Zoning ordinances and land use regulations are often captured by homeowners to protect property values and control development in their surrounding areas. Unlike redlining, which openly discriminated against African Americans, the exclusionary logic of zoning is subtle. Homeowners and the politicians who represent them engage in defensive zoning through the use of labyrinthine technical regulations that determine population density, land use class, building height, plot size, and so on to preserve the status quo, approve what can be built, and ultimately affect who can live in a particular neighborhood. This practice essentially extends an individual’s property rights beyond the boundaries of their land, into the neighborhood. Increasingly, these tools are applied in middle- and lower-income neighborhoods by renters fearing that new development will supercharge neighborhood gentrification and drive up housing costs. Zoning creates barriers to entry and establishes a system that “pits incumbents against newcomers,” Klein and Thompson write.
However, a mindset of scarcity that prioritizes existing constituents is not limited to policy-happy liberal coastal enclaves, as Klein and Thompson imply. As coastal cities become prohibitively expensive, Sun Belt cities like Atlanta appear poised to follow a similar anti-abundance trajectory. While they are usually praised for their well-regulated housing supply, many of these cities have rules on the books similar to their coastal counterparts. Alex Armlovich, a senior housing policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank, recently told The Atlantic, “When I first opened up the zoning code for Atlanta, I almost spit out my coffee. It’s almost identical to L.A. in the 1990s.” The problem, then, is not the regulation itself but its use and interpretation by local communities. To put it in plannerspeak: Zoning is not the cause but the enabler of NIMBYism (Not In My Backyard) in the face of housing scarcity. In extreme cases, the pressures of scarcity make cities go BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything).
Anxiety over the future of one’s own neighborhood isn’t a new or even surprising attitude. Back in the 1970s, well before Klein and Thompson, sociologist Richard Sennett asked a provocative question: “Why is the local community more appropriate than the city for dealing with urban problems?” Sennett was writing at a time of growing criticism of top-down urban planning and its dire consequences for poor neighborhoods and segregated communities. The figure of the almighty city architect, as typified by Robert Moses, could never orchestrate the improvisational ballet of the streets that Jane Jacobs wrote about in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, critics argued. But what happens when communities themselves decide who should be allowed to join the dance?