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Zoned in the USA: The Origins and Implications of American Land-Use Regulation
"[Hirt] provides a succinct overview of the history of zoning in the US. She compares zoning in the US to five European countries―England, France, Sweden, Germany, and Russia―to highlight its distinctiveness. The story of American zoning reveals its origins in the early-20th century, fashioned to maintain property values and protect Americans' investments in their homes. The book tells the story of how local, state, and federal governments have contributed to the use of zoning to preserve the single-family detached home, connecting zoning to other policies, such as transportation and home loan financing. This is a terrific book for collections on housing, land use, zoning, and law."
―CHOICE Why are American cities, suburbs, and towns so distinct? Compared to European cities, those in the United States are characterized by lower densities and greater distances; neat, geometric layouts; an abundance of green space; a greater level of social segregation reflected in space; and—perhaps most noticeably—a greater share of individual, single-family detached housing. In Zoned in the USA , Sonia A. Hirt argues that zoning laws are among the important but understudied reasons for the cross-continental differences. Hirt shows that rather than being imported from Europe, U.S. municipal zoning law was in fact an institution that quickly developed its own, distinctly American profile. A distinct spatial culture of individualism—founded on an ideal of separate, single-family residences apart from the dirt and turmoil of industrial and agricultural production—has driven much of municipal regulation, defined land-use, and, ultimately, shaped American life. Hirt explores municipal zoning from a comparative and international perspective, drawing on archival resources and contemporary land-use laws from England, Germany, France, Australia, Russia, Canada, and Japan to challenge assumptions about American cities and the laws that guide them.
―CHOICE Why are American cities, suburbs, and towns so distinct? Compared to European cities, those in the United States are characterized by lower densities and greater distances; neat, geometric layouts; an abundance of green space; a greater level of social segregation reflected in space; and—perhaps most noticeably—a greater share of individual, single-family detached housing. In Zoned in the USA , Sonia A. Hirt argues that zoning laws are among the important but understudied reasons for the cross-continental differences. Hirt shows that rather than being imported from Europe, U.S. municipal zoning law was in fact an institution that quickly developed its own, distinctly American profile. A distinct spatial culture of individualism—founded on an ideal of separate, single-family residences apart from the dirt and turmoil of industrial and agricultural production—has driven much of municipal regulation, defined land-use, and, ultimately, shaped American life. Hirt explores municipal zoning from a comparative and international perspective, drawing on archival resources and contemporary land-use laws from England, Germany, France, Australia, Russia, Canada, and Japan to challenge assumptions about American cities and the laws that guide them.
256 pages, Paperback
First published November 18, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
February 4, 2021
There is good information in this book, but the style is sufficiently dry-as-dust that I'm loathe to recommend it to anyone.
November 25, 2022
Sonia Hirt, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs in the College of Architecture and Urban Studies at Virginia Tech, illuminates how US land-use practices are a global anomaly, grounded in a unique national moral temperament about spatial design and civic virtue. Hirt argues that US zoning laws — characterized by strict and uniform municipal regulations, the absence of federal intervention, the reliance on courts to litigate zoning practices, and the championing of detached single-family homeownership as the object of public policy — are distinct from those on continental Europe. Thus, as opposed to the flexible top-down zoning policy that has enabled mix-use urban cityscapes more commonly found in Europe, US urban design was more bottom-up. More precisely, where public intervention in zoning practices was limited, the result was less public planning, public building, and public ownership.
Hirt reveals how US land-use practices have historically promoted the preservation of property values, spatial separation (and eventually segregation) where function follows form, and the creation of unadulterated “pure” residential areas (once countryside family “cottages” that now take the shape of suburban single-family homes with private yards). Homeownership, she writes, became an outlet for producing a civic-minded citizenry that would produce ideal democratic practice. Perhaps unintended, another result was creating a “nation of homezoners” fixated on preserving their property values. This has created a culture opposed to urban development and increasing inaccessibility for aspiring homeowners.
Hirt’s striking analysis reveals the unique moral topography of American land-use practices, premised on many assumptions (e.g., separate land uses would make society safer by lowering crime and reducing traffic accidents while promoting better communities and a better nation) that turned out to be fallacious. “The moral of the story is that zoning does not seem to perform according to the exploit theories it was based on,” she writes. While not going as far as to propose solutions to these current conditions, Hirt encourages policymakers to break their policy inertia and reject the assumptions which make US land-use policies sui generis to their global counterparts.
Hirt reveals how US land-use practices have historically promoted the preservation of property values, spatial separation (and eventually segregation) where function follows form, and the creation of unadulterated “pure” residential areas (once countryside family “cottages” that now take the shape of suburban single-family homes with private yards). Homeownership, she writes, became an outlet for producing a civic-minded citizenry that would produce ideal democratic practice. Perhaps unintended, another result was creating a “nation of homezoners” fixated on preserving their property values. This has created a culture opposed to urban development and increasing inaccessibility for aspiring homeowners.
Hirt’s striking analysis reveals the unique moral topography of American land-use practices, premised on many assumptions (e.g., separate land uses would make society safer by lowering crime and reducing traffic accidents while promoting better communities and a better nation) that turned out to be fallacious. “The moral of the story is that zoning does not seem to perform according to the exploit theories it was based on,” she writes. While not going as far as to propose solutions to these current conditions, Hirt encourages policymakers to break their policy inertia and reject the assumptions which make US land-use policies sui generis to their global counterparts.
February 18, 2023
why is this not a required reading for urban planners?? hmmm
February 18, 2015
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 rather than 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 America was still primarily a rural country at the dawn of zoning, and because its cities were new and ugly.
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 rather than 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 America was still primarily a rural country at the dawn of zoning, and because its cities were new and ugly.
August 4, 2018
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.
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.
January 7, 2018
This is interesting, and the conclusion is really well done, but there's no reason for it to be nearly as long as it is for a non-academic audience. If there was an hour-and-a-half version of this I could give to people to read I would absolutely do it.
September 13, 2019
I believe this book, unexpectedly, will be one that I think about and revisit for years. In fact, I don't think I will be able to walk around any city in the U.S. or in the world without now thinking about zoning and how its construction has framed our lives in fundamental ways.
The book is academic yet captivating not because of the writing style rather the content. The U.S. does not fit the typology of other developed countries' zoning laws. Instead, the U.S. has diverged into its strict, municipal zoning in three key ways:
1) U.S. zoning laws have deliberately limited the powers of municipal officials, giving them little discretion in decision-making
2) U.S. zoning laws are a paradox in that they are strict in a country that values individualism, but this occurs because they serve to protect property rights and benefit the American tradition of economic individualism
3) US. zoning laws work to create private spaces that promote traditional spatial individualism; The American Dream is the detached single-family house!!
Particularly, I will keep thinking over the American Dream -- a single-family house, with a lawn, privacy, and in a neighborhood of similar houses. Is that necessary, beneficial? How does that contribute to the affordable housing crises in cities and more broadly?
Certainly that has been the American Dream, I, an immigrant, have wanted.
The book is academic yet captivating not because of the writing style rather the content. The U.S. does not fit the typology of other developed countries' zoning laws. Instead, the U.S. has diverged into its strict, municipal zoning in three key ways:
1) U.S. zoning laws have deliberately limited the powers of municipal officials, giving them little discretion in decision-making
2) U.S. zoning laws are a paradox in that they are strict in a country that values individualism, but this occurs because they serve to protect property rights and benefit the American tradition of economic individualism
3) US. zoning laws work to create private spaces that promote traditional spatial individualism; The American Dream is the detached single-family house!!
Particularly, I will keep thinking over the American Dream -- a single-family house, with a lawn, privacy, and in a neighborhood of similar houses. Is that necessary, beneficial? How does that contribute to the affordable housing crises in cities and more broadly?
Certainly that has been the American Dream, I, an immigrant, have wanted.
May 28, 2017
Really great historical/comparative overview of zoning laws. It's an easy and lucid read that makes its points concisely and well.
I really dug this as an introduction into how the US got its weird zoning laws, what those laws are supposed to do, and what alternatives are out there. If you're scratching at this issue too, for whatever political or professional or pasttime purposes, you should read it too.
I really dug this as an introduction into how the US got its weird zoning laws, what those laws are supposed to do, and what alternatives are out there. If you're scratching at this issue too, for whatever political or professional or pasttime purposes, you should read it too.
April 6, 2022
America has the must unique zoning codes. There is no country with more and bigger single family homes. It’s remarkable. Hirt finds every reason imaginable for this- she thanks Thoreau and even goes to legitimate environmental concerns, but overall NIMBYism wasn’t always bad. It just made it reaaaaalllly easy to segregate neighborhoods and cause today’s problem- that property value is the DEFINING political force. So broad, hard to get into any one topic though
April 7, 2019
This book was a little bit of a slog for me. It is about how the zoning of Freedom-Loving Americans is so much stricter than the zoning of places in Europe. Why do single-family homes get their own zoning designation in the US? What are other ways that zoning could be done? Since I was not familiar with the topic, I learned a lot of new things from this book.
February 4, 2021
I was actually pretty happy with this book, though everyone else in my book club seems to have hated it. I thought it was fairly interesting as an introductory source on how differently land-use regulation works in Europe, but I do have to admit that the history section is not very well done, and the author--a European--really doesn't seem to grasp or want to talk about the significance of race.
March 10, 2022
Hirt provides research on the global history of zoning, particularly focusing on how the United States' reverence of single-family residential districts came to be.
3.5 Stars - Good book on the topic, but you can get the gist of everything in the introductory chapter
3.5 Stars - Good book on the topic, but you can get the gist of everything in the introductory chapter
July 10, 2018
Great read breaks down the origins of zoning and its implications for today.
October 1, 2020
Not too much to say about this other than it’s a fantastic read on comparative zoning policies. I will say that this could be pretty dense for those without previous knowledge of zoning laws/systems.
July 12, 2023
A bit academic but overall really helpful for folks who are trying to untie the stubborn knot of land use and housing affordability in the US.
Want to read
October 19, 2023recommended by Strong Towns author
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 6, 2025
Pretty good overview of zoning with good international examples. She could stand to go off a little more
December 29, 2020
The thesis of the book is important and well-supported, but it’s a slog to read.
December 29, 2015
A very worthwhile book. It is an attempt to demonstrate and explain the features of modern zoning codes (and cities) that are almost unique to the United States: the very broad use of exclusively residential zones and exclusively single-family house zones. It combines an extended history of zoning, both internationally and in America, with a comparative study of modern zoning codes and legal regimes surrounding new construction in several countries, most notably England and Germany.
The book is fascinating overall, and highly recommended to any students of cities and/or American history. It is richly detailed and sourced. The perspective is that of an urban planning student from Bulgaria who moved to the US for career reasons and was baffled by the apparent contradictions between the narrative of American individualism and freedom and the very restrictive codes surrounding the built environments in which they lived (which is baffling to this native US citizen as well).
There are many hypotheses that attempt to explain American zoning codes. To name a few: the availability of plenty of cheap land in the US, the predominance of local as opposed to national control over planning and development, the protection of private property values, etc.
However, Hirt feels that these arguments are insufficiently unique to explain the genuine uniqueness of American zoning. The principal thesis of the book is that they are largely the result of a strong cultural undercurrent of agrarian and "frontier" values in the US. As a result, the single-family house on a generous plot was seen as the morally correct dwelling arrangement, and our zoning and legal codes responded to that desire.
The apparent contradiction described above results from the explosion of US cities in the 19th century, and the resulting collision between our preferences for different sorts of "freedoms": political freedom (in particular the right to use private property without governmental interference) and what she calls "spatial freedom," which is something like the desire to claim, explore, and patrol the boundaries of a sizable piece of land. It's not exactly a spoiler to observe that spatial freedom won this rhetorical battle. However, political freedom was appeased in that the new legal structures were simple, scientific, rules-based systems that would treat each property the same and give each property owner the right to development without asking permission within the constraints of the rules, or were advertised as such anyway. And "economic" freedom was appealed to by the universal emphasis on stabilizing and increasing property values.
I did feel that the international comparisons beyond those to Germany and England were a bit overpromised and underdelivered. The sections on each of the other nations discussed (France, Russia, Sweden, Australia, Canada, Japan) amount to capsule histories of a page or two and are not the subject of extended comparisons throughout the rest of the book.
The book is fascinating overall, and highly recommended to any students of cities and/or American history. It is richly detailed and sourced. The perspective is that of an urban planning student from Bulgaria who moved to the US for career reasons and was baffled by the apparent contradictions between the narrative of American individualism and freedom and the very restrictive codes surrounding the built environments in which they lived (which is baffling to this native US citizen as well).
There are many hypotheses that attempt to explain American zoning codes. To name a few: the availability of plenty of cheap land in the US, the predominance of local as opposed to national control over planning and development, the protection of private property values, etc.
However, Hirt feels that these arguments are insufficiently unique to explain the genuine uniqueness of American zoning. The principal thesis of the book is that they are largely the result of a strong cultural undercurrent of agrarian and "frontier" values in the US. As a result, the single-family house on a generous plot was seen as the morally correct dwelling arrangement, and our zoning and legal codes responded to that desire.
The apparent contradiction described above results from the explosion of US cities in the 19th century, and the resulting collision between our preferences for different sorts of "freedoms": political freedom (in particular the right to use private property without governmental interference) and what she calls "spatial freedom," which is something like the desire to claim, explore, and patrol the boundaries of a sizable piece of land. It's not exactly a spoiler to observe that spatial freedom won this rhetorical battle. However, political freedom was appeased in that the new legal structures were simple, scientific, rules-based systems that would treat each property the same and give each property owner the right to development without asking permission within the constraints of the rules, or were advertised as such anyway. And "economic" freedom was appealed to by the universal emphasis on stabilizing and increasing property values.
I did feel that the international comparisons beyond those to Germany and England were a bit overpromised and underdelivered. The sections on each of the other nations discussed (France, Russia, Sweden, Australia, Canada, Japan) amount to capsule histories of a page or two and are not the subject of extended comparisons throughout the rest of the book.
May 5, 2015
Suited more to someone that has little knowledge of zoning. To say I didn't learn anything would be a lie, but big points in the book were still well-known to me before reading them.
September 9, 2015
Good news, American Land Use/Zoning is uniquely awful in the world.
July 30, 2016
This is a very brief book, but makes for good background on understanding U.S. zoning in an international (though mostly European) context.
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