Zoning—What Is It (and Why Should I Care)?
The other day, a friend told me she wanted to build an addition to her house. She didn’t think she could, though. A neighbor had told her that the town would not allow it because it would make the house’s footprint too big.
“What zoning district do you live in?” I asked.
She looked at me blankly. “What’s a zoning district?” she said.
Do you know what zoning district you live in? Do you know how many zoning districts we have in Swarthmore?
If not, you’re not alone.
When I first moved to Swarthmore, I didn’t know anything about zoning. It was only after my newly purchased garden shed was delivered on a flatbed truck that a next-door neighbor let me know you can’t put one right up against your property line.
A few years later, I started doing research for a novel revolving around a small-town real estate transaction. I went to the public library and asked if they had a copy of Swarthmore’s zoning code. They did.
The rest of that afternoon, I struggled with the code as though it were written in a language I’d taken in high school but never learned well. I sort of got it, but I knew I was missing a lot. Since then, I’ve read the code from start to finish (half an hour a day for a few weeks), taken a zoning administration class from the Pennsylvania Municipal Planning Education Institute, and served on the borough’s Zoning Hearing Board. For a non-professional, I understand zoning pretty well. I think it would be great if more people understood it, too.
Zoning is how the government puts limits on what you can do on your own land and what your neighbors can do on theirs. The limits on house size, fence height, etc. are different depending on what zoning district you live in.
Some History
Before America’s first modern zoning laws were enacted in the early 1900s, you could build anything you wanted on your property: a log cabin or a marble castle, a pork-processing facility or a textile factory. Whatever it was, your neighbors would have to live with it. Indeed, one of the main reasons local governments embraced zoning was to protect people from having to live in the literal shadows of giant industrial buildings. That benefit helped persuade freedom-loving property owners to accept some constraints on what they could and could not do on their own land.
The kind of zoning we (mostly) have in this country is known as “Euclidean Zoning”—which is confusing, because it makes you think it has something to do with geometry. It does not. It’s named for Euclid, Ohio, the first town to have its zoning ordinance upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. That was in 1926. The court affirmed that a town could divide itself into zones: one for houses, one for shops, one for factories, and so on.
From there, zones proliferated, each one with different rules. Big cities have dozens of them. Even a town as small as Swarthmore has nine.
Race, Class, and Gender
In addition to protecting people from living near paint factories or commercial behemoths, there was another reason zoning codes were adopted: to exclude racial minorities from places White people lived, and to keep poor people out of wealthy neighborhoods. Likely as a way to exclude Chinese people, one early Los Angeles zoning law prohibited laundries and washhouses in certain neighborhoods. Soon after, cities like Baltimore, New Orleans, and Oklahoma City passed laws specifying which parts of the city people of different races could live in.
When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-based zoning in 1918, exclusion found different avenues, like deed covenants and redlining. In Swarthmore in the early decades of the 20th century, an informal agreement among White property owners prevented Blacks from moving beyond a few unpaved streets south of Yale Avenue, and as late as 1958 (as Sue Edwards has documented), the Swarthmore Friends Meeting was riven when a member family sought to sell their home to African Americans.
Although discrimination in housing was outlawed by the Fair Housing Act of 1968, America remains a largely segregated country. One reason is that there are lots of ways to keep poor people out of affluent neighborhoods, and—partly because of our history of housing discrimination—non-White people remain significantly poorer than White ones. For example, in the case that was the vehicle for the Supreme Court to uphold zoning, Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co. in 1926, the court maintained that apartment buildings were “mere parasites” on neighborhoods of single-family homes.
Indeed, zoning for single-family homes began to spread widely after the passage of the Fair Housing Act. Not only were apartment buildings often prohibited, so were duplexes and triplexes. (I personally have a soft spot for the triple-decker buildings with porches so common in and around Boston, where I used to live.)
Other new zoning laws decreed lot-size minimums so that new lots had to be big. In Connecticut, for example, 81% of the land is zoned for lots of at least one acre—and 50% have to be at least two acres. Especially in burgeoning suburbs, the imperative to build just one house on a big lot put a lot of housing beyond the reach of most Black people and other people of color. Housing segregation lived on.
Racial and class-based exclusion were not the only reasons zoning ordinances often required bigger lots. Many people aspire to the suburban ideal of a single-family house surrounded by enough space for privacy and a swing set for the kids (architectural historian Sonia Hirt calls this a “pastoral ideal” in her book Zoned in the U.S.A.). But it’s sobering to note how many of the zoning laws that enabled this were written as legal segregation came to an end.
Also sobering: the large role that car and gasoline companies played in selling the suburban ideal promoting new roads and neighborhoods far from city centers and train stations. The suburban ideal was good for profits.
This suburban vision and the zoning laws that enabled it were also influenced by a romantic idea of family. Hirt and urban policy writer Diana Lind (Brave New Home) both describe how big lots in the suburbs were seen as good for children, who would be protected from playing in dirty urban streets. Housewives, central to this scheme, were conceived of (and advertised as) reigning happily over neat suburban homes. Some of them may have felt that way, but for many women, new housing patterns exacerbated the epidemic of isolation and loneliness that Betty Friedan described in her 1963 classic The Feminine Mystique.
Alternative Ways to Zone
These days, many people are reconsidering Euclidean zoning. “Mixed-use zoning,” with houses and stores permitted on the same block, is one idea. “Transit-oriented zoning,” with housing clustered around train stations and bus stops, is another. Both of these approaches are designed to help people drive less and use less fossil fuels. Zoning can be an important tool to help fight climate change.
Some towns, cities, and states have reconsidered single-family zoning. As housing prices soar, Minneapolis, Oregon, and California have decided that the single-family-home lot has outlived its time. The idea is that the creation of the millions of new homes this country needs can’t be accomplished with just one home on every lot.
What’s Right for Swarthmore?
There are lots of reasons it might be time to reconsider zoning here in Swarthmore. For me, the rapid rise in housing prices—and the way that is changing our town—is a big one. So is the opportunity to redress some of the legacy of racial segregation in Swarthmore. So are environmental concerns.
What if we thought creatively about ways to use the land and buildings we have more efficiently? What if people could divide their house into two or three separate units to rent or sell? What if we permitted tiny houses in backyards or let people rent out apartments over their garages? What if people with large lots could subdivide them into two?
I don’t know which—if any—of these ideas might be right for Swarthmore. But I’m hoping that our community will seriously consider these and other possible innovations.
Learning about zoning will help you figure out if you can build an addition on your house. Maybe it will also inspire you to join the conversation about using zoning as a tool to make Swarthmore a more vibrant, just, and resilient community.
