Zoned in the USA: The Origins and Implications of American Land-Use Regulation

This book destroys a variety of myths about American land use and zoning.One common myth is that home ownership is "the American Dream"- more common in the U.S. than elsewhere. Not so! Hirt shows that 65 percent of American housing is owner-occupied- less than the European Union average (70 percent), Canada or Australia. Moreover, many American homes are effectively owned by banks through mortgages; 45 percent of U.S. houses have a mortgage, while the European Union average is 27 percent. The major difference between the U.S. and other democracies is that Americans generally live in either detached houses or apartments, while in some other countries the middle-ground housing of attached single-family homes (such as duplexes and rowhouses) is more common.Another common myth is that U.S. zoning is less restrictive than European zoning. In fact, American zones tend to rigidly separate land uses; the majority of residential land is devoted to single-family housing, and single-family houses can almost never be in the same zone as businesses or multifamily housing. By contrast, other nations regulate by intensity of use but not so much by type of use; for example, Germany's most common residential zone, "general residential", allows multifamily housing and retail uses as long as they are on a small, neighborhood-serving scale. Land-rich Canada and Australia tend to be more like the United States, but nevertheless are more flexible, usually allowing smaller houses than most American cities.Why were Americans so willing to accept such strict regulation? Hirt explains that in the early 20th century, pro-zoning interests argued that zoning was a means of increasing homeowners' property values and excluding lower socio-economic classes. In other words, middle-class Americans perceived zoning as a license to print money. Hirt also suggests that Americans were more willing to subjectively believe that single-family houses were special and superior- perhaps because most Americans were only a generation or two removed from rural life.

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I enjoyed reading this book. I don’t have any education in the field of land use, and I was able to understand it. It taught me a lot about the history of zoning in the world and its inception and development in different developed countries.

I recommend this book to everyone involved in planning communities in the US - it will shake off your preconceptions about the purpose of zoning and its natural form. Hirt, who grew up in Romania, compares America's land use laws to those of other developed countries, and teases out the differences. If you're an American and have never thought much about planning, you'll be surprised by what she found.Hirt writes in a dispassionate and accessible way about something most Americans take for granted. The book is very light on theory, and I did not come away feeling like she was pushing an agenda. It really requires you to reflect - and I am still processing it. Refreshing for academic work on housing and land.

As a relatively new planner, I found the book to be informative. It's well written, and not too difficult of a read.

Good historical overview.

Zoned in the USA : The Origins and Implications of American Land-Use Regulation (2014) by Sonia Hirt is an interesting look at how land use regulation came into being in much of the US. It’s a well written, scholarly book.The book looks at how Americans pride themselves on being a nation of home owners but how recently a number of other countries have overtaken them. The trademark of suburbs and segregated commercial, industrial and residential zoning is widespread in the US.Hirt carefully goes through how zoning arose in Europe and has great detail on how Germans began to carefully zone by rules and compares this to the more discretionary zoning of the UK. She mentions how Napoleonic zoning also worked. She compares the US approach to the European approach which has far less, or no only residential zoning. Instead in Germany small shops are permitted in residential areas.Unless you were a scholar of zoning it would be hard not to learn interesting facts about how zoning has arisen in different countries. It’s very interesting to learn in today’s climate that zoning was often proposed in order to keep land values high. This may have been beneficial in the past but today appears to have caused an artificial scarcity in housing driving up prices. These sorts of effects are not mentioned in the book.The book also details how US zoning tends to be more local than European zoning which is often country wide. Unfortunately little or no mention is made of the very weak zoning in Texas which has resulted in much lower housing prices there despite a strong housing market.Zoned in the USA is a very good book and very much worth reading for anyone interested in comparative zoning. It’s also well written and very readable.

One of the best books on land use regulation that I have read.