100 years of evidence isn't enough

Zoning needs a scientific revolution.

Thomas Kuhn was a philosopher whose groundbreaking 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is credited with bringing the term “paradigm shift” to pop culture. Kuhn described how scientific communities stick to established paradigms, even as evidence of their limitations mounted. Widely accepted paradigms for understanding and interpreting knowledge don’t crumble under the weight of mere data. Instead, they tend to persist until a crisis emerges—when anomalies become so disruptive that a shift to a new paradigm is unavoidable.

Zoning was established in the early 20th century as a way to protect homeowners from unwanted industrial developments nearby. It was pitched as a way to separate heavy industry from residential neighborhoods, which made practical sense at a time when factories polluted neighborhoods. Early industrial cities were notorious for their noise, filth, sickness, and all around misery.

The wealthy had options, so they’d put some distance between themselves and factory life. You can imagine that the elite would want to guarantee never having to deal with the industrial riff-raff. Zoning would give such guarantees. You can also imagine that social workers and other empaths would want to guarantee the poor and middle class had the same separation from the dirty parts of a city as the elites had. Zoning would give such guarantees.

But zoning wasn’t used merely as a tool to separate heavy industry from residential zones. Local power brokers segregated all the land uses—separating single-family homes from apartments, office buildings from retail, residential from retail, and so on. The regulatory framework became so normalized in America that it’s hard for people to imagine life without it: “Without zoning, my neighbor might build a strip club and a paper mill.”

Normal Science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all of their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Much of the success of the enterprise derives from the community’s willingness to defend that assumption, if necessary, at considerable cost.

Thomas Kuhn

As Kuhn would’ve predicted, the normal science of zoning has produced a number of “anomalies” that increasingly contradict zoning’s purported benefits:

1. Housing Expense and Shortage: By restricting a variety of housing sizes and types, zoning codes limit the supply of housing, driving up prices and making places unaffordable for many residents.

2. Environmental Degradation: Zoning encourages urban sprawl by pushing residential development outward into zones that are only practically reachable by car. Zoning codes create low-density, car-centric development, at great expense to our natural environment.

3. Social Segregation: Zoning is a devilish segregation tool. Throughout pre-zoning history, cities had opportunities for people from all walks of life, social standing, and economic standing.

4. Economic Stagnation and Opportunity Costs: By prohibiting a mixture of land uses in a neighborhood, zoning limits economic activity, making it difficult for small businesses to thrive in residential neighborhoods or for residents to access amenities without a car.

5. Car Dependency. Neighborhood pharmacies are outlawed, so you drive to CVS just to get a birthday card. Neighborhood restaurants are outlawed, so you drive your kids to Chick-Fil-A. Neighborhood salons are outlawed, so you drive to get your nails done.

Changing a paradigm isn’t just about accepting new facts, it’s about challenging an entire worldview, and that’s something humans are generally reluctant to do. And in spite of all its harms, the zoning paradigm remains resilient among the experts because:

• Planning departments are organized around zoning administration.

• Professional credentialing still lionizes zoning codes.

• University programs train students to use zoning for the greater good.

• Thousands of attorneys specialize in zoning law.

• Lobbying pressure remains intense from industries that benefit from strict land use policies.

There are powerful incentives to preserve the system, even among professionals who privately acknowledge its failures. Kuhn observed that paradigms persist not because they work well, but because entire careers, departments, and professional identities are built upon them. Challenging zoning means threatening not just an idea, but the livelihoods and expertise of countless people.

Much like a fundamentalist belief system, zoning has developed a language of justification that makes it difficult to challenge. Clever defenses like “preserving neighborhood character” or “protecting property values” are invoked to defend restrictive zoning policies, even when these policies have been proven to harm the vast majority of people. Zoning defenders use language not to inform, but to deflect and manipulate.

Kuhn would say a paradigm shift requires a moment of crisis, a point at which the old framework can no longer explain or accommodate the reality of a situation. I think we’re getting there with zoning, because the accumulating anomalies are becoming too severe to ignore.

Scientific revolutions reshaped how we understand the world. A zoning revolution has the potential to transform our small towns, big cities, and sprawling suburbs in positive ways we have yet to fully imagine. We have 100 years of evidence that zoning has brought more harm than good.