Julie Smith recently wrote a piece for Granite Grok about my white paper for AIER entitled “Unbundling Zoning.” She badly misinterpreted the paper, made false accusations, and even got the main thesis exactly backwards. Here’s the proof.
Smith: “Sorens calls zoning useless, unjust, and irrational and explains why.”
FALSE. These are the claims I’m responding to, not my own claims. I’ll quote from the paper since Smith notably did not: “Arguments against zoning fall into three major buckets: zoning is useless, zoning is unjust, and zoning is irrational. Let’s take each of these arguments in turn before considering newer defenses of zoning and then assessing the strength of the cases for and against zoning.”
Smith: “He later acknowledges most of the reasons why people are against abolishing it [zoning], though he’s seemingly unconcerned about disastrous unintended consequences, and so are his passionate fans.”
FALSE. The main thesis of the paper is that we should reform, not abolish zoning: “I make the case here that the harms of zoning are significant, and that if zoning had never been invented, superior alternatives could have been adopted. But since zoning already exists, abolishing it could disrupt many property owners’ expectations. Instead, I’ll argue for splitting up zoning’s different functions and setting up processes to reduce its spatial coverage- in favor of superior land-use governance regimes.”
Smith: “In the conclusion, Page 16 for those wanting to skip ahead, he says the insidious and sinister part out loud, and it’s very frightening, akin to a page out of the Agenda 21/2030 playbook. He doesn’t say SMART CITY or 15 MINUTE CITY, but he uses the word SPRAWL more than once, implying that it’s a reason for his proposal.”
FALSE. I say nothing at all about “sprawl” in the Conclusion, and I have nothing kind to say about “15-minute cities,” which are just another kind of central planning. The only mention of “sprawl” in the entire paper is in a reference to something zoning abolitionists do not like about Houston. (And I’m not a zoning abolitionist.)
Smith: “Sorens is clearly embracing the 15-minute or smart city model. He even mentions bikes.”
FALSE. I say nothing about bikes or bicycles anywhere in the paper! Seriously, did she even read the paper I wrote?
Smith: “And perhaps the most frightening language at the end of Sorens’s opus is the flavor of Hillary’s famous words, ‘by any means necessary.’”
FALSE. I use no words of that kind anywhere in the paper. Here’s what I say in the conclusion:
“Rather than abolishing zoning, we can talk about ways of letting small communities opt out of zoning. States can provide a mechanism for neighborhoods to upzone by majority vote. They can also let landowners in a sufficiently large, contiguous area opt out of local zoning, by unanimous consent and with various guarantees against the externalization of costs onto neighbors.
“It does not pay to be complacent. Gray is probably right that zoning could loom even larger as a cause of national economic and social distress in the coming years, as land suitable for large-lot, detached, single-family houses close to jobs starts to run out even in the formerly affordable Sunbelt. During the pandemic, the whole country saw a taste of what buyers and renters in West Coast and Northeastern housing markets have experienced for a decade or more. We can’t let a national housing shortage become the new normal. That means we’re going to have to rethink how zoning works in America.”
Pretty reasonable, huh?
Why does Smith completely misrepresent my paper? Perhaps because she opposes all zoning reform, including some bills currently under discussion in the General Court. But if you’re not a socialist, you have to admit that we need some guardrails on zoning. After all, zoning, taken to the extreme, can become pure socialism.
Don’t believe me? Well, what do you call a system in which the government can take your property any time it wants, without compensation? Extreme zoning can do just this.
Two years ago, I met a family in my town (Amherst) who bought an oversized lot. They wanted to subdivide it when they retired and put a house on the second lot. Selling that house would be a big chunk of their retirement nest egg.
The planning board put a zoning amendment on the ballot that would have increased the minimum lot size on their lot so that they could no longer subdivide it. They backed it unanimously, but a group of us got together, campaigned hard, and narrowly defeated it on election day. Had we not done so, the town would have taken away a substantial portion of this family’s land value, without any compensation whatsoever.
Recently, I heard a story from Matt Mayberry about the town of Barrington. They did the same thing when a family wanted to sell their 200-acre farm, jacking up the minimum lot size so that they couldn’t build nearly as many homes on it. This story doesn’t have such a happy ending: the zoning amendment passed, and the family lost more than $1 million on their previously agreed sale price.
These zoning abuses are government theft, pure and simple. It’s even worse than eminent domain. If the town takes the title to your land, they at least have to compensate you. But if they simply regulate your land, they can take its value away without having to pay you.
The free market is begging to solve New Hampshire’s housing crunch, at a cost of zero taxpayer dollars. All we have to do is protect private property rights from municipal tyranny. It’s sad that the supporters of municipal tyranny feel justified in flinging false accusations at those of us who’ve maintained our principled defense of private property rights and free markets, but I’m not surprised. Those of us who advocate reform to extreme zoning bring data, evidence, and logic to the case, but those on the other side have so far preferred to wallow in the gutter rather than address the substance of what we reformers are trying to achieve.
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