The case for ending zoning and unleashing free market choice

The impulse to use state legislation to tweak local zoning ordinances to favor particular kinds of land use begs the larger question — whether the time has come not to tinker with local zoning for the policy interests of any moment, but to get rid of it altogether, unleashing economic growth by letting the free market determine what kind of development takes place where across Connecticut, and using free choice to achieve the very things sought to be achieved through the inefficient tool of zoning regulation.

Zoning ordinances limit what we can do with our real estate in each of our 169 cities and towns, where we can build, and what we can do with what we’ve built. However, if we just kept the state building and housing codes to guide what can be safely built and how, and standards of repair for our buildings, our own economic decisions on real estate could be made without the hidden cost and burden of local zoning, and with greater efficiency and equity resulting from the market itself guiding land use.

The town of Woodbridge has been a target of progressive efforts to put apartments and condominiums into a suburb of New Haven that, except for a modest area of mixed use commercial and residential property known as “The Flats,” is essentially zoned for farms or large lots with large homes. When New Haven’s Jewish Community Center built a Woodbridge campus similar to a large YMCA, the town’s zoning would not allow the construction of an outdoor pool if it was open to all members of the public, so its use is limited, even use by JCC members. Under local zoning, excess land at the JCC cannot be used for congregate housing for the elderly or other multifamily housing. The local government controls the use of that property through zoning, just as with any property in any town, and inefficiency is the rule.

Local zoning makes land use a government decision, distorting and discouraging investment and what can be built where. Marketplace decisions guide both profit and nonprofit investors to buy and build across Connecticut, and to use property, as they see fit.

Every property owner would get to decide the highest and best use of its own property without zoning. Real estate and economic development would boom across Connecticut because rational owners, banks and other stakeholders would be the guide, not the expensive, often economically irrational and political hurdle of zoning. Only the availability of capital in the marketplace would determine whether and what we would build, where we would build it and how we would use it.

Insiders or the influence of special interests in the state Capitol or town halls would no longer define land use. Investment would fund its expression in whatever kinds of housing or business construction would make sense across Connecticut — including the very multifamily affordable housing that progressives want to see outside our cities, or a local United Way agency like the JCC in Woodbridge opening its pool to underprivileged children from other towns. Real estate investment and construction would not only boom across our state, but development would come to Connecticut rather than other states, because rational investment motives and potential profit would now freely govern decisions.

Eliminating the expense of zoning compliance and its impact on the real estate marketplace could unleash a post-pandemic economic boom in a weary state, and the very public interests sought by the advocates of using zoning for housing equity could be achieved without regulation, simply through trusting stakeholders in real estate to follow their own self interest across Connecticut, and allowing the free market to work.

Mark A. Shiffrin, a New Haven attorney, regulated real estate, home improvement, and building trades as Connecticut’s Consumer Protection Commissioner. He can be reached at mark@markshiffrin.com.