For people who like dense, walkable, transit-oriented, cosmopolitan cities, there are only a few genuine options in America. They have New York City, Chicago, DC, Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and maybe portions of a few other cities. These “legacy cities” are unique because they grew before the automobile, necessitating dense settlement patterns, while most other U.S. cities grew afterwards. But another, far less discussed, factor is that they grew before the evolution of strict zoning regulations. From the Industrial Era until World War II, these cities received floods of immigrants, and allowed developers to build housing for them, since there was very little legal framework to stop this. A recent New York Times interactive graph shows that modern zoning, which in New York City has metastasized from an innocent 1916 resolution into a behemoth, would have killed off much of this growth in Gotham.
On March 20, the Times ran an article showing that 40% of Manhattan’s buildings would be illegal today. Using data compiled by Stephen Smith and Sandip Trivedi, of the real estate firm Quantierra, the map showed that illegal buildings are spread nearly proportionally throughout the borough, from the Financial District on up to Inwood. A smattering of these buildings, including many on the Upper East Side, would be too tall. Many of the buildings in Lower Manhattan would have too many apartments. And a lot of buildings, particularly in Midtown, have excessive square footage dedicated to commercial uses.
Mr. Smith and Mr. Trivedi evaluated public records on more than 43,000 buildings and discovered that about 17,000 of them, or 40 percent, do not conform to at least one part of the current zoning code. The reasons are varied. Some of the buildings have too much residential area, too much commercial space, too many dwelling units or too few parking spaces; some are simply too tall.
Much of Manhattan’s stunning architecture, meanwhile, would be regulated away by today’s bulk limits and setback requirements. And the data didn’t even account for zoning mandates concerning affordability and quality.
While the Times piece focused on Manhattan, where about three-quarters of square footage was built between the 1900s and the 1930s, similar articles could be written about America’s other dense cities. Most of the rowhomes found, for example, throughout Philadelphia and other large East Coast cities span from their founding in the 17th and 18th centuries to the first half of the 20th century. After San Francisco was devastated by the 1906 earthquake, residents rebuilt it quickly enough to host the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition, and much of that construction remains. Chicago contributed the world’s first skyscraper in 1885, and many more in subsequent decades. Like Manhattan, these older cities were built rapidly and intensively, void of much regulation and review, and centered on key public spaces, ground-level retail and transit nodes. But now they are dominated by preservation overlays, minimum parking requirements, restrictions against mixed uses, and many more of the aforementioned regulations, meaning a large portion of their early growth would be illegal. Indeed, if today’s regulatory climate had been applied a century or two ago, the American cities that people most want to preserve would be shells of themselves.
And that was the point of the Times' article, to show the fundamentally anti-urban nature of modern zoning regulations. Such zoning not only would have stopped New York City and other dense ones from forming, but are hindering their further maturity. Places like Manhattan and San Francisco—dense as they are—could become even denser, while their outlying areas (Queens, Brooklyn, Oakland) are prevented from becoming the great cosmopolises of tomorrow.
Zoning is having similar effects on cities that grew after the automobile and have long been dominated by sprawl, but that are now primed for densification. Los Angeles, for example, didn’t become a significant city until after World War I, when the public was craving single-family homes and private automobiles. Today there is demand for filling in its suburbanized spaces, but citywide zoning laws severely limit this, creating an affordability crisis. Similar stories can be told about Portland, Seattle, New Orleans, and other emerging cities.
Meanwhile, the cities enjoying rapid densification—of the sort mirrored by the great cities of yesteryear—are the less-regulated ones. I recently wrote for National Review about Brickell, a financial center south of downtown Miami. In two decades, it has gone from a low-slung neighborhood of single-family homes and mid-rises to an overnight skyscraper zone, adding 36 high-rise towers since 1997. This is because Miami’s city hall anticipated an influx of foreign capital by taking a hands-off approach to development. And Houston, which lacks a formal zoning code, has become a city that, contrary to its reputation, features numerous skyscraper clusters and whole neighborhoods dominated by new townhomes.
These trends point out a glaring contradiction in modern urbanist thinking. The people who claim they like density—such as planners, architects, environmentalists, and self-described progressives—also tend to prefer government centralization for cities. And they tend to oppose, as a broader principle, ideas that are market-oriented, anti-regulatory, capitalist, and pro-growth. But they seem not to have pondered how any of these variegated ideas actually work in practice within cities. Centralization has led to a stifling regulatory climate—most notably zoning—that prevents cities from adding new buildings and people, a point demonstrated by the New York Times. A hands-off approach, meanwhile, is what has proven to liberalize cities for this human influx, making them dense and dynamic.
