Pennslyvania Geographer
Arbitrary Lines is a valuable contribution to the zoning literature and expands on ongoing debates and dialogues on zoning reform.…. Gray’s vibrant discussion of local examples, disputes, and misinterpretations about zoning makes it a wonderful read and leaves the reader with lingering thoughts on potential solutions.”
Journal of the American Planning Association
"Arbitrary Lines is a comprehensive, well-grounded, and logically organized critique of the rigid and indeed arbitrary way in which Euclidean zoning structures our communities and shapes our lives. Elegantly written, concise, and witty, Gray’s book is a useful introduction to zoning’s history and current state...If you live outside the world of professional architects, landscape architects, urban designers, and planners and yet you wonder why our cities are built the way they are and if, further, you have time to read one book on the subject, Arbitrary Lines, with its engaging writing style, may well top your list."
Slow Boring - Matt Yglesias
"Excellent new book."
Planetizen
"The major purpose of Nolan Gray's new book, Arbitrary Lines, is to show that by limiting housing construction, zoning increases rents by limiting housing supply, accelerates suburban sprawl by reducing density and pricing Americans out of walkable areas, and slows economic growth by making it expensive for Americans to move to prosperous areas. On each count, Gray makes a persuasive (to me) case."
Journal of Urban Affairs
If I could get all members of my own city council to read one thing, it would be the chapters of Arbitrary Lines that convey vital messages about zoning’s failures and the potential for its reform.”
Emily Hamilton
"In Arbitrary Lines, Gray provides a compelling case against the parochial zoning rules that have shaped Americans' lives, from our homes to our budgets to the work opportunities available to us. While the costs of zoning become clearer each year, few have questioned the paradigm of local policymakers determining the quantity and type of building that will be permitted on the private land in their jurisdictions. Gray steps in with a new way of thinking about urban land use and a road map for a future unconstrained by zoning."
Common Edge
"A provocation and a prescriptive treatise."
Housing and Society
Nolan Gray’s Arbitrary Lines could not have arrived at a better time, quenching the thirst of the American public’s desire to know more about zoning. It is an accessible introductory text for anyone who wants to understand zoning enough to have informed conversations about its adverse impacts on racial equity, the environment, housing affordability, and economic growth. Undoubtedly, the book has further mainstreamed zoning not just in policy debates but also in casual conversations.”
Adam Millsap
Overall, Gray’s book is an excellent addition to the literature on housing and land-use regulations.”
Orange County Register
"Powerfully argued book."
Donald Shoup
"Nolan Gray has the insights of Jane Jacobs and the prose style of Mark Twain. In his aptly-titled new book, Arbitrary Lines, Gray argues that zoning in America is a disease masquerading as a cure. He also proposes a post-zoning style of planning for fair, sustainable, and livable cities."
American Conservative
"Arbitrary Lines is at once a primer and a manifesto, a highly readable introduction to zoning’s history and harms as well as a bracing call for a post-zoning city."
Alain Bertaud
In Arbitrary Lines, Nolan Gray wrote a compelling argument for urgently reforming the ‘stodgy rulebook’ that distorts the shape and decreases the welfare of American cities. In addition to his devastating critique of the status quo, Nolan suggests a practical path that would allow urban communities to get out of their current zoning straightjacket. This book is a must-read for all of us who are interested in more innovative and affordable cities.
Resilience
If you are interested in affordable housing, housing equity, environmental justice, reduction of carbon emissions, adequate public transit, or streets that are safe for walking and cycling, Arbitrary Lines is an excellent resource in understanding how American cities got the way they are and how they might be changed for the better.”
Kirkus Reviews
2022-03-29
A study of zoning as an instrument of inequality—and deliberately so.
Former New York City planning official Gray examines the “arbitrary lines” that mark zoning maps. In most of the country’s major cities, he notes, the least desired sort of construction is apartment buildings, since these typically serve poorer communities, often made up of immigrants or ethnic minorities. Because deed covenants are no longer politically acceptable, zoning authorities hide behind “a dizzying array of confusing and pseudoscientific rules” that touch on such things as setbacks, floor area ratios, room size, and the like. So it has always been: Gray observes that the first discernible zoning laws were meant to impede Eastern European Jews from settling along New York’s Fifth Avenue. Modern zoning laws block not just the movements of people of color and of low income; they also stunt growth and innovation. Exclusionary rules make cities, which should be engines of innovation, unaffordable while immiserating the people who live there. Add to that the extraordinary requirements of many zoning laws about housing density and the location of shopping centers, and modern zoning condemns suburbanites to life in their cars. Examining the case of the zoning-free city of Houston, Gray convincingly presses the argument for rethinking and largely abandoning zoning laws as such, writing that these laws usually have only to do with “uses and densities on private land—nothing more, nothing less,” and are largely proscriptive and not prescriptive. Instead, the author urges that precedence be given to planning, which is a different thing entirely, and a planning system that allows for the interlayering of different kinds of housing and other properties that will help make housing more affordable and available and more ecologically sustainable—“green downtown apartments,” say, as opposed to “brown detached homes out on the edge of town.”
A welcome manifesto for rethought urban spaces and their outliers, bringing social justice into the discussion.
