Revisiting an age-old issue: How good is zoning?
By R.C. Hoiles | December 26, 2025
Since this column has been opposed to any form of government interference with human initiative such as city and county zoning, an editorial in a weekly publication devoted to news and developments of significance to the real estate profession and allied interests is very interesting. The publication is named Headlines.
In the September issue under the heading, “How Good Is Zoning,” Herb Nelson, the chief editorial writer, has some significant confessions to make. Here are some of the things he said:
We helped think up the idea of city zoning ordinances 30 years ago. Their purpose was to protect good residence neighborhoods from trade uses that would destroy values. Apparently we also helped to give the planners and bureaucrats a grand chance to show how they could think everything out for future generations for everybody who lives in a city. Zoning has become so detailed and extreme in many cities that it does much more harm than good.
I would like to know one place in all history where it has not done more harm than good. It has done more harm because it is a denial of human initiative. As one bishop said of England, “I would rather have a free England than a sober England,” and any good American would rather have a free America than a materially planned America. All zoning is pure materialism. It is a denial of human rights.
Nelson continues as follows:
The more zoning the cities do, the worse they look. Zoning has become in many communities a major cause of blight, of unused privately-owned land that grows up to weeds, and of a continuing flight from the city. While a fourth of the privately-owned land in most of our cities lies unused, the building goes on apace outside of the city where the municipal zoners do not rule.
But the zoners are reaching outside of the city. They are even grabbing for county zoning. Ambitious men, men who want to domineer and rule the lives of other people get on these planning boards. Anything to give them unearned power. So we are not only facing great damage by city planning, but county, state and national planning as well. City planning is exactly the same as New Deal planning for the federal bureaucrats.
Nelson continues:
Zoning as practiced by most cities is an attempt to freeze a pattern of community life by prescribing land used for private owners in great detail. Our swiftly moving modern life, with changing habits, cannot be squeezed into this pre-conceived mold.
In some cities like Los Angeles you now have to have so much land to build an apartment that multiple dwellings can hardly be built where they are most needed.
Then there is the bright idea that by law apartment owners must also provide parking for automobiles. Washington has such an ordinance. This means, of course, that transportation costs are being saddled onto housing and tend to make multiple housing too dear for the average renter.
Some cities have from 15 to 20 different land classifications into which business and commerce are somehow to be fitted. Some of the ordinances run into hundreds of pages in describing in minute detail just how everybody has to build and what for. Thousands of property owners give up in despair when they try to understand this jumble of regulations and when they realize how hopeless it is to try to comply with all the rules.
Los Angeles apparently wants to go into the farming business too as part of its planning. A part of the city has been laid out in five-acre tracts where the joyous owner of the one house permitted on the tract is supposed to become the precursor of a new breed—the city dweller who raises his own food.
The National Association of Real Estate Boards has always supported sound city planning and national zoning.
When we see, however, that the disorder in our cities is increasing yearly in spite of all the rules that the planners can think up, isn’t it time that we stopped, looked, and did a little thinking? Isn’t it time that a committee of NAREB from 50 of our major cities sat down and considered fully whether we haven’t gotten off the track?
They cannot revise planning — they haven’t gotten off the track as they claim — they should abandon it altogether. It is no more possible to wisely plan by the state our economic development than it is to wisely plan rape or to make black white. The only solution for the planning of chaos is to repeal it and let people grow up like Topsy grew up.
We already have laws which prevent one man from directly molesting another. So we need no planners to stop a man from directly injuring another. What the zoners believe is that there is some possible way they can have benefits from their neighbors’ wise development without indirectly suffering the losses from their neighbors errors in judgment. It cannot be done.
This column is reprinted with permission from The Orange County Register.
