Cities could easily dezone. Most areas have only had zoning for 60 to 80 years, prior to that there was just fire & building code constraining you. What was added by zoning was height restrictions, parking minimums, building type eg. single family detached, and lot/building size minimums.
The value that zoning provides is to segregate and disenfranchise the bulk of the populace, while spreading them out during the Cold War so as to make the US more resilient towards bombings supposedly. This is the same culture that thought sidewalks were bad.
I dunno- Houston is notorious for its lack of zoning, yet it still grew the same sprawling manner. The fact is most of our cities did most of their growth after WWII. A baby boom, affordable automobiles, the interstate highway system, advertising, and FHA subsidies made mass suburban developments like Levittown profitable and desirable.
>Matthew Festa [is] a land use professor in Houston...
>For all that’s been made of Houston’s infamous lack of zoning, Festa said it increasingly seems that reputation isn’t deserved or even accurate.
>“We do have a lot of land-use regulations,” Festa said. “We still have a lot of stuff that looks and smells like zoning.”
>To be more precise, Houston doesn’t exactly have official zoning. But it has what Festa calls “de facto zoning,” which closely resembles the real thing. “We’ve got a lot of regulations that in other cities would be in the zoning code,” Festa said. “When we use it here, we just don’t use the ‘z’ word.”
The value that zoning provides is to segregate and disenfranchise the bulk of the populace, while spreading them out during the Cold War so as to make the US more resilient towards bombings supposedly. This is the same culture that thought sidewalks were bad.