Arbitrary Lines Quotes

“If an American wants to live a greener life and scrap their car, why should zoning stand in the way?”
― M. Nolan Gray, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It

“this way, zoning simultaneously forces us to collectively subsidize driving while making walking, bicycling, and taking transit as uncomfortable as possible.”
― M. Nolan Gray, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It

“capping densities in precisely the places where many aspirational car-free commuters might like to live.21 If people want to live in a way that dramatically reduces the impact of their commute on the environment—and developers are eager to build this housing for them—why would we stop this?”
― M. Nolan Gray, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It

“Worse yet, zoning often thwarts transit where it already exists, squandering taxpayer investments in transit—by blocking potential riders—and forcing more Americans into auto-oriented developments. And it seems to do so against the wishes of many residents and employers. As urban planner Jonathan Levine observes, demand to locate in and adjacent to transit is quite high among many”
― M. Nolan Gray, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It

“density, zoning makes this shift away from the car difficult. The literature varies widely on this issue, but there is a reasonable consensus among transportation planners that a city needs densities of at least seven dwelling units per acre to support the absolute baseline of transit: a bus that stops every thirty minutes. To get more reliable service, like bus rapid transit or light-rail service, a city needs just over double those densities, or approximately fifteen units per acre.17 The standard detached single-family residential district—”
― M. Nolan Gray, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It

“All of this is to say, by reducing distances and increasing densities, cities substantially reduce our carbon footprint. And this”
― M. Nolan Gray, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It

“As Owen notes, the typical resident of Vermont—renowned for its commitment to environmentalist causes—consumes three and a half times as much gasoline per year as the typical resident of New York City.”
― M. Nolan Gray, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It

“Beyond economizing on land, cities also improve energy efficiency: living in a smaller townhouse or an apartment—a decision often made for urban residents by higher housing costs—can dramatically reduce electricity consumption. By one estimate, a household in a detached single-family house consumes three times as much energy as a household in an apartment.7 This difference mostly comes down to the cost of heating and cooling, which alone accounts for half of a household’s residential energy consumption”
― M. Nolan Gray, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It

“By building up, cities reduce the need to build out, which would normally mean building out onto meadows, forests, deserts, and wetlands. As hundreds of millions of people have poured into cities over the past”
― M. Nolan Gray, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It

“Pursuant to city regulations, slaughterhouses—an early zoning boogey-man—must remain 3,000 feet from the nearest residence; oil wells cannot be within 400 feet.19 Strip clubs and other adult-oriented businesses cannot be within 1,500 feet of a school or church; liquor stores and bars cannot be within 300 feet.”
― M. Nolan Gray, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It

“Even before zoning, differing locational needs help to nudge the most incompatible uses apart: • Industries need to be where land is cheap and transportation is accessible, and complaining neighbors are few and far between. • Large office and commercial centers thrive on the visibility and access afforded by major corridors and transit interchanges. • Residential developments are content to fill up the quiet side streets in between, along with inoffensive retail—think corner stores and cafes. Homeowners don’t want factories or malls showing up on their cul-de-sacs—and they can rest assured that those factories and malls don’t want to open up on their cul-de-sac either. As the legal scholar Bernard Siegan observed in his landmark study of Houston, the city achieves much of what we might consider to be desirable use segregation”
― M. Nolan Gray, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It

“Many of these municipalities exist purely to adopt zoning as a way to exclude certain less privileged groups and artificially keep densities low, hoarding lavishly funded public services for affluent residents.”
― M. Nolan Gray, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It

“In even the most restrictive Japanese residential zoning districts, apartments and single-family homes alike are allowed as-of-right, as are small corner stores and certain professional offices—that is to say, the casual use mixture that defined many US residential neighborhoods before the rise of zoning.”
― M. Nolan Gray, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It