Strong Towns Chicago Book Club | Arbitrary Lines by M. Nolan Gray at New Wave Coffee – Chicago, IL

Who decides what can be built on your block? For about a century, the answer has been the zoning code. Gray thinks that’s the problem.

For December, Strong Towns Chicago is reading Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray, a former New York City planner.

Most people think of zoning as a neutral tool that keeps factories away from houses. Gray argues it has done much more than that. Zoning caps how many homes a city can build, pushes up rents, separates people by income and race, and requires the car-dependent development pattern that so many American cities now struggle to pay for. Rather than calling for reform at the edges, Gray makes the case for abolishing zoning entirely and handling real nuisances through more targeted rules. He points to Houston, the largest American city without a zoning code, as evidence that this can work.

Why a Strong Towns group is reading this

Strong Towns has long argued that every neighborhood should be allowed to grow by the next increment, by right, without a special permission process. Gray pushes that idea further than many of us are used to. Chicago’s zoning rules decide where middle housing can go, how much tax value each acre of the city produces, and how much infrastructure each household has to support. The book also picks up where The Color of Law left off in our October book club: once courts struck down explicit racial zoning, many cities turned to rules about lot sizes and building types that produced similar results.

Discussion topics will include:

• Whether abolishing zoning goes too far, or whether allowing the next increment by right gets Chicago most of the way there
• What Houston gets right, what it gets wrong, and what a Chicago version would have to look like
• How exclusionary zoning took over from explicit racial zoning, following last month’s discussion
• Where aldermanic prerogative and the city’s ward-by-ward approach to changes (including ADUs) fit into the problems Gray describes
• Which nuisances still need rules, and who should write them

Who should come

Anyone who has wondered why their neighborhood looks the way it does or why housing costs so much. You do not need to finish the book to join. If you read a few chapters, or missed October, come anyway. The conversation is better with people who disagree with Gray as well as people who agree with him.

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