Y’all Means Sprawl in the Wild West
How Lawless Zoning Made Texas America’s Last Housing Frontier
Picture the scene: two men stand twenty paces apart on opposite ends of a dusty road. The sun-bleached facades of the town saloon, bank, and general store stand like sentinels. The high noon sun glints off of belt buckles and boot spurs; hands hover near holsters. A crow caws, a tumbleweed rolls by. At last, the unlikely hero utters those fateful words: “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us.” In a flash, six-shooters are drawn, bullets fired, and a body falls to the ground.
So dies housing in America’s zoning Wild West.
Of course, as the vignette illustrates, the Wild West of zoning is not out in the undeveloped countryside but right in town. There it functions not as a system of law, but as a regime of lawlessness, one in which neighborhood vigilantes and overzealous officials can shoot down new housing for any reason or no reason at all.
As a member of Austin’s Zoning & Platting Commission and as a housing advocate, I’ve seen firsthand how the complexity, discretion, and arbitrariness of the “system” stifles development. Unless you’re building a single-family home, almost nothing can be built by right—that is, without securing special permission.
gets to the heart of the problem:[A]mid all of the talk in national politics about the rule of law, we have gotten far too used to lawlessness at the local level, with regard to zoning and development. We govern something as basic as housing and development with a system in which the law as written does not in reality indicate what is permitted.
Addison explains that “the code is not written with the expectation that it will be followed.” Instead, it’s “written to induce negotiations or bargaining with developers, or to extract concessions.” Such a system does not reflect the objective rule of law but the capricious rule of men.
Modern zoning is a series of arbitrary lines,1 a patchwork of individual plots that bear no relation to one another. Most of the cases we hear on the commission are rezoning applications, reflecting the reality that the underlying zoning doesn’t work for anything beyond single-family homes. The majority of these cases are supported by city planning staff—a tacit admission that our approach to zoning is fundamentally broken.
In Texas, the law requires that any rezoning must endure an approval process that includes at least two public hearings. Further, as I explained in “The Tyrant’s Veto,” 20% of nearby property owners can trigger a “valid petition,” requiring a supermajority of City Council to approve a rezoning. Zoning law turns every neighbor into a deputy and every rezoning case into a potential standoff, leading to drawn-out, bad-faith negotiations intended to wear down developers and undermine project finances, all leading to a showdown at City Hall. Even with a pro-housing supermajority on Austin City Council, the process remains punishing—lengthy, expensive, and undemocratic.
What looks like law is really discretion disguised as process—where personal preference overrides any pretense of objectivity.
Outside of zoning-free Houston, arbitrary zoning regimes are the norm in Texas and much of the rest of America. Yet by making certain types of development illegal—especially anything that isn’t detached, single-family housing—zoning effectively creates outlaws. Unsurprisingly, development goes to where it isn’t outlawed.
And that means much of it goes to the Wild West of undeveloped Texas.
Ironically, the lawlessness of local zoning regimes pushes growth into places where there is very little law, process, or procedure to block it. When cities make growth too hard, it doesn’t stop—it just gets pushed to the path of least resistance.
The result is Texas sprawl: housing abundance without intention.
Writing in The New York Times Magazine last week, Conor Dougherty argued that sprawl is necessary to address the national housing shortage. While Dougherty acknowledges that some cities are making progress by easing zoning rules, most haven’t—and even those that have remain mired in delays and procedure. There are other roadblocks: “cities are difficult and expensive places to build because they lack open land.” The same is true of the established suburbs that ring most cities. As he concludes:
Adding density to already-bustling places is crucial for keeping up with demand and preventing the housing crisis from getting worse. It will not, however, add the millions of new units America needs. The only way to do that is to move out—in other words, to sprawl.
Much of the urbanist discourse condemned Dougherty’s premise. As transportation advocate Beth Osborne deadpanned, “the only way to fix the housing crisis is to build the wrong housing where people don’t want it so that their overall expenses go up, traffic gets worse and quality of life goes down.”
For his part, Dougherty acknowledges that sprawl, especially as it is built today, is far from perfect. These communities are car-dependent and congested, while many lack infrastructure like schools and hospitals needed to support population growth. Princeton, Texas—the nation’s third-fastest-growing city, forty miles north of Dallas—has grown from 10,000 to 50,000 residents in a dozen years, “overwhelming the roads, the sewers and the local Police Department.” The city has imposed a moratorium on new housing development to catch up on infrastructure. Meanwhile, sprawl has environmental implications, eating up agricultural land and open space, causing habitat destruction and increasing pollution. But the worst part, perhaps, is that these places often lack a sense of community and identity, with few cultural, recreational, or social amenities.
As the mayor of Princeton put it, “You ask anybody what they love about Princeton, and it’s simply just the affordability. We need to be more than that.”
It’s not that everybody hates density—they hate unaffordability.
Cities have always expanded outward, even as they expanded upward through densification. Initially, streetcars and other early transit allowed cities to grow in a more orderly, urban way—lower density neighborhoods than downtown, but following orderly patterns oriented to transit. Most of these early suburbs were annexed by their central cities. As zoning took hold nationally, suburbs resisted annexation and imposed exclusionary rules. With the rise of the automobile, suburban growth took on its modern, non-urban form—quite unlike the walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods of yore. And when those suburbs became “full,” the growth had nowhere to go but farther out. Human nature abhors a vacuum—and zoning ensures it gets filled with cul-de-sacs and parking lots.
When I interviewed Gabe Metcalf, chief planner of the California Forever new city project outside San Francisco, he said:
If we were to stop greenfield development, our housing shortage—and in California, our housing catastrophe—would be much, much worse than it already is. It is simply not a serious housing proposal to imagine we could do what needs doing without greenfield development.
So while Metcalf agrees with Dougherty in part, California Forever is an attempt to do greenfield development better than it’s typically done, following time-honored urbanist principles: a walkable street grid, mixed-use development, a variety of housing types, and transit connectivity—the opposite of the exurban sprawl Dougherty describes. Of course, California Forever has attracted its fair share of detractors, too. For some, exurban expansion is an evil to be stopped, regardless of its urbanist aspirations.2
Which is a recipe for housing-starved California and New York to continue exporting people to development-friendly states like Texas. The reality is that even cities well ahead of reform are not capable of growing fast enough within city limits to accommodate all of the people who would like to live there. We need both greenfield and infill development to address the housing shortage. I only wish someone were building a “Texas Forever.”
Still, the limits of infill development might be overstated. Many of our central cities are filled with parking garages and lots, strip malls, and other underutilized property that could be turned into housing. The Parking Reform Network estimates, for instance, that 26% of central Atlanta and 27% of downtown Dallas are devoted to off-street parking. Meanwhile, in the aptly titled “Reopening the Frontier,”
notes that the federal government owns a staggering 10,000 acres of undeveloped land within New York City, and nearly 1,500 acres within San Francisco, all of which could be used to develop thousands of new homes. It’s not a shortage of land that’s the problem in most cities. The land is there. The demand is there. What’s missing is permission.If this city ain’t big enough for all of us, it’s not because we ran out of room—it’s because we ran out of vision, neighborliness, and commonsense. With laws like the valid petition—and a civic culture more invested in procedure than outcomes—we’ve allowed a tyrannical minority to weaponize land use and block housing in high-opportunity neighborhoods across America. Soulless sprawl was the inevitable result, the price society has paid for a century of exclusionary, arbitrary zoning regimes.
Ultimately, it’s zoning that has American cities shooting themselves in the foot.
What do y’all think?
A really big part of the story here is that under Texas law, counties are prohibited from zoning their unincorporated areas. I don't actually know if that is completely unique to TX or if it exists in other states (if it did it would probably be other Southern states)--anyone on here know?--but it is definitely unusual within the US. For that reason, the land use scholars Robert Puentes and Rolf Pendall, years ago, referred to the land use regime that we have here as "Wild Wild Texas"--all of TX (not just Houston) was in its own category.
In addition to a ton of subdivisions and RV parks and cement plants and so forth, that explains why Community First Village was able to be built in unincorporated Travis County. The neighbors didn't like it--but too bad! There was no legal mechanism they could invoke to stop it. The county's hands were tied--they had to approve it. I always correct people when they talk about "this amazing development for formerly homeless people in Austin"--no! The whole point is that it is not in Austin. It never in a million years would have gotten approved had it been inside of Austin, for all of the reasons Ryan says in this post.
I like the "abundance without intention" formulation. Anyone who's interested can find my recent thoughts on abundance (and its sidekick, scarcity) in yesterday's newsletter on The Practice of Community.
I am exhausted, however, by these shots at a slow-moving target. Its not the zoning, which is just a mirror of the story the community is telling itself. Where I live, the land-use regulations undergird everything that "Texas sprawl" is not, but they're adopted under similar legal authority.
You can't fix the zoning without changing the story first.