Land Use Without Zoning

For fifty years the United States has attempted to substitute political control in place of the free market in land use allocation. That control—zoning—has not worked in the past and shows no promise of working in the future, and ought to be abolished—so argues Bernard Siegan in his award-winning book, Land Use Without Zoning.

Land Use Without Zoning is the most significant free market-oriented study ever writtenon the land use question. Whether you call it zoning, planning or environmental protection, the issue is the same: coercive control of private property by the state.

Siegan learned about zoning first hand from twenty years of real estate law practice in Chicago. Returning to the University of Chicago in 1969, he published the path-breaking article “Non-Zoning in Houston” in the prestigious Journal of Law and Economics and has since worked actively with citizens’ groups around the country to defeat local zoning proposals.

Even the proponents of zoning admit that it can be ponderous and expensive to administer and that there is a “moral hazard” in entrusting decisions which can skyrocket the value of a parcel of property into the hands of petty local officials. But, they tell us, the social benefits of zoning far outweigh these costs.

Nonsense, answers Siegan. All of the traditional reasons given for zoning are fallacious: gas stations will not locate in residential neighborhoods in the absence of zoning because it is uneconomical for them to do so; even without zoning laws, businesses will cluster on main roads and leave quiet suburban lanes in peace. Siegan argues by using careful analysis of comparable zoning and unzoned communities, that residential, commercial and industrial properties are segregated by the natural forces of the free market.

Siegan’s laboratory example is the city of Houston, sixth largest city in the United States, which has never had a zoning law, and in which property development is controlled through private covenants and economic forces. Siegan shows, by comparison with cities with zoning laws, that the cost of zoning tends to fall on the poorer sectors of the community that it tends to produce higher rents by restricting the supply of housing and that it tends to exclude from poorer residential neighborhoods the businesses and services which the people need.

Land Use Without Zoning is no mere ideological tract against government intervention. It gives the hard-nosed dollars-and-cents economics of the failure of zoning as well as an explanation of how a zoned city can be eased through the process of de-zoning with a minimum of disruption. It is an important and timely book.

Reviewed by Davis Keeler / Economics (271 pages, indexed) / BFL Price $10