It isn’t that zoning laws are the problem. It’s the lack of specific updates to the zoning laws that make them cause the negative effect. They do fix a lot of potential problems. I don’t want to live next to an industrial plant, a Wal-Mart, a 20 story building or a cemetary
I encourage you to start where the headline leaves off. You don’t have robust evidence that zoning is at fault - just a political movement. Why not describe zoning and the unintended outcomes with actionable models, identify testable hypotheses, explore sampling options, and propose thresholds for remedial action? I vote for transparency and logical coherence.
Zoning's faults are self-evident -- it's even in the name. Local governments heavily restrict private property by deciding which zones are allowed to have what. I've written about this many times. Those intended outcomes are bad, but so are the unintended outcomes (e.g. car dependency).
There is this real interesting tension between a homeowner that wants to do whatever these chose on their land, and one that cries to high heaven when their neighbor does something to block their view. Is there some other mechanism (other than zoning and planning law) to moderate these issues?
Absolutely, there are options. That's why it's been said that zoning is an unnecessary evil.
For issues like pollution (air, noise, water, whatever), building height, etc. there are ways that local governments could deal with land use without the heavy hand of zoning. The major barrier is that the planning profession won't acknowledge 100 years of outcomes that are worse than the promised benefits.
Lol… To be fair, there's some very good content there. That said, if you tend to prefer an analytical framing over a moral one, or propositions that invite scrutiny rather than assert conclusions, it’s probably best to include a few other alongside that one.
Zoning, Adaptation, and the Risk of False Dichotomies
This framing of zoning as a failed paradigm is a useful provocation. It rightly points to real harms that have emerged from rigid, exclusionary land-use rules: housing scarcity, car dependence, environmental degradation, and social separation. These are not imagined problems, nor are they denied by serious planners. Where the argument becomes less convincing, however, is in its implication that zoning itself—rather than how it has been designed and used—is the root cause, and that discarding it outright is therefore the necessary response.
That framing risks turning a complex policy question into a false dichotomy: zoning versus no zoning; planning versus organic order; experts versus common sense. Cities, however, are not laboratories for ideological purity. They are long-lived systems where outcomes are shaped by incentives, infrastructure, capital, and governance over decades. The evidence suggests that the real question is not whether zoning should exist, but what kind of zoning best supports long-term community outcomes.
Zoning as a Tool, Not a Dogma
Zoning has never been a single thing. In practice, it ranges from highly restrictive, use-segregated codes to flexible, mixed-use, form-based systems. Treating all zoning as interchangeable obscures the fact that many of the outcomes the author celebrates—walkability, mixed use, incremental density—are achieved in places that rely heavily on zoning, just not the postwar North American version optimized for cars and separation.
Metro Vancouver’s experience since the early 1990s is not one of zoning abandonment, but of regional-scale planning paired with intentional land-use regulation. The Greater Vancouver Regional District’s Livable Region Strategic Plan explicitly sought to curb sprawl, protect agricultural land, and focus growth into compact, transit-served centres. Zoning was the primary implementation mechanism, but it was applied in service of density, mixing, and connectivity rather than exclusion.
The result is visible today: a network of town centres and corridor communities - Metrotown, Brentwood, Richmond City Centre, Surrey Central and many smaller town centres or nodes - linked by rapid transit and shaped by transit-oriented development. These did not emerge spontaneously from market forces alone. They required community planning and zoning that permitted height and density where infrastructure could support it, alongside regional coordination that limited outward expansion.
A Useful Comparison: Vancouver and Seattle
A comparison with Metro Seattle (US) over roughly the same period is instructive. Seattle invested heavily in freeway expansion through the late 20th century, consuming far more land and reinforcing low-density, auto-oriented growth across a wide metropolitan footprint. Metro Vancouver, by contrast, built no major urban freeways, protected its green zones, and invested earlier in regional rapid transit. Land-use regulation aligned with those infrastructure choices.
Notably, Seattle has since moved in a more Vancouver-like direction: emphasizing urban villages, transit-oriented rezoning, and the rollback of single-family-only zoning. This shift is an implicit acknowledgment that earlier laissez-faire and highway-led approaches produced outcomes like congestion, displacement, infrastructure cost that required correction. Zoning did not disappear; it evolved.
What “No Zoning” Tends to Produce
The essay gestures toward places without zoning as evidence that land-use freedom yields better outcomes. In practice, the absence of formal zoning rarely results in a neutral or democratic landscape. Other controls quickly fill the void: private covenants, parking mandates, environmental regulations, and capital-driven land assembly. The practical effect is often that decision-making shifts away from public institutions and toward those with the most financial leverage.
This is not a theoretical concern. Where zoning is weak or absent, incompatible uses tend not to distribute evenly. Affluent areas typically find ways, formal or informal, to protect themselves, while lower-income neighbourhoods bear disproportionate exposure to industrial, logistic, or nuisance uses. The market does not correct for this on its own, nor does it reliably produce the incremental, fine-grained urbanism often idealized in retrospection.
Culture, Cars, and the Role of Planning
The author is right to identify car dependence as a defining failure of modern urban form. But car culture was not created by zoning alone; it was produced by a coordinated system of industrial lobbies, extensive road investment, parking requirements, minimum lot sizes, and land-use separation. Reversing it requires the same level of coordination in the opposite direction.
Here, zoning remains one of the most effective tools available. Allowing multi-unit housing near transit, removing parking minimums, enabling neighbourhood-scale commercial uses, and concentrating density into walkable nodes are all zoning decisions. Without them, the market tends to default to what is most immediately profitable under existing infrastructure conditions—which is usually low-density, car-oriented development.
On Tone and Certainty
Finally, there is the question of rhetoric. Framing planners as self-interested, stubborn, or intellectually captured by a paradigm does little to advance the discussion. Many of the strongest critiques of conventional zoning have come from within the planning profession itself, and many reforms now underway reflect that internal reassessment.
If the intent of the original essay is to push zoning to adapt—to become more flexible, less exclusionary, and more aligned with contemporary social and environmental goals—that is a conversation worth having. But adaptation is not the same as abandonment. The evidence from Canada and elsewhere suggests that cities function best when markets operate within a clear, democratically accountable planning framework, not in its absence.
Zoning has helped to cause harm where it has been misused. It has also enabled some of the most successful urban outcomes in the country. The task ahead is not to discard it, but to continue reshaping it - deliberately, transparently, and with humility about what cities require to work over the long term.
I use ChatGPT to quickly put my thoughts into a coherent message. I also use Perplexity, Gemini, CoPilot, and Claude to assist with various other tasks. Saves a lot of time and helps ensure my message is as intended.
If you prefer you can imagine that AI actually wrote it. Should make it easy to refute.
Note: I lived in Vancouver in the early '90s and wrote a paper on this very topic.
Disingenuous unscientific opinion. The article claims to champion the scientific method. Yet all the observations are anecdotal and not backed by scientific analysis. Certainly, there is need for studies on the effects of zoning. Especially needed are reviews of the experimental changes in some cities to radically change and weaken urban zoning restrictions. Did these changes increase homeownership? Did eliminating parking minimums increase numbers of units and reduce costs? Are ADUs having the desired impact?
Interesting take! I appreciated the call out of all the industries/professions built on the foundation of modern zoning law. Agree they might be the biggest opposition to reforming any of it because of their very vested interests in the current system.
All societies around the world have come up with some sort of land use regulation system they use, and it should be fair to say a modern society requires one to be in place.
We are not building too many factories anymore in 2025, true, but some forms of negative impacts between neighbours are inevitable (regardless of whether those impacts are real or not), and being able to have a civilised and well-framed discussion around the conflicts resulting therefrom is pretty much what urban planning—land zoning being its fundamental product and instrument—is for. We've developed a system, though imperfect, of planning policymakers, lawyers, consultants, and bureaucrats so that we don't have to fight each other in the most physical sense over all these matters.
'The current system is bad' is a reason good enough to develop a new system that is much better than the current one—rather than dismantle it altogether. All the observations on how zoning rules fail societies are, of course, undoubtedly true; however, the most excellent feature of any policy is that one can write a new policy.
It isn’t that zoning laws are the problem. It’s the lack of specific updates to the zoning laws that make them cause the negative effect. They do fix a lot of potential problems. I don’t want to live next to an industrial plant, a Wal-Mart, a 20 story building or a cemetary
.
Of the things you listed, none require zoning.
What do they require then? Maybe I don’t understand how you are defining zoning laws?
They just might like the paper mill, when they are running out of toilet paper.
I encourage you to start where the headline leaves off. You don’t have robust evidence that zoning is at fault - just a political movement. Why not describe zoning and the unintended outcomes with actionable models, identify testable hypotheses, explore sampling options, and propose thresholds for remedial action? I vote for transparency and logical coherence.
Zoning's faults are self-evident -- it's even in the name. Local governments heavily restrict private property by deciding which zones are allowed to have what. I've written about this many times. Those intended outcomes are bad, but so are the unintended outcomes (e.g. car dependency).
Zoning was a lifesaver to the poorest workers 100 years ago.
There is this real interesting tension between a homeowner that wants to do whatever these chose on their land, and one that cries to high heaven when their neighbor does something to block their view. Is there some other mechanism (other than zoning and planning law) to moderate these issues?
Absolutely, there are options. That's why it's been said that zoning is an unnecessary evil.
For issues like pollution (air, noise, water, whatever), building height, etc. there are ways that local governments could deal with land use without the heavy hand of zoning. The major barrier is that the planning profession won't acknowledge 100 years of outcomes that are worse than the promised benefits.
Great question. This is more of a proclamation space though.
For discussion and balanced perspectives where such questions are welcome, there are plenty of safe places. Google:
- Strong Towns (not on substack)
On Substack:
- Urbanism Now
Post Suburban / Free Range City
- Andrew Rumbach
aww man, Urbanism Speakeasy doesn't get a shout-out? womp womp
Lol… To be fair, there's some very good content there. That said, if you tend to prefer an analytical framing over a moral one, or propositions that invite scrutiny rather than assert conclusions, it’s probably best to include a few other alongside that one.
Zoning, Adaptation, and the Risk of False Dichotomies
This framing of zoning as a failed paradigm is a useful provocation. It rightly points to real harms that have emerged from rigid, exclusionary land-use rules: housing scarcity, car dependence, environmental degradation, and social separation. These are not imagined problems, nor are they denied by serious planners. Where the argument becomes less convincing, however, is in its implication that zoning itself—rather than how it has been designed and used—is the root cause, and that discarding it outright is therefore the necessary response.
That framing risks turning a complex policy question into a false dichotomy: zoning versus no zoning; planning versus organic order; experts versus common sense. Cities, however, are not laboratories for ideological purity. They are long-lived systems where outcomes are shaped by incentives, infrastructure, capital, and governance over decades. The evidence suggests that the real question is not whether zoning should exist, but what kind of zoning best supports long-term community outcomes.
Zoning as a Tool, Not a Dogma
Zoning has never been a single thing. In practice, it ranges from highly restrictive, use-segregated codes to flexible, mixed-use, form-based systems. Treating all zoning as interchangeable obscures the fact that many of the outcomes the author celebrates—walkability, mixed use, incremental density—are achieved in places that rely heavily on zoning, just not the postwar North American version optimized for cars and separation.
Metro Vancouver’s experience since the early 1990s is not one of zoning abandonment, but of regional-scale planning paired with intentional land-use regulation. The Greater Vancouver Regional District’s Livable Region Strategic Plan explicitly sought to curb sprawl, protect agricultural land, and focus growth into compact, transit-served centres. Zoning was the primary implementation mechanism, but it was applied in service of density, mixing, and connectivity rather than exclusion.
The result is visible today: a network of town centres and corridor communities - Metrotown, Brentwood, Richmond City Centre, Surrey Central and many smaller town centres or nodes - linked by rapid transit and shaped by transit-oriented development. These did not emerge spontaneously from market forces alone. They required community planning and zoning that permitted height and density where infrastructure could support it, alongside regional coordination that limited outward expansion.
A Useful Comparison: Vancouver and Seattle
A comparison with Metro Seattle (US) over roughly the same period is instructive. Seattle invested heavily in freeway expansion through the late 20th century, consuming far more land and reinforcing low-density, auto-oriented growth across a wide metropolitan footprint. Metro Vancouver, by contrast, built no major urban freeways, protected its green zones, and invested earlier in regional rapid transit. Land-use regulation aligned with those infrastructure choices.
Notably, Seattle has since moved in a more Vancouver-like direction: emphasizing urban villages, transit-oriented rezoning, and the rollback of single-family-only zoning. This shift is an implicit acknowledgment that earlier laissez-faire and highway-led approaches produced outcomes like congestion, displacement, infrastructure cost that required correction. Zoning did not disappear; it evolved.
What “No Zoning” Tends to Produce
The essay gestures toward places without zoning as evidence that land-use freedom yields better outcomes. In practice, the absence of formal zoning rarely results in a neutral or democratic landscape. Other controls quickly fill the void: private covenants, parking mandates, environmental regulations, and capital-driven land assembly. The practical effect is often that decision-making shifts away from public institutions and toward those with the most financial leverage.
This is not a theoretical concern. Where zoning is weak or absent, incompatible uses tend not to distribute evenly. Affluent areas typically find ways, formal or informal, to protect themselves, while lower-income neighbourhoods bear disproportionate exposure to industrial, logistic, or nuisance uses. The market does not correct for this on its own, nor does it reliably produce the incremental, fine-grained urbanism often idealized in retrospection.
Culture, Cars, and the Role of Planning
The author is right to identify car dependence as a defining failure of modern urban form. But car culture was not created by zoning alone; it was produced by a coordinated system of industrial lobbies, extensive road investment, parking requirements, minimum lot sizes, and land-use separation. Reversing it requires the same level of coordination in the opposite direction.
Here, zoning remains one of the most effective tools available. Allowing multi-unit housing near transit, removing parking minimums, enabling neighbourhood-scale commercial uses, and concentrating density into walkable nodes are all zoning decisions. Without them, the market tends to default to what is most immediately profitable under existing infrastructure conditions—which is usually low-density, car-oriented development.
On Tone and Certainty
Finally, there is the question of rhetoric. Framing planners as self-interested, stubborn, or intellectually captured by a paradigm does little to advance the discussion. Many of the strongest critiques of conventional zoning have come from within the planning profession itself, and many reforms now underway reflect that internal reassessment.
If the intent of the original essay is to push zoning to adapt—to become more flexible, less exclusionary, and more aligned with contemporary social and environmental goals—that is a conversation worth having. But adaptation is not the same as abandonment. The evidence from Canada and elsewhere suggests that cities function best when markets operate within a clear, democratically accountable planning framework, not in its absence.
Zoning has helped to cause harm where it has been misused. It has also enabled some of the most successful urban outcomes in the country. The task ahead is not to discard it, but to continue reshaping it - deliberately, transparently, and with humility about what cities require to work over the long term.
Which AI tool wrote this?
I use ChatGPT to quickly put my thoughts into a coherent message. I also use Perplexity, Gemini, CoPilot, and Claude to assist with various other tasks. Saves a lot of time and helps ensure my message is as intended.
If you prefer you can imagine that AI actually wrote it. Should make it easy to refute.
Note: I lived in Vancouver in the early '90s and wrote a paper on this very topic.
Disingenuous unscientific opinion. The article claims to champion the scientific method. Yet all the observations are anecdotal and not backed by scientific analysis. Certainly, there is need for studies on the effects of zoning. Especially needed are reviews of the experimental changes in some cities to radically change and weaken urban zoning restrictions. Did these changes increase homeownership? Did eliminating parking minimums increase numbers of units and reduce costs? Are ADUs having the desired impact?
Interesting take! I appreciated the call out of all the industries/professions built on the foundation of modern zoning law. Agree they might be the biggest opposition to reforming any of it because of their very vested interests in the current system.
Amen
All societies around the world have come up with some sort of land use regulation system they use, and it should be fair to say a modern society requires one to be in place.
We are not building too many factories anymore in 2025, true, but some forms of negative impacts between neighbours are inevitable (regardless of whether those impacts are real or not), and being able to have a civilised and well-framed discussion around the conflicts resulting therefrom is pretty much what urban planning—land zoning being its fundamental product and instrument—is for. We've developed a system, though imperfect, of planning policymakers, lawyers, consultants, and bureaucrats so that we don't have to fight each other in the most physical sense over all these matters.
'The current system is bad' is a reason good enough to develop a new system that is much better than the current one—rather than dismantle it altogether. All the observations on how zoning rules fail societies are, of course, undoubtedly true; however, the most excellent feature of any policy is that one can write a new policy.