No Kings, No Zoning

Land Use, Liberalism, and the Rule of Law

A couple months ago, protesters gathered across America in the tens of thousands to chant “No Kings!” They organized against creeping authoritarianism, executive overreach, encroachments on civil liberties, the exercise of arbitrary power, the flouting of the rule of law. The chants echoed the founding ethos of our country, when we declared ourselves independent not only from the despotic monarch of Great Britain, but from tyranny as such. The United States was the first country founded on the idea that it was not the state but the individual who was sovereign. In America, each person was the ruler of their own life, and their home their castle.

The hallmark of American liberalism—the very thing “No Kings” purports to uphold—is the rule of law. Yet when it comes to land use, we live in a regime based on the arbitrary preferences of other people—not of kings, but of neighborhood associations, zoning commissions, design review boards, historic preservation panels, and elected officials.

Modern land-use regimes invert the most basic principle of American law: that individuals are innocent until proven guilty, and that government must justify its use of force. In property development, the burden is reversed. In most cities, if you wish to build anything other than a single-family home, you are presumed to be a threat. And so you must ask permission. You must prove your project is worthy. You must accept the judgment of others about what shape, what height, what design is “best.” You are presumed guilty, and treated accordingly.

To secure a rezoning, cities exact fees, concessions, “community benefits,” and more as tribute. Even if a would-be builder meets all objective, codified requirements, officials—elected or otherwise—can still deny approval. In any other context, we would call this extortion. Under zoning codes, we call it discretionary review.

The net result is that development is slow and expensive—if it is allowed to happen at all. It is little wonder that the cities with the most complex zoning are those suffering the worst housing shortages.

And the reason is simple: zoning is not mere policy, it’s an exercise of state force. Compliance is mandatory: violating land-development codes can mean fines, injunctions, permit denials, even the seizure of property. So when we talk about “local control,” we are really talking about who gets to use the state’s coercive power—and against whom. This basic truth—land use is enforced through coercion—is often absent from the discussion.

Recent debates about local control and state preemption have focused on who should make land use decisions—neighbors, cities, states, the federal government. But that framing elides a more fundamental question: why should anyone—other than the property owner—have that power at all?

Under American liberalism, individual rights are protected by the government’s monopoly on force, which exists to remove violence from interpersonal relationships. That monopoly is legitimate only when it restrains actual harm: trespass, nuisance, violence, theft. In a free society, our dealings are voluntary—through trade, contract, persuasion, debate. The government steps in only when one party inflicts actual harm on another.

Viewed that way, government is not, as Barney Frank once quipped, “the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” It is the name we give to the things we do at the point of a gun. And zoning is exactly that: armed compulsion over how others may use their property.

When we debate about who gets to control land use decisions, what we’re really arguing about is who gets to hold the gun. Which means the deeper question isn’t who should control land use—it’s whether coercive control is legitimate at all. If coercion is only legitimate to prevent real harm, then land use must be restructured accordingly.

The answer is not more layers of local control, but fewer. The way to make land use just and predictable is to remove arbitrary discretion and make development as much “by-right” as possible. Fewer decisions made by bureaucrats, commissions, review boards, and councils. That doesn’t mean no rules—it means rules set up front, applied universally, and enforced without exception.

American law has long recognized that liberty is not a license to use one’s property in ways that harm others. Nuisance law draws the line where one person’s use of property inflicts tangible, demonstrable harm on another—pollution that fouls the air or waterways, runoff that floods a neighbor’s land, noise that makes sleep impossible. By contrast, modern zoning prohibits far more—like barring a duplex because it might “disrupt neighborhood character,” or blocking an apartment building because of who might live in it. These are not real harms. They are preferences elevated to the force of law—denying equal rights to property owners under the law.

Our towns and cities are stronger when we cultivate vibrant, engaged communities—but we have systematically weakened communities across America by investing neighbors, planners, and local leaders with arbitrary coercive power over private property, giving them the power to control what their neighbors can do. Because the law is on the side of the controllers, those who seek to impose their own preferences onto the property of others wield the power to coerce. The threat of force is the death knell of voluntary cooperation. What kind of conversation is possible when one party enters brandishing a gun? The possibility of dialogue disappears the moment coercion enters the room.

Coercion is a community killer.

So much of the discord in American society today is about control. But the achievement of our liberal order was to remove coercive control from those who would impose it unjustly, and place it in a structure that defends liberty and limits force, creating the conditions under which a free society can flourish. The more we try to control each other, the less harmonious our society will be—our descent into political tribalism reflects that baser instinct. Overcoming the urge to control others is the hallmark of civilization.

The unspoken contradiction at the heart of our approach to land use is that we reject autocracy in the public square but accept it on private property, replacing the crown with the public hearing and discretionary review. The purpose of American liberalism was to displace despotic monarchs, not to impose petty tyrants at the local level. Whether we call it preemption or reform, what our communities need is not more power to control others, but more people with self-control—citizens focused on getting their own houses in order before trying to rule someone else’s.

If we really mean “No Kings”—not just “no” to one man but “no” to arbitrary rule altogether—then we ought to strip authoritarianism from our local land use regimes and restore sovereignty where it belongs: to the individual, with no kings at any level.