicket that needs to be cleared away and so i'd say you know if we revert to uh if we change the governance in some small ways to make sure that these things are still accountable and that they can actually go away over time as lani's preferences change um i think that would be a positive step and you know these things they do go away i mean many cases especially older d restrictions have mechanisms uh to be abolished and then of course if they're not enforced over the course of so many years courts will essentially just stop observing them and for all instances and purposes uh they go away but i i hear you i think this is one of those next big research steps that i'm trying to think about and that i would like more planners to think about is what's the role in like emergent solutions uh for ladies planning that don't involve uh you know having to revert to a zoning system that we just know is dysfunctional let me just jump in here and uh and let people know that uh please use the q a function of zoom rather than the chat to ask your questions i will say that in the chat there is a link if you wanted to get the book for 30 off from island press with a code uh with that um let mary continue okay like i said uh we we have a lot of questions here and i'm trying to listen to you and scroll through them uh and and some of them are duplicative um there's one that that you really talk about larger cities and and in the book you talk more about the coast and people moving to this coast for economic reasons et cetera but a couple of different people are really curious about what this means for smaller towns more rural areas that are not suburban communities some of which are trying to figure out how to deal with you know national chains wanting to come in and build strips on every highway into town some of which have declining populations um since you didn't really talk about that much in your book um i don't know if you have specific thoughts if you have research on those areas just sort of you know what's the future of zoning for much smaller places that are not dealing with growth pressures but maybe are dealing with sustainability and affordable housing and all these issues yeah well i mean i'll speak first to just the rural area piece i mean some of the most of course the crisis is is we know about it in a place like san francisco or new york city uh but you know if you actually look at the data some of the most acute housing prices are prices are actually in small rural communities in the mountain west or small rural communities in new england uh places like vermont uh or places like wyoming uh where the housing crisis is actually mostly queue um in those cases it's partly because it it's they've created a paradigm where all growth has to be the sprawl low density spread out it's going to destroy what made the community so valuable but then at the same time the city doesn't allow the actual infill development that might keep the city affordable while avoiding uh that scenario so in those cases uh you know those there are many small rural communities that have affordable housing pressures uh and especially over the last few years the second piece of it is is i think communities that are dealing with this investment are shrinking you know especially rural communities i go through so many small towns uh where they might have a main street that's 50 vacant and just out of morbid curiosity i'll crack open the zoning code and you know the downtown will be subject to like some highway retail zoning ordinance that says you know one parking space per per 50 square feet of commercial right it's effectively illegal to as of right use a lot of those uh main street properties or they'll have rules that effectively don't allow for any info residential to be built in their downtowns even if somebody wanted to do that uh right so these cities that i think are struggling with this investment uh literally are keeping up zoning barriers that if somebody were to want to come in and enrich their community uh they legally can't do that without having to go through regulatory rigmarole that's that's the easiest thing in the world that a lot of these cities can do to just remove barriers is is say here we're going to set clear workable baseline rules uh for what we want and we're going to clear out a lot of these rules because what we don't want and say if you want to come in and enrich our community in this way we're not going to add uh additional hurdles thanks um like i said i'm trying to scroll there's a lot a lot of questions here um so a couple people have have touched on your your mention of houston and the fact that they have more affordable housing and um and you know more ability for small businesses etc etc but at the same time you know it is arguably one of if not the most sprawling city in the u.s it has the largest land area so even though its fourth largest its density is is way lower than that um but but the idea you that planners should be planning the streets and blocks what is the public realm et cetera um a lot of communities now have unified development codes if the state laws allow it but have you seen particularly good examples where the the city has actually done something through zoning or subdivision etc where they're really paying attention to the public realm which could help reduce sprawl and you know environmental concerns etc yeah i mean i i think right the way i frame it in the book is i think zoning abolition or even just zoning reform is unnecessary but not sufficient condition for getting the types of cities that we want i think urban forum is going to be driven by a lot of things and zoning on the margins doesn't help with sprawl but if you really want to control urban form you're going to have to stop the pattern of infrastructure growth that we've had for the past 50 years stop building the freeways out to the middle of nowhere stop letting people uh drive without actually incurring the costs uh so i would say the actual effective uh restraints on on sprawl partly yeah absolutely stop mandating it through zoning stop making it to where it's literally the only way you can build uh housing in many u.s cities uh but then also adopt policies like congestion pricing uh put the revenue that's generated from congestion pricing uh into transit investments or or multimodal investments um it's i think this is why the entire last chapter of the book is all about that that type of physical planning that actually needs to be done that type of big picture planning uh that's actually required to build the type of cities that we want um i guess that you know that was one part part of the question is then how how uh oftentimes we like to say that you know let the the government sets the table to enab enable the type of development they want and so even if you put the streets in you know how what kind of standards you need to to reinforce that new the public realm um have you looked at at complete streets policies that communities have adopted or whether or not they have actual regulations that will implement those policies uh yeah a little bit uh we worked on some of this in new jersey yeah i mean i i complete streets are absolutely important i mean this is i think maybe the bigger picture to what i'm getting at with the infrastructure defining the type of city that you get is essentially if you build all of your infrastructure around cars then of course all develop and then you mandate parking requirements and you mandate that everything be physically separated and low density you're going to get a city that's built around cars if you remove some of those barriers and maybe set guard rails around uh development or maybe put a price on the amount of traffic that certain users generate or you actually price congestion and you build freeways where people can actually or you build right of ways where people can actually safely use those spaces without being in a car then you start to actually change the dynamic uh but this is why i center physical planning in the last chapter because i think it's actually so key to getting what we want but you have to remove those barriers to making it work right if you if you have complete streets and you have congestion pricing and then you make it illegal to build an apartment building in the city uh you make it very easy to build low density single family sprawl um all the best transportation planning in the world it's not going to matter um thanks there um a couple i'm going to try to consolidate this again into a multi-part question um several different people are asking uh for for more thoughts on affordable housing federal fair housing laws um avoiding displacement uh for example in some communities where they're now allowing infill and say a small de facto affordable older house is torn down and a fourplex that's very high-end comes back in its place um you know do you have thoughts about mechanisms to deal with those and do you have specific thoughts as about the federal fair housing laws how they're enforced today yeah um there's a lot there uh so i mean i would say the as in all these very good questions um so i mean the current housing crisis is is really coming down to a mismatch between supply and demand right there's enormous demand for housing uh and going into the pandemic we just weren't building a lot of housing there was a great upper growth report that just came out uh showing we had we had housing deficits in 2012 we had housing deficits in 2019 and all of us have been turned up to 11 over the last two years so the question is really going to be how do we build more housing uh and how do we build more housing in a way that actually strengthens our communities um so i think you know to the extent like zoning of course is a huge barrier here and there's really no question within the literature that metropolitan areas that have stricter land use planning regimes um specifically zoning or subdivision rules that make it hard to build and bill uh have higher higher housing prices now i think the the equity piece is actually really important here and i think planners do have an important role to play in desegregating cities if only because for the past hundred years our policy has basically produced uh the secretary of state that we have today um in context where gentrification is underway uh i think cities can and should be doing things like community land trust to buy up existing affordable housing put a deed restriction on it put it into a land trust that says you know this unit will always be rented or always be sold at a below market rate uh that's that's the policy very specifically to keep people who are currently in their communities in their communities today of course in the longer term if you're building more housing uh once we're not in a you know permanent uh worsening housing crisis if you're building more housing you're keeping uh price appreciation under control that becomes less of an issue uh integration i also think is really important uh we need mechanisms uh we need to use basically every every lever that we have and many uh states and cities are already working hard on this to say you know hey to the extent that we're going to fund uh housing through a program like litec or to the extent that we're gonna engage in something like section eight how do we make sure that that these programs are deployed in places that uh historically have been exclusionary or historically uh predominantly overwhelmingly white or wealthy and have used policies like zoning to remain exclusive providing incentives for new development to include below market rate units of course today the easiest path is just to mandate these things and then development doesn't work at all and then everybody loses but actually saying we want below market rate units in in these high opportunity uh areas uh we're going to kick in some money uh to make this work um so you know i i think this is again this is another area where uh we actually could be using our our incredible planning civil service capacity to solve some of these issues that that the public sector actually can do a good job of solving um instead we mostly use that capacity to maintain an existing system of exclusion that's making housing prices get more and more expensive um there a couple different people are asking questions and this this may sound like the same question i just asked but but i think they're asking a different thing which is um you know we talk about how to how to change the zoning to allow more density which market wise can get us more affordable housing or more middle-income housing or more workforce housing whichever term we want to use um but but i think maybe one of the questions and this may be outside of your policy research that people have had and a couple people have said they're on their local planning and zoning commission which is how what are your thoughts on the advocacy role how do you get the city council the people who ultimately make the decisions to recognize single-family zoning is part of the problem how do we get more middle-class workforce et cetera housing um do you have any thoughts or experience on that sort of more advocacy role as opposed to just change the zoning yeah no i mean i i this is i'm now uh at california envy and this is what we think about all day every day right i mean it's i i this is a great thing to do i love the exercises the big picture i did want to sort of advance the discourse but right in the day-to-day i think you're exactly right that we have to find a way to find a path to actually get these reforms through i mean i think the crisis is so increasingly acute in many places that uh those populations that historically didn't feel it are feeling it right so that council member now is saying oh my kids can't afford a home within two hours of me and i so i'm never gonna see my grandkids right or they're finding oh all of my all of my peers are cashing out and moving away because they can't afford to live here uh or you know my my friends want to downsize and there's no townhouses or no condos within my community to downsize so i'm just gonna move away uh people i think are already seeing the downstream effects of zoning and the way that it's actually these constraints are actually destroying their community uh preserving the physical form of the community to where nothing can absolutely change but dramatically changing the demographics and the composition of who actually lives there and the community um so you know i think this is going to be city by city right you know when i was at mercatus we would talk to uh local planners or council members and they would say what are the what are the three or four things that we should be doing uh to our former zoning code and of course you know i can give the standard stuff get rid of your parking requirements allow more housing typologies in your single family zones you know allow for more use mixture um but really it's going to be up to what the what the local politics allow with the local conditions allow go talk to your your your incremental local development community and say hey what are the barriers to building the type of housing that we as a community agree we want or hey you know what are the barriers standing in the way to revitalizing our main street um those questions are gonna have in many cases very very very local answers and there's not one path that i think you can trot out for for every single city i do think you know a big part of the reform path is going to go through state governments because just so many local governments the politics just don't work for reform at all uh if you even propose the most tepid reform in some suburbs you know of course you will uh you know you'll be picketed by the by the neighborhood association uh but you can do some of these things at the state level uh and be extremely effective and i think we're seeing some of that happen already let's say it's like california uh increasingly you know in the mountain west and some belt um i think uh you you tagged that you mentioned a couple things and i want to just highlight them one thing i i found in my practice is really trying to frame the discussion in terms of housing options and housing choices um my husband and i relocated here a couple of years ago and we're way over housed but we could afford it you know but we're empty nesters but we wanted to be in a neighborhood where we could walk to things et cetera so we're in you know a detached single-family four-bedroom historic house which is way more than we needed but there were no other options no other options uh you know anywhere around where we wanted to be and so um you know it we're in a house that probably should be in a family with six you know six people or whatever but but i think presenting it as options or choices the elected officials i i think is an important uh potential yeah i mean i think this is just a riff on that for a minute i think this is something the new urbanists have actually done really effectively i think there there have been certain forms of of reform movements that had a very eat your vegetables approach right like sorry guys housing's expensive and the earth's on fire so we have to build like nice little communities that have town houses and parks and bikeable infrastructure um i don't think you need to apologize for that i think as exactly as you're saying many people desperately want to live in complete communities that have a range of housing typologies they want to live you know for example my hometown of lexington one of the most expensive neighborhoods is a neighborhood that has corner groceries that has a little park that has apartments mixed in with homes these are actually neighborhoods that to the extent that they you know were built before zoning and they still exist uh are extremely desirable and people like them and i think exactly to your point i think another way to approach reform is to identify those neighborhoods in your city and say hey you know we're not talking about uh like liberalizing zoning is not going to get you midtown manhattan um it's going to get you that nice mixed-use uh neighborhood that actually everybody knows and loves that's downtown in our very own city uh i think that's another great path to reform so we're going to uh uh i wanted to let people know that uh we're at the end of an hour and we're going gonna post the video on cmu's website tomorrow uh and in the meantime i think that we'll keep on talking we have more q a and uh so we can continue to ask and answer people's questions okay thanks rob we'll we'll keep going i haven't i don't even think i've given you ten percent of the questions that are here i'm trying to consolidate them but um you mentioned one of the issues on the affordability side is is the discretionary review and the processes that run for 12 or 24 months etc and so a couple of people have asked about that um do you have any thoughts on on again it's kind of more on the advocacy uh or potentially um how do you get there from here how do you get communities to sort of let go of that whether it's discretion at the planning and zoning commission or the elected officials to you know move towards administrative or buy right reviews have you seen that done in very many places or do you have thoughts on that to to get a rid of at least that hurdle yeah absolutely i mean so you know we i'm just wrapping up a big giant study of the transit oriented communities program in los angeles uh which is essentially a program that said to developers within a quarter and a half mile of transit um if you build in these areas and you have a certain affordability mix uh you will get some zoning relief right parking relief a little bit of extra density but also you'll get expedited streamline uh in in many cases as of right entitlement uh we went out and talked to developers you know thinking what what what attracted you to participate in this program we thought it was going to be that sounding relief and that zoning relief was important but actually what really attracted them was entitlement certainty i'm going to get my permits and i'm going to get them promptly this is really really important this is in many cases the lowest hanging fruit for cities uh if you can just have you know if you can staff or fund your permitting office to make sure that permits get out quickly for as of right projects and then the bigger picture reach a consensus among your community about what type of development you want and then when that development comes in it should be fairly straightforward to get a permit um i think the way we do things in the current zoning framework is we say we're going to have big giant public processes on a project by project basis that'll that little fourplex we've got to have a public hearing we gotta have you know an environmental review we gotta do all this stuff you should be doing that at the neighborhood or the citywide level reach a consensus and where you can do actual public process where you can have things like surveys you can have things like focus groups you can have things like charrettes reach that consensus write it into a comprehensive plan and then on a project by project basis it should be like clockwork yeah this complies this complies with the consensus or it doesn't if it complies here's your permits in two weeks um you know this is i think a very this is just basic this is not even like what type of city you you do or don't want it's it's purely procedural uh and it's it's it's uh it's one of the lower cost and more politically palatable reforms i think a lot of cities could take um i i think it's curious and this kind of goes to your one of your conclusions of the book to let planners plan um what what i found in community after community especially if they don't have any consistency state consistency requirements is a lot of communities do exactly what you described on the front end they do a big new comprehensive plan they hire a consultant they do incredible public outreach and at the end of the day they don't change their zoning and so therefore their their zoning and their plan are at at cross purposes so i guess that then kind of circles back to even if you're not totally throwing out your zoning it needs to be reformed so that it actually can be a tool to implement your plan um someone here is asked a question sort of along those lines are you know we've talked mostly about housing affordability and you kind of touched on this when you talk about houston is is how do we encourage communities to do take baby steps or major change uh on redeveloping their auto oriented aging corridors allowing more mixed use if not requiring more mixed use you know a lot of communities have all this infrastructure in place and giant underutilized parking lots and and dying strip malls and i know a bunch of people who are on this call and myself included have have done work in that area but i'm curious if what you found in your research you know sort of related to that retrofitting suburbia auto corridors etc yeah i mean this is this is an issue that we were encountering when we talked to people all over the country is every city in america has multiple strip miles that are just sitting half empty on major corridors uh it's essentially blight uh and that's only gonna get worse as ecommerce becomes more insurance um in many cases those those are subject to rules that literally don't allow you to build anything other than a strip mall uh there's a reason why that strip mall is just sitting there uh for so long and it might just be an absentee commercial landlord but in many cases it's exactly that it's literally illegal to build anything else um so you know i think the absolute minimum you can do is to say okay hey like we're just gonna remove one of the barriers to potentially redevelop in this property and you can go talk to people and say hey what type of what type of uh socially positive development might make sense here and what are the barriers that are standing in the way of that um you know that's the type of work that i think uh can can dramatically improve communities and if you're if you're adding more density along corridors i think that's also great because that's teeing up a potential transit corridor of course i don't think we should only be doing density on quarters i think a lot of planners uh especially the more conventional maybe non-new urbanist uh variety have this idea well let's just put all of our density on corridors i think you need to be building density uh all over including where you know the quiet side streets where people actually want to live but yeah and on many corridors this is your near-term redevelopment scenario you have these huge lots uh that could easily be redeveloped into maybe a small little mixed use town center or at least be part of a broader project um you know i lived in arlington and something that they've done along the main washington boulevard corridor is extremely effective you know remove some of these rules come up with come up with broader plans for uh redevelopment of these corridors and it's a generational long project yeah i think uh some of us on here done some work in arlington um uh i'm trying to see what other um so one person this is sort of big philosophical question but since you're trained as a planner i've been trained in architecture and planning and a lot of people on the call have um that's the idea that apa is is trying to do better but but how hard is it for a profession like conventional planners and zoners to reform their own profession i mean do you have thoughts about that i mean i when i went to school many decades ago we didn't even talk about zoning in school beyond the land use law class but then as soon as you go to work everybody assumes like you know zoning um any anyway just thoughts about the profession overall when you say you know let the planners do planning um some planners are terrified we seeing you we've had sessions where the planners are like they want everything to be black and white because they don't want to have discretion they don't want to be held accountable at the end of the day that's probably a you know a weakness in our profession so any thoughts on that yeah i mean i i went to an amazing planning program at rutgers uh but it's exactly the same experience so we talked a little bit about zoning and lanny's law but just make sure that we don't get sued uh and then that there was there was an optional zoning seminar and it was like you know special topics in planning colon uh zoning and language planning um taught by a barbara fager who was a who's a fantastic professor she is joking she was like i finally got it listed from being a special topic to being a full course so it'll say it'll just say zoning in the course catalog and i said oh then people will be flooding in um but i mean i think this is this is kind of telling right which is that this is actually not what planners really want to be doing uh you know like zoning is i think a lot of planners go into the profession wanting to do more of maybe the environmental planning or the equity planning the equity advocacy or the actual physical planning that where and those are issues where i think planners actually can add a lot of value to their communities or so maybe even some of the you know working with developers to build to build better projects right for those who go into the private sector um i think planners have an incredibly important contribution to make there uh but so much of that capacity gets wasted i think you know administering variances or processing paperwork for rezoning for things that in many cases the master plan already says you know should be allowed right um so you know i think exactly to your point this is one of my i think this is one of my like subtler critiques of zoning that i've actually found jives with a lot of planners which is that this just ends up taking up a lot of our time a lot of our capacity and not creating a lot of value uh where planners could be doing other things yeah i've been i've been surprised by the number of planners who have been like oh this is kind of a cathartic experience some of the because you know a lot of the stories are drawn from some of my uh public sector planning experience of dealing with the frustrations of zoning and i've been impressed by you know sometimes you get the the planner who's weirdly defensive of their zoning code a zoning code that they didn't even write and they're like well how could you criticize my zoning um you know they have maybe i would argue with stockholm syndrome um but in many cases the planners are like yeah this is like i'm i'm glad that planners are finally having this conversation and and i would say i'm not the only one engaged in this like i was just reading through planning magazine the magazine for the apa and there was something like five articles in there about zoning reform um i think we're in a moment now where you know maybe once zoning reform was this thing where if you were an especially bold local planner you might entertain it or you might uh be pushing for it i think increasingly we're in a situation where you know i think this is best practice this is what this is you know this is what planner should be doing and you might be in a political context where uh it's extremely conservative and that doesn't work and in which case you know it's probably just worth moving on but in many cases i find that council members are actually looking for solutions and they want uh they want their planning staff to be you know frankly saying hey look um maybe a city like lexington hey uh look over at fayetteville that's a that's a comp for us they got rid of all their commercial parking requirements why can't we or oh look ann arbor michigan uh allows two accessory dwelling units on every residential property uh we should be doing that yeah i think planners of course like you know i know that in many context planners are disempowered and ignored uh and to the detriment of of course our cities uh but you know i think it's also you know work with local champions work with local advocates uh find that that council member who actually wants to build a more affordable and equitable and sustainable community and just communicate to them these conversations that that we're having uh maybe and zoom chat rooms and say hey you know like this we can be doing these things that other cities are doing it's not this you know crazy uh idea anymore this is happening um it's interesting because unless i'm mistaken i don't think you have uh taken an aicp exam yet um and it's an interesting experience that i know several people on this call have lived through um because because uh in the ethics portion of aicp um this is about planners reforming themselves you know one of the one of the tenants is that planners are not supposed to be giving their opinion they're supposed to provide the decision makers with all of the facts so the decision makers uh can make the decision and and i think there are there are many of us know that what how you're supposed to answer on the aicp ethics exam but we're very frustrated because in fact you know how is that planning if you're not supposed to actually have an opinion on anything um that's that's just a comment on planners reforming themselves um well i mean just add on i i i have taken the icp exam i'm behind on my credits so sorry guys uh but uh yeah i mean uh players also have an ethical obligation to not engage in practices that entrench segregation or that put people uh living in tents on the street or that build communities where you know whole portions of the population cannot get around um so yeah yeah you i i i hear you you don't want to be the the you don't want to railroad your your political process but in many cases providing the facts is really all you need like hey look these parking requirements increase their cost by x amount and make development infeasible and all these less uh you know hey look you can't build an apartment in like 90 percent of our city the facts in many cases speak for themselves but yeah i think planners do have an ethical obligation to engage in advocacy um i'm looking for sorry i'm trying to i wasn't good about making sure i had um this is kind of this is kind of curious um this is back to the conversation we had on deed restrictions um and it's a question about most communities that do have deed restrictions tend to be on the uh upper end of the income scale and you know how how might lower income communities that they whether they have d d restrictions or wanted to use them i mean have you seen that anywhere or have you really just seen it limited to the high end of the income scale um the context is that if a developer comes into these communities they oftentimes just can ignore the deed restrictions because the community can't take them to court et cetera et cetera yeah right i mean what part of the compromise that made all this system work in houston is that is the the city government actually comes in to play an enforcement role uh if if the community asks for it um right so that's one way to basically just offload uh you know you get to set some of the rules and then we'll help you for example we won't issue permits or we will uh bring a suit against someone who's repeatedly violating these provisions um you know and i would argue too in many cases where these need restrictions were were heavily adopted were in working class communities where uses were coming in uh so absolutely i would say it's you know it's it's they're generally concentrated in higher income neighborhoods i think that's mainly because that's where the populations that want something like r1 zoning are but no these things do exist in in at a variety of income levels um and again like just to re-center the conversation because i think people are really focusing on the restriction bit um that was a compromise that made uh a city like houston otherwise dramatically more liberal uh right so you know something i think it was something we don't have good estimates on this if there's a houston planner who has a data set up there uh please email me um you know something like a third to a quarter of this of the residential areas of the city are subject to these deed restrictions right so in exchange for for letting people uh opt into these things or buy community buy houses and communities where developers created these things in exchange for that uh the rest of the city is not subject to zoning's provisions uh i agree that was a good compromise and that doesn't mean that houston doesn't have other planning work to do of course you know houston has incredibly planning important planning work to do to make sure that you don't have developments of wetlands or that you have great bus and bike infrastructure i would argue that they're actually on the cutting edge of many of those policies now uh but not having zoning of course makes all of those problems i think slightly easier to solve um thanks i'm scrolling a whole bunch more questions had come in i hadn't looked through so i'm uh trying to get a sense of them um one part this is this is intriguing i don't know if your research has looked at this i know somewhere we're looking at something like this um have you seen places where non-conformity is an issue and where communities maybe have have reverted to their historic zoning like like the picture you showed with the neighborhood store in dc which humorously enough i know that building because it's one block from my former business partner's house so i recognized it as soon as it came on the screen but um anyway uh have you seen communities sort of reverting to the underlying zoning to just you know make sure that what was there before uh is no longer considered non-conforming yeah that's a i actually think that's one of the easiest paths to zoning reform is to just say like look we have this main street that actually is illegal to build today and occupying one of these spaces requires a bunch of variances or rezoning uh yeah absolutely uh this is this ties into the whole piece of like find that non-conforming neighborhood in your city that everybody loves and sort of say hey like that let's just clear off this ticket of rules that stop us from from uh reproducing this and yeah i think like this is another just bit of low hanging zoning reform for use you could say like we're not going to allow city maybe at the state level you say a city can't institute zoning rules that would make you know more than 10 or 15 of properties non-conforming i mean this is this is like this is such a huge headache that it's actually i think invisible to people one of the last projects that i worked on in new york city was literally just changing um from a c12 commercial overlay to a c2 commercial overlay because this long-standing medical office space had been operating a medical lab in the back and nobody cared and it was perfectly fine but they couldn't uh they couldn't refinance or they had some financial issue um over this extremely minor just zoning error uh right that that for that created difficulties for them uh yeah hey linda she's in the chat she remembers that project those were the types of projects where i was like uh okay come on like this system is just not working it's not getting us what we want um you know the idea that we're gonna put this person through regulatory rig and roll uh it's just like this is not what lanny's planning should be doing uh and so i think non-conforming properties are really where people people you know i think start to feel the crunch of zoning and you can maybe a first step to reform is is addressing that do you have maybe one more question mary oh let me see what's the best one uh sorry there's still i've i've got like 30 questions that we haven't even touched on yet um sorry there's some people wrote like really long i can't read their questions because the question has 200 words like the questions i ask um there was one i was saw and i wanted to ask it now i can't find it again um maybe i'll revert back to one that's somewhat of my somewhat of my own um and and that is when we're talking about getting rid of single-family zoning and what can be done at the state level and what are the nuisances that people want to uh ban or whatever we we've seen communities and states and localities where a new urbanist as well you know want to advocate about no more snout houses and now we've seen several state legislatures that have come back and passed a state law that says you know local government cannot prohibit garages on the front or cannot prohibit certain things they may call them aesthetic but they say sometimes they say you can't regulate anything about a single-family home um and so i'm curious because we know there's we know some people who are funding that type of legislation because it's cookie cutter it's you know showing up in multiple states um but at the end of the day it gets to something that people say they don't want and planners say they don't want a community say they don't want but you know people may be in the home builders realm have have found the way to come back and say we should just be allowed to build what we want as quickly and cheaply as possible and we're gone and then you know the communities left to deal with it so any thoughts about when the state government is going in the opposite direction from how maybe people thinking about place making and long-term investments and development and community stability are thinking about yeah i mean i'm i'm gonna offer uh maybe a political answer here of uh it's a delicate balance right uh it's i think it's not always it's not always clear that some power should be at the state or local level uh i tend to think that these game that the arguments about what level of government should be doing the policy are actually just veiled arguments about what the policy should be uh so i my personal preference is that the level of government that will execute my policy preferences should handle any given policy right this is my like this is my ideological uh commitment right um but in all seriousness yeah i mean i think you want to have you want local governments to have some uh leeway over i think some of these matters where local preferences might vary uh of course you want to have guardrails up to where uh local governments can't engage in openly exclusionary or segregationist practices um that's a difficult balance to strike and you know i don't think this is this is a question where there's one right or wrong answer i think uh it's going to depend on on uh on the issue at hand right so for something like accessory dwelling units right i think it was totally appropriate for the state of california to say okay um we're going to allow these statewide subjects to these provisions uh for something like design i think there might be a case for allowing a little bit more uh flexibility i think it would depend on the local context well i'm going to uh just say that this has been a great discussion a lot of people have participated on what is a very hot summer day in many parts of the country and uh i wanted to uh i wanted to thank uh mary and nolan and all the people who were uh asking uh questions some really good questions and and and the people who uh who um who came and to watch this and uh once again the video will be posted uh on cnu website for folks who want to take a closer look at the slides and and the discussion and hear it again um and the book is arbitrary lines by island press and there it is everybody have a great day and thank you again thanks rob thank you thanks mary thanks for having me all right take care