In 1916, New York City adopted America's first comprehensive zoning ordinance. The stated goal: prevent industrial encroachment into residential neighborhoods, ensure adequate light and air.
The actual effect: legal segregation by class, race, and use—a template copied by cities nationwide.
Today, that regulatory architecture determines where you can live, what you can afford, how you commute, and who your neighbors are. Zoning isn't technical minutiae. It's destiny encoded in law.
What Zoning Does
At its simplest, zoning divides cities into districts: residential, commercial, industrial. Within residential zones, further divisions: single-family, multi-family, high-density, low-density.
Then come the details: minimum lot sizes, maximum heights, setback requirements, parking minimums, floor-area ratios. Each rule seems reasonable in isolation. Cumulatively, they determine urban form.
Consider single-family zoning, which covers 75% of residential land in most American cities. It prohibits duplexes, townhouses, small apartments—anything but detached houses on large lots.
This isn't preservation of character. It's exclusion by design.
The Origins
Early zoning had explicit racial goals. Before Fair Housing laws, cities zoned by race directly. Berkeley's 1916 ordinance created residential districts from which "negroes and Asiatics" were excluded.
When courts struck down racial zoning, cities shifted to proxies: minimum lot sizes, single-family requirements, prohibition of multi-family housing. These achieved the same segregation through ostensibly neutral rules.
The logic was simple: expensive housing = wealthy residents = white residents. Make building cheap housing illegal, and you exclude poor people, which meant excluding Black people and immigrants.
Redlining's Partner
Zoning worked hand-in-hand with redlining. Federal maps rated neighborhoods for mortgage lending. "Declining" areas (code for Black neighborhoods) were marked in red—loans denied.
But why were these neighborhoods declining? Often because zoning allowed industrial uses nearby, prohibited investment, prevented maintenance. Zoning created the conditions redlining then codified.
The partnership was deadly. Redlining denied capital. Zoning denied alternatives. Segregation became self-reinforcing.
The Housing Shortage
Today's housing crisis is substantially a zoning crisis. Demand for urban housing has surged. Supply can't respond because zoning makes building illegal.
In California, over 80% of residential land is zoned single-family only. You can't build a duplex, a townhouse, a small apartment—even on your own land, even if neighbors support it.
Result: crushing scarcity. Median home prices exceed $800,000 in San Francisco, $700,000 in Los Angeles. Rents consume 40-50% of renter incomes. Essential workers—teachers, nurses, firefighters—can't afford to live where they work.
This isn't natural scarcity. It's manufactured through law.
Euclidean Zoning
The legal framework is "Euclidean zoning," named for the 1926 Supreme Court case Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., which upheld zoning's constitutionality.
The Court reasoned that separating uses protects public health and safety. Factories emit pollution; homes shouldn't be nearby. Apartments bring congestion; quiet streets should stay quiet.
These rationales made sense in 1926. Do they now?
Modern industry is mostly clean. Apartments are homes, not nuisances. Mixing uses reduces driving, which improves air quality. The old justifications have inverted.
Yet the legal precedent remains. Cities have nearly unlimited power to zone, and courts rarely intervene.
Climate Implications
Zoning drives climate change in two ways:
- Sprawl: When cities prohibit density, growth spreads outward—low-density suburban development that requires driving everywhere
- Induced demand: Parking minimums and wide roads encourage car dependency, increasing emissions
Studies show urban form explains much of per-capita emissions variation. Dense, mixed-use neighborhoods (like Brooklyn or downtown San Francisco) have 50% lower per-capita emissions than sprawling suburbs (like Phoenix or Houston).
Zoning mandates the high-emissions pattern.
Reform Movements
Resistance is building. Oregon eliminated single-family zoning statewide in 2019, allowing duplexes on any lot zoned residential. California followed in 2021 with SB 9, allowing lot splits and duplexes.
Minneapolis upzoned the entire city in 2018, allowing triplexes citywide. Portland, Seattle, Austin, and others are following.
The results are early but promising: construction increasing, prices stabilizing, no neighborhood character collapse.
YIMBY vs. NIMBY
This is the YIMBY ("Yes In My Backyard") movement's core demand: legalize housing. Not force it, not require it—just allow it.
The opposition (NIMBYs—"Not In My Backyard") argues for neighborhood stability, character preservation, environmental review. Often, these are proxies for property values and demographic control.
The divide isn't left-right; it's homeowner-renter, insider-outsider, present-future. Existing residents benefit from scarcity (rising home values). Prospective residents suffer from it (unaffordable rents).
Zoning protects the former, excludes the latter.
Form-Based Codes
An alternative approach: form-based codes, which regulate building form (height, setbacks, street interface) rather than use.
Instead of "this block is single-family residential only," a form-based code might say "buildings up to three stories, front doors facing the street, parking in back."
This allows mixed uses, diverse housing types, and walkable urbanism while maintaining coherent form. You can have a corner store in a residential neighborhood, an office above a restaurant, an apartment next to a house.
The result resembles traditional neighborhoods—like Brooklyn's brownstone blocks or San Francisco's Victorians—before zoning separated everything.
Political Economy
Zoning reform faces fierce resistance because existing homeowners are well-organized, vote reliably, and benefit from scarcity. Renters and prospective residents—the reform constituency—are diffuse, transient, and politically marginalized.
This creates a democratic problem: the people most affected (those priced out) can't vote in the jurisdictions excluding them. Exclusionary zoning is self-reinforcing politically.
Breaking this requires state or federal intervention. When local democracy produces exclusion, higher-level democracy must intervene.
Legal Challenges
Recent litigation frames exclusionary zoning as civil rights violation. If zoning perpetuates segregation (it does), and segregation violates Fair Housing law (it does), then exclusionary zoning may be illegal.
So far, courts have been reluctant to intervene. But legal theory is building: zoning as structural discrimination, housing scarcity as harm, exclusion as civil rights violation.
This could be transformative—if courts are willing.
What Reform Looks Like
Successful zoning reform follows a pattern:
- Legalize density near transit: Apartments should be allowed near trains and buses
- Eliminate parking minimums: Let the market decide how much parking to build
- Allow missing middle housing: Duplexes, triplexes, townhouses, courtyard apartments
- Streamline approval: Reduce discretion, increase certainty
- Protect tenants: Prevent displacement through rent stabilization and tenant protections
The goal isn't unregulated development. It's regulated differently—for access, not exclusion.
Conclusion
Zoning is destiny because it determines urban form, which determines who can afford to live where, which determines economic opportunity, educational access, environmental exposure, political power.
When we zone for exclusion, we get segregation. When we zone for scarcity, we get housing crisis. When we zone for sprawl, we get climate crisis.
The alternative isn't chaos. It's choice: Let people build housing where people want to live. Let neighborhoods evolve. Let cities be cities.
Zoning reform won't solve every urban problem. But without it, we can't solve any of them.
This article is part of our Urban Forms series. Next: "The Missing Middle: Housing Between Sprawl and Towers."