Toward a More Responsive American Urbanism

“We can all remember the time when it would have seemed absurd for a city to restrict the height and arrangement of buildings on private property. One of the sure proofs that this was a free country was that a man could build a structure to any height, of any shape, and put it to any use that was not a nuisance.” – Edward M. Bassett.

In 1917, Edward Bassett reflected on America’s urban past. An attorney and urban planner, Bassett had recently helped lead New York City’s successful effort to enact America’s first zoning law. The time he had in mind, when he looked back, was the late Victorian Age, when the freedom to build on private property, even in cities, had encountered far fewer limits from the law. The variety of building sizes and shapes that one still finds in older American neighborhoods is often a relic of that time: Even when the buildings are newer, their geometry has often been influenced by that earlier, freewheeling urbanism, and its echoes in the rhythms of the blocks and lots.

The meteoric rise of industry in the late nineteenth century created vast fortunes and lifted the American standard of living. Where wealth was concentrated, it produced beautiful new neighborhoods that remain treasured today. But industry’s effects on the land, writ large, also illustrated the tragic inadequacy of traditional urban growth governance in the face of such profound change. Victorian property laws had grown out of the ancient customs of an agrarian society. With the rise of industrial capitalism, they could not slow the bleak landscape of slums, railroad tracks, and factories that crept into settled old places and marred the pristine countryside. For at least two generations, the persistent expansion of industry must have seemed, to many Americans, like a free-for-all.

During those years, a deep skepticism of unregulated construction took root, animating a coalition of citizens, officials, and reformers. At first, construction codes, fire codes, and tenement laws were aimed narrowly at principal health and safety concerns. By the early twentieth century, Bassett and others went further, proposing a new paradigm of comprehensive planning, including what we now call zoning, to bring private land use decisions into the realm of public policy. In time, such proposals would find legal footing and transform the process of building neighborhoods.

New York City’s novel zoning ordinance was enacted in part as a response to the gloom cast over Wall Street by an increasingly dense morass of skyscrapers. (Ironically, the Department of City Planning is today located in the 1915 Equitable Building, whose construction had been the proverbial last straw.) A decade later, in Euclid v. Ambler Realty, the Supreme Court confirmed that regulation of private land use could be a legitimate exercise of a state’s police power. Soon, many states delegated zoning powers to local governments. A generation later, when a car-oriented suburban construction boom followed World War II, new slums and industrial nuisances had mostly been prohibited.

While zoning offered an effective solution to the industrial excesses of the time, it also planted the seeds of an approach to urban growth that would slowly distort America’s land markets. Even in its first iterations, zoning claimed far more power than needed to simply prohibit slums and isolate the blight of heavy industry. With each additional layer of complexity, land-use rules transformed urban growth from a living process shaped by the local democratic quirks of diverse customs and dynamic markets into one that would be established prescriptively, by lawyers, planners, and elected officials.

For all its shortcomings in the face of industry, traditional urbanism contained a certain timeless wisdom: it allowed each owner to make incremental changes. When populations grew, apartments could be carved out of houses, detached structures could be replaced with attached buildings, and lots could be split and split again. Buildings and grounds could be repurposed as their owners saw fit. Such changes might need to comply with safety rules, but they rarely required discretionary approvals from public officials. Cumulatively, these modifications reshaped the fabric of neighborhoods, over time, to accommodate each location’s changing needs.

This customary, evolutionary process contrasts with the comprehensive planning model, still common in American cities and suburbs, where a strict schedule of allowable uses and dimensions is frequently enshrined for each building lot. When elected officials (or their appointees) need to undertake the process of changing the law, the barrier to change in a neighborhood becomes very high. Is it no wonder that, over several generations, with these laws pervasive and space for new homes more limited, Americans now face a shortage of housing units. Nor is it a surprise that research has flagged the rising cost of housing as a likely factor in declining birth rates, or the high number of Americans who feel compelled to leave expensive home regions, and presumably local ties, to seek affordability elsewhere.

Despite its deleterious effects, in excess, one can appreciate the concrete benefits of modern land use regulation. After all, few Americans would wish to return to the Victorian paradigm, when, say, a glue factory might suddenly appear on a long-settled residential street; or when sunless tenements might rapidly proliferate in an unfiltered response to population growth. With such caveats in mind, the intentional reintroduction of an element of the responsive spirit of a more traditional urbanism has now become desirable: Doing so would allow communities to shape themselves in accordance with the patterns of peoples’ lives; it would allow more Americans to choose to live where they feel at home; to be part of deeper, more meaningful, and less transient communities.

A better urban growth model could retain the salutary features of modern comprehensive planning while prizing a degree of innate responsiveness. Approaches could vary according to regional and local priorities but would share a common thread: a foundational recognition that the latitude to adapt our neighborhoods—to markets, to demographics, to human variety—is a traditional, essential element of stable communities; and that the contemporary impulse to require political permission for small changes has become a double-edged sword, tilting the scales toward those who oppose any change.

A good first step would be for town plans to intentionally create space for local homeowners to add new housing units, as needed, at a harmonious scale with the existing neighborhood. Such an approach would return meaningful discretion to individual owners and foster greater alignment between communities and housing options, allowing peoples’ affinities and social ties to play a greater role in choices about where to live and when to start families. Fortunately, a heterodox mix of initiatives, drawn from the laboratories of American democracy, can help to point the way.

Over the past decade, a handful of initiatives have sought to promote affordability by allowing local housing markets to adjust for local demand. These measures have offered locally tailored approaches. In 2019, the City of Minneapolis enacted a comprehensive plan that no longer included an exclusive, single-family zoning district. Contrary to claims, this change did not prohibit or discourage single-family homes. Rather, it gave homeowners more flexibility, allowing them, for example, to create a two-family house out of a large home that had previously been limited to single-family status; or to build a new three-family house on an appropriately sized lot.

The same year, Oregon enacted a similar approach, making it applicable in metropolitan Portland and municipalities that exceeded certain population limits, while leaving regulations in place in the state’s smaller and more isolated municipalities. In 2021, California adopted a series of statewide reforms designed to let markets produce more homes. Its key achievement was to authorize owners to add new units on existing lots. Large, single-family lots could be divided, and each lot could host an additional unit, meaning that as many as four units might be situated on lots that had previously allowed just one.

Form-based codes, favored by the New Urbanism community, offer another approach, focused on establishing coherent physical attributes, like town centers and corridors, rather than prescribing land uses or unit counts. Many towns and cities, especially in the South and West, have adopted form-based codes, with pleasing results. Miami, Denver, and Buffalo are among the larger cities whose plans now include form-based elements. Calibrated to achieve a desired level of urbanization in a given place, they typically let compatible uses share space—a feature that can foster the elements of traditional town centers. Since these codes require deference to traditional patterns, they remain prescriptive. Nevertheless, they can be designed to provide for significant responsiveness to local markets.

Each of these models acknowledges the costs of retaining a perennially unresponsive paradigm. The variety of human ways is often found in the idiosyncrasies of the unique places we build. One size does not fit all; prudent governance has long valued subsidiarity. Accordingly, if a variety of approaches, in a variety of settings, can show that a responsive element may be added to urban growth rules without causing the sky to fall, then perhaps the Overton window can be creaked open a bit more. Given the stakes for those whose lives are being distorted by the present regime of urbanism, this is an important goal. The challenge will be to continue to find ways to recalibrate America’s urban growth processes away from prescriptive and generic rules, toward more made-to-order, participatory models, generating new housing for individuals and families, and strengthening communities, while preserving the key protections that we have inherited from Edward Bassett’s era of American planning.