Is lack of zoning the key to this city?

For many years, Houston has been Exhibit A for people looking for evidence that cutting awayland-use red tape leads to inclusivity and broad-based economic growth. The truth seems self-evident: The one place with no comprehensive development plan also has some of the lowest rents of any major city.

Urban libertarian Houston boosters have been particularly active in recent weeks, even reaching the pages of the New York Times op-ed page witha column by David Brooks, who praised the city’s “easy, hodgepodge housing construction” and the fact that it’s “less regulated, so it’s easier to start a business.” A piece at Market Urbanism, a website devoted to laissezfaire municipal governance, credited the city’s “handsoff approach” with allowing the city to keep upwith shifting demands.

Ofcourse, it’s true that Houston has grown massive ly in the past several years, due largely, but not entirely, to an energy boom that created hundreds of thousands of well-paid jobs. If the city had more restrictive zoning codes, it would have taken longer and cost more to build enough housing to accommodate them. Who lee-books have been written about the harm that NIMBY ism, both codified and informal, has wreaked upon American cities.

But it’s also important to remember one very important thing about the geography of affordable cities: They tend to be muchless dense already. Plotting median rents (as collected by Zillow) against the number of people per square mile shows a pretty strong correlation between the two.

Sure, there’s still plenty of room to add housing in places like New York and San Francisco, as the Washington Post’ s Emily Badger has illustrated. But building in already-dense places is inherently harder than places like Houston that still have big unbuilt lots all over downtown. Small parcels have to be consolidated, construction is tricky, neighbors have to be accommodated. So even if the city rubber-stamped developers’ permit applications, the resulting apartment buildings would be moreexpensive.

And of course, Houston has paid another price for its unwillingness to tell people whereto build, as recent columns in City Observatory and Next City have observed: Out-of-control floods and scatter shot transportation, which have cost billions through flood rehab and productivity-killing traffic jams. Perhaps Houston might have benefited from stronger guidelines in years past to shape a more sustainable present.

So before saying that zoning is good or zoning is bad, consider that some zoning is good and other zoning is bad, at least from the standpoint of creating an accessible and dynamic city.

And above all, don’t ignore the role that the quantity of land available in a city plays in how much it costs to live in it.