SARA BRONIN: Welcome to Property Law 101.
I'm Sara Bronin.
And I created the series to help you understand
the basics of property law.
The series covers four fundamental questions
about property and property law.
And today we are talking about the third question,
which is using property.
In other videos, we cover what zoning is and what it does.
And we cover the various ways that zoning codes
might offer flexibility to governments and to property
owners.
In this video, we cover very broadly
the pros and cons of zoning as it exists in the scheme
as we've described it.
So let's start with the good.
And again, this is very broad brush.
So what might we like about zoning as it exists today?
It certainly accomplishes the objectives
of increasing light and air, of separating noxious uses
from regular uses.
Zoning is also predictable.
There's a sense of certainty, certainty that people pay for.
It can be objective.
It outlines specific rules.
And zoning is better than the alternative, particularly
the nuisance alternative, as we discuss in another video.
But there are also significant issues with zoning.
For one, it segregates uses from each other
in ways that have proven to be deeply problematic.
And actually, as you go back to the roots of many zoning codes,
they were written to achieve racial segregation explicitly
written into zoning codes.
That changed with the 1917 decision
of Buchanon versus Worley where the US Supreme Court outlawed
racially restrictive zoning.
But many communities figured out ways
to achieve the same goals without using race explicitly
in their zoning codes.
As it has been applied, zoning codes
have been challenged on many grounds.
So landowners seeking variances can
say that there wasn't enough process, that there wasn't
enough due process, of course a protected constitutional right.
Neighbors might argue that a zoning board didn't
make the right decision substantively, perhaps
using substantive due process arguments.
Prospective residents can sue if they
think their constitutional rights might be violated,
a concept that we talk about when
we discuss exclusionary zoning in another video.
Another criticism of zoning is that it is really
sometimes very difficult to understand
how zoning codes really work.
We understand, or we use zoning rather
to make predictions about how people will want to live.
We're not always right.
In an article I've posted to SSRN about Connecticut's zoning
districts, I illustrate how the housing stock in Connecticut,
a highly segregated state by the way,
is primarily single family zoning on large lots.
80% of primarily residential land
is zoned for lots of basically an acre, 0.92 acres or more.
Zoning locks in a result that ignores demographics,
that ignores market changes and demographic changes
because today we see many people who
don't want to live that way.
There's also a connection between zoning and housing
prices.
The most overregulated cities when it comes to zoning are
Boston, New York, and San Francisco .
These are places that are very expensive.
And probably they're so expensive
because wealthy people will pay to be sure about how
their communities will develop.
In the Connecticut study, some of the most exclusive towns
in Connecticut have the longest zoning codes.
One clocks in at 500 pages.
My hometown of Houston is an interesting counterexample.
It has no zoning.
And housing there in most years has
been deemed to be more affordable than most
other cities.
On the other hand, much of Houston
is unfortunately sprawl, which has
terrible environmental consequences
and is essentially inequitable because it
forces people to rely on cars.
There is a voluminous literature about zoning's many effects.
For the most part, and I've just highlighted a few here,
these effects are judged to be problematic.
But despite those studies and despite what
I've found in my own research on Connecticut,
I tend to be a lot more optimistic about what
zoning has the potential to do.
But I think the only way we can unlock
that potential is if people understand
zoning's great power.
So I will leave it there.
I'd love to hear from you whether on Twitter
or through my website where you can sign up to my mailing list.
And I will see you next time.
Thanks.