LAND USE and HOUSING
 
 

"The least fallible of city planners is the free market."--Bernard Siegan, in Land Use Without Zoning
 

Government "solutions" to land use and housing problems have been primarily political moves which imposed Large costs upon the middle- and low-income people who could Least afford them.  Environmental nuisances have been permitted to continue and even expand, but non-aggressive uses of Land are prohibited in order to satisfy politically powerful minorities.  Studies indicate that zoning boosts renters' costs ten to fifteen percent, in addition to imposing other hard-to-quantify burdens.  Rent controls, building codes, rehabilitation subsidies, and public housing have all hurt low-income housing residents rather than helped them.

Libertarians will repeal Land use controls and improve the property law so that relief is available for environmental nuisances.  They will encourage use of private arbitration in land use and housing disputes, permit voluntary covenants to guide land use, and allow voluntary building codes to guarantee housing quality, and remove governmental obstacles from the path of private urban redevelopment.


     Touring America with a delegation of Soviet officials in 1975, Moscow deputy mayor Vasily Isaev remarked to the press that he liked Houston. This booming, modern city, he thought, featured an "impressive" plan.  But planning in other American urban areas, he commented, seemed haphazardly "...carried out with the plans of private firms rather than of the cities."
     What Isaev did not know was that the Houston he admired had the
 least governmental involvement with land use of any major American city:  no comprehensive plan and no zoning.  The Soviet mayor confused the orderly operation of the free market with governmental planning, and the decrepit state of "planned" and regulated American cities with the "failure" of private enterprise.1
     Now, Moscow officials are not the only ones who have it backwards.  A recent article in a New York newspaper featured photographs of crumbling tenements lacking heat or running water, and protested, "Slumlords Still On Top In Harlem Areas."  Except that the slumlord, as it turns out, is the city Department of Real Estate--biggest owner of dilapidated housing in all of New York.2
     Government has intervened so long and so thoroughly in land use and housing that one can hardly blame observers for their inability to identify the causes of the malaise which afflicts our living environments today. But a clear pattern emerges from the history of government land use and housing policy:
     * Government "solutions" to land use and housing problems have
served the interest of government first and responded to actual community needs only secondarily--often causing the problems to become worse.
     * Such pseudo-solutions have imposed large costs upon society.
     * These impositions have struck at poor and middle class people who could least afford such burdens, often at the same time that land use and housing policies claimed to help them.

Land Use

     The laws of trespass and nuisance exist for the purpose of marking out the proper boundaries between neighbors.  They are instruments for keeping the peace.  As such, these laws need to evolve and grow as people invent new ways of trespassing upon each other.
     Unfortunately, nuisance law's natural evolution turned perverse in the mid-1800's as judges who administered it and local legislatures who were responsible for updating it decided to serve political interests rather than maintain justice and peace among landowners.  When conflicts arose between smoky, noisy industrial developments and other landowners, it was the factories and railroad companies who won out over orchard farmers and housewives.3  Courts came to practice the principle set forth by one teacher of nuisance law in that day, that "No public interest deserves protection and encouragement more than the manufacturing industry."4  When this explicitly political interference in nuisance law began to foster noticeably unhealthy urban conditions around 1900, many recoiled in horror; but it was to more regulation and intervention that they resorted.
     This reaction against industrial pollution, noise, traffic dust, and blockage of light by tall buildings served as the popular rationale for land use control proposals, particularly zoning.5  Specific regulations against such nuisances paved the way for Supreme Court acceptance of zoning in the definitive Euclid v. Amber Realty Co. decision of 1926.6  (And even today the commonest argument used on behalf of land use regulation is a nuisance-type complaint: "Would you want a slaughterhouse to move in next door?")
     Yet this reaction did not signal a return to the practice of protecting the right to private property.  Mixed in with the promise of relief from nuisance were claims that land use control should accomplish what the promoters called "public amenities," particularly the improvement of property values, higher taxes, and various "social engineering" objectives.  Zoning's founders originated a "bait and switch" maneuver which is still perpetrated in land use politics: having gained a sympathetic hearing by attacking the inadequacies of a government-administered nuisance law, they then proposed a new regulation explicitly rejecting any foundation in nuisance or trespass law precedent and doing nothing to fundamentally resolve the land use conflicts which they had been lamenting.  Their aim--often alluded to but seldom openly embraced--was simply to usurp for the government individuals' rights to direct the use of their own land.7
     The long-term trend is now clear.  Under land use regulation, the system of protections for individual property right built up under the common law is eroded, circumvented, ignored, and finally discarded. 
Rights come to be replaced by grants of privilege dispensed by local zoning boards and regional planning agencies.  Thus land use conflict comes to be managed to the advantage of political powers but never resolved.  To the extent that the zoning pseudo-solution interferes with private property ownership and preempts full access to nuisance-law remedies in the courts, it deprives the citizen of what law should give: justice.
     The proper name for land use regulation is, as John McClaughry has described it, the "New Feudalism."8  It exists so that entrenched political interests may profit upon the misery of society at large.
What does it cost? For one thing, material progress in coping with environmental trespass has been stunted.  Jane Jacobs9 cites the example of noise pollution, where, because noisy industries were zoned together into exclusive districts, machines actually grew louder.  Thus noise control technology, feasible since the 1950's on, went undeveloped.  Now, noisy industries have outgrown their territory, noise pollution is more serious than ever, and--where are the noise control devices we need?
     The cost also shows up in direct dollar terms.  It is now generally accepted that zoning-type regulations boost the costs of homes by mandating large lot sizes and restricting the supply of land which can be used to develop various kinds of housing, particularly multi-family rental housing.  A 1972 comparison of rents in Houston and Dallas, Texas revealed renters' costs to average 10-15% higher in Dallas; the two cities are comparable in every way except that Dallas has had zoning ordinances since the 1930's while Houston has never had one.10  Land use restrictions impose hard-to-quantify costs such as poorer service from landlords, dampened competition among developers, real estate brokers, and community business establishments, inflated real estate brokerage and home financing fees, and a blighting sterility and conformity upon residential and commercial streetscapes.11  Planner Richard Bjornseth, architect Robert Venturi, and Bernard Spring, dean of the City University of New York School of Architecture, have all recently criticized attempts to regulate the "character" of neighborhoods and business districts for introducing "...an ugly deadness into the environment."12
     All land use control is by its very nature "exclusionary," and it is especially the poor and middle class who are hurt by it.  The increased supply of developable land which results from lifting land use controls would lower housing prices directly and stimulate an expansion of the

TABLE 1
AVERAGE ANNUAL RENTAL COSTS FOR TWO FAMILY SIZES AND THREE LIVING STANDARDS -
HOUSTON AND DALLAS


Lower
Moderate
Higher
Year
Houston
Dallas
Houston
Dallas
Houston
Dallas
4-Member families
 Autumn, 1966
 Spring, 1967
 Spring, 1969
$872.00
931.00
$973.00
989.00

$1,051.00
1,086.00
1,175.00

$1,243.00
1,277.00
1,340.00
$1,575.00
1,721.00
$2,369.00
2,642.00
Retired couples
 Autumn, 1966
 Spring, 1967
 Spring, 1969
628.00
662.00
636.00
744.00

754.00
790.00
878.00

818.00
856.00
1,039.00
1,757.00
1,855.00
1,756.00
1,997.00

 
 
Sources:U.S. Dept. of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletins Nos. 1570-1, 1570-5 and supplement; 1570-4, 1570-6 and supplement.

Reproduced with permission from: Bernard Siegan, Land Use Without Zoning (Lexington, Mass., D.C. Heath and Co., 1972), p. 118.


 
 
housing supply.  Moreover, each new home added to the housing supply would then make possible an average of three-and-one-half succeeding moves as others "move up" to newly-vacated housing.13  People do seem to know where their interest lies with regard to zoning.  In the rare cases where local laws have allowed zoning to be put to a vote, all except the most upper class neighborhoods have rather consistently voted against it.14  Rural zoning boards as well as urban practice discrimination: their ordinances often restrict mobile homes, household businesses, and small hunting cabins (sometimes called "the second home of the middle class").  Farmers complain of being prevented from retiring to a house trailer on their land when the kids take up farming.15

Housing

     There is only one way to make more and better housing available to those who want it: increase the supply. And there is only one way government can increase the housing supply without robbing from the stock of other goods people value: eliminate government obstacles which make housing hard to produce and buy.  Yet local government policies inspired by the federal Housing Act of 1949 have exhausted just about every conceivable way of evading these simple facts.  In their tinkerings with the housing industry, local governments have made much political mileage but, as we shall see, solved few problems. Instead, housing policies have foisted inconveniences and high costs upon the very people these programs were supposed to help.
     Rent control is one such policy.  Despite having earned an early bad reputation in major urban areas, rent controls are under renewed consideration as people react to inflation and the ravages of government land use restrictions.  Like any attempt to set price ceilings, rent controls quickly produce shortages of housing. Unable to meet rising costs, apartment owners must cut back on maintenance. For many, large and small, this is not enough, and tenants are thrown out into the street when landlords are driven out of business.  In New York City, where rents have been controlled for three decades, more than 25,000 apartments a year are being abandoned.16  In some Brooklyn neighborhoods, virtually no new housing has been constructed since 1935.17  In Manhattan, where rent control has been most severe, the rental housing supply contracted by 1,000 units from 1943 to 1967--during a period of a national housing boom.18  The experience has been repeated in Washington, D.C., which has suffered a net loss of rental units since rent controls began--despite a housing market demand for more than 1,200 new units each year.19  The regulations there make it profitable in some cases to raze modern apartment projects to make way for office buildings.
    Strict building codes are a necessary adjunct to rent control (how else to decide whether requested rent increases will be granted?) and come to be viewed as a means of forcing rent-controlled landlords to "behave."  Like rent regulation itself, these enforcement efforts have the effect of driving owners to abandon marginal properties.
     Consequently, some municipalities have countered with rehabilitation subsidies.  While these may appear beneficent--except from the viewpoint of the taxpayer who foots the bill--rehabilitation subsidies play a cruel hoax on tenants as landlords of rehabilitated low-cost housing suddenly find themselves able to compete in the housing market with other units renting at higher rates.  Thus:

Philadelphia, hailed by the Urban Land Institute as standing "foremost among the great rebuilt cities of America," also stands foremost in another respect: abandoned housing, which at last count numbered 25,000 units in the city proper.  In Boston, the National Commission on Urban Problems found that
strict enforcement of housing codes would lead to mass abandonment of properties by their owners and/or higher rents with their resultant occupant displacement."  And for New Orleans this prediction became reality as the city invested $100,000 per year for nine years and succeeded in bringing 38% of an estimated 45,000 sub-standard units up to the housing code.  The result was that the rents of rehabilitated dwelling space doubled. Public housing waiting lists in New Orleans jumped to 20,000 and ousted tenants overcrowded into the remaining 28,000 sub-standard units that (fortunately) the city had been unable to rehabilitate.20
     Frustrated with the housing problems of the poor, many local governments finally decided, "We'll give it to 'em!"  Public housing did just that.  In the hands of upper middle class, white politicians bent on achieving visible results, public housing programs between 1950 and 1968 built 559,000 units--at the cost of demolishing some 1,646,000!  Though nonwhites occupied only a minority percentage of urban substandard housing, over 65% of those turned out of their homes were black, Hispanic, or members of other racial minorities.21  The "beneficiaries" were displaced to make way for civic centers, schools, apartment high-rises and office buildings attracted to the renewal sites by federal funding; it is estimated that over 50% of new construction on urban renewal properties would have been built elsewhere even without the renewal authority's helping hand.22  Those evictees who made it into new low-income housing often confronted hostile design23 and concentrated exposure to juvenile delinquency. Economist Richard Craswell has observed that "since occupancy was limited to low-income families, turnover rates were high; as families increased their income, they were


SOURCE:      Commission on Urban Problems, Building the American City, pp. 82-83.  Estimates of demolitions from Urban Renewal, Urban Highways, Public Housing Site Clearance, and Equivalent Demolitions are those of the Commission; other estimates are based on National Association of Home Builders figures cited in the Commission's report. Public Housing figures are from the 1971 HUD Statistical Yearbook, table 150, p. 145.
     While most figures have been adjusted to cover a common period of time (roughly 1950-1968), in the case of the Code Enforcement and State Action estimates this was impossible.
Since these figures were available only as far back as 1960, the net demolition figure is actually an understatement.
Reproduced with permission from Richard Craswell, The Failure Of Federal Housing (Washington, D.C. ACU Education and Research Institute, 1977), p. 8.

 
forced to move out--and the lack of stability contributed to the poor sociological environment."24  Those who were left on the waiting list simply had to scramble for a place to sleep, gritting their teeth under brunt of inflated rents and poorer conditions in a shrunken housing supply.
     Public housing was to have cost less than private; but in general it has cost 20% more.  Reports Graswell: "In Washington, D.C.... the true monthly rent (not counting the subsidy reduction) of a one-bedroom public housing apartment was $32 more than a comparable private unit; in Pittsburgh, the difference was $40; in Seattle, $64."
25 In reaction, authorities have toyed with a few last ideas.  The "Turnkey" program of subcontracting public housing construction and management to private corporations succeeded somewhat in shaving costs.  Interest subsidies for low-income housing purchasers were tried in Boston until, after three years, over eighty per cent of the loan customers were in default.  So after all has been said and done, what could remain but to give the housing-needy the money directly?
This is the idea behind housing vouchers: grants to landlords and homeowners to purchase improved housing.  Though this subsidy technique sheds some of the bureaucratic costs associated with previous housing panaceas, it is subject to the same general pitfalls. An example will illustrate.
     If we give John Doe $1,000 upon the sole condition that he spend it on housing, it is likely that he will be more eager to buy housing than if the money were really his own and he could use it to buy food, clothes, or a new car.  Knowing this, landlords and building contractors will be less likely to provide additional housing without taking advantage of the opportunity to raise prices and inflate costs. This is fine with John Doe; even if he has to spend $1,000 to get improvements previously worth only $500, it's all free to him anyway. But what about other people who receive no subsidy?  The effect of John Doe's "easy money" on housing costs is felt by them, too.  And with each escalation the cost of subsidies to the taxpayer rises even faster, as a broader base of people need help.26
     The result of such programs may be observed in Sweden, where 90% of the housing receives government aid of one sort or another,27  hundreds of homeless people compete for each vacant unit,28 and a young couple may go six or seven years before getting an apartment all their own.  By any index, this is no way to solve the housing problem.

Libertarian Proposals

     What will Libertarians do about land use and housing?
     * Libertarians will treat environmental conflicts as invasions of property rights.  When a developer changes the surface of a parcel of land and thereby increases the flow of water and mud onto adjoining properties, the remedy need not be a zoning or subdivision ordinance.
This is a simple case of trespass--an invasion of neighbors' property rights.  So ruled a federal appellate court in Breiner v. C&P Home Builders (1976), in a decision welcomed by Libertarians.29  The Libertarian approach is also reflected in the proposal of the Chester County (Pennsylvania) Conservation District to scrap local subdivision ordinance runoff regulations in favor of trespass procedures.  Says the Districts's Stormwater Management Bulletin: "One teacup of increased runoff or one teaspoonful of increased mud" constitutes an invasion of property.30
In short, Libertarians will substitute an improved property law for coercive local ordinances. To the extent that voters demand relief from runoffs, smells, noise, and pollution, the Libertarian official can respond with local statutes which, like the Chester County proposal, call upon the courts to better define and protect individual property rights to be safe from trespass and nuisance.
     There is an alternative to reliance upon court systems, too: arbitration.  The American Arbitration Association, a "public service, non-profit organization dedicated to the resolution of disputes of all kinds through the use of arbitration," sponsors a Community Dispute Services office which engages in mediation of a wide range of community issues including land use and housing disputes.  CDS representatives are available full- or part-time at all AAA regional offices, and the Association's National Panel Of Arbitrators includes some 40,000 men and women nominated for their expertise and impartiality.31  Application of mediation to environmental issues has been researched at the Institute of Environmental Studies of the University of Washington, and at Washington University, St. Louis.32 Libertarian organizations such as the Center for Libertarian Studies and the Association for Rational Environmental Alternatives are at work developing the application of Libertarian legal theory to concrete environmental problems.33
     Thus with improved property right protection and easier access to legal relief through arbitration, the Libertarian program solves the basic environmental difficulties which so often beguile people into embracing zoning or other regulatory pseudo-solutions.  Nonetheless, there are limitations to what "environmental property rights" can accomplish.
     Environmental property rights, for example, cannot impose unlimited obligations upon the community: thus a claimed "right" to an unchanged view out one's window, or to a stable "neighborhood character," or to a particular community esthetic standard, could not be enforced.  They must be based upon objectively measurable standards; so, for instance, one’s hatred of a neighbor's musical tastes could not find its way into court, but a protest against loud noises of any kind might.  They must bear an objective, reasonable relation to the property or land from which the environmental property rights derive; therefore, one could not rightfully prevent a neighbor from decorating his house with Christmas lights, but one might succeed in stopping the erection of a sign which bathes one's own house in a glare all night long.  And such rights cannot make property out of that which can belong to no one: people and their thoughts.  So "property values," which rest upon nothing but other people's opinions, should not be propped up by simple force of law.  Unless individual property rights are being invaded, people must use other, voluntary means to secure for themselves such values as "neighborhood character" or the protection of property values. This is the role of voluntary covenants.
     * Libertarians will allow zoning to be replaced by voluntary covenants. Covenants are contracts in which people pool their individual property titles to achieve certain shared goals which none could accomplish by himself. They are private, voluntary land use restrictions.
     In Houston, Texas, where there is no zoning, a network of land use covenants has matured into an efficient and relatively sophisticated system.  Imposed either by subdivision developers before sale or by agreement of an association of neighbors, covenants affect single-family homes, townhouses, and industrial parks in about one-quarter of Houston's total area.34  Most provide for the agreement to run 25 or 30 years, with automatic extension unless a majority of the participating owners vote to terminate or amend the covenant at the end of the initial period or any following 10-year period.35  In this way, change can come if a majority desire it--but the requirement to wait until the covenant expires protects minority owners' interests as well.  Obviously, the authority of private covenants extends only to those who participate; this means that the resulting diversity of land use restriction found in the community provides many avenues of choice to the property purchaser, without sacrificing his sense of security in the character of the immediate neighborhood he finally chooses.  Private covenants deliver what government zoning and subdivision regulation cannot even promise: security and flexibility.36
     Some technical caveats: Libertarians oppose transforming covenants into de facto zoning ordinances by municipalizing their formulation and administration.  Nor would Libertarian policy--unlike some present-day statutes governing covenants--compel frequent and public enforcement of agreements in order to sustain them as valid. Another significant technical point is that Libertarian justice could compel performance of the agreement only by assessing damages against offending participants or by authorizing the injured parties to claim title to any performance bonds which had been posted; the law could not actually enslave anyone to carry out promises.37  Finally, covenants could not, as is often loosely assumed, "run with the land." Titles, in order to be enforceable, must belong to someone.  If one party to a covenant were to die without transferring title to anyone else (and there were no heirs), the other party would be free of the agreement.38
     The political difficulties of substituting environmental property rights, arbitration, and covenants for land use regulation seemingly loom large.  But this first impression may be exaggerated.  As noted, considerable popular sentiment against controls exists.  Apart from those who stand to receive money and influence from land use restriction, there are few who would be unfavorably affected by repeal.  According to Bernard Siegan, who studied the Houston non-zoning, the Libertarian proponent of land use freedom may scout for support among most average-income homeowners who would prefer tailor-made covenants to imposed zoning ordinances, homeowners in subdivisions already subject to restrictive covenants, renters who would benefit from new multiple-family unit construction, and people who enjoy living in areas of mixed used.39  While zoning sometimes appears useful to some of the more affluent homeowners, most of these would have the capability of establishing their own covenants even without a zoning ordinance.
     * Libertarians will allow creation and enforcement of voluntary building codes.  Government-imposed building codes are coercive invasions of human liberties and need to be speedily eliminated.  But what, if anything, will take their place?
     In the place of traditional building codes, it can fairly well be expected that private contractors and modular housing manufacturers will adopt and maintain their own codes--"brand-name housing" as it were.  Where a structure is sold with a guarantee that is conforms to a particular standard--be that a manufacturer's guarantee, or an industry-wide or consumer-organization standard--the purchaser will be able to enforce this guarantee with the support of Libertarian judges, just as other kinds of commercial fraud are handled.  Insurers and mortgagers might also assume a role in enforcing construction and upkeep according to agreed codes.  Tenants could be relieved from rent obligations if landlords failed to carry out maintenance promised in rental agreements.40
     Similar codes are already in place and functioning.  Some, like the electricians' code, are far more comprehensive and up-to-date than most local building codes.  Government building codes are in fact often based on industry standards.  Thus the main difference in results under a Libertarian approach amounts to this: No longer will housing industry associations be able to force acceptance of their standards and products by hiding behind protective local government codes.  No longer will consumers be compelled to pay a premium of fifteen per cent or more on housing costs to support archaic, noncompetitive manufacturing and construction techniques,41 corrupt inspectors,42 and the expensive situation where it takes between seven and eleven craft members to install a single bathroom in New York City housing.43  People who want to experiment with cheaper or innovative techniques can do so, and these may well flourish; those who want the security of traditional methods and a certified housing "guarantee," it can have that too.44
     * Libertarians will allow people to redevelop their neighborhoods--voluntarily! Libertarians say that government ought to step out of the way of improved housing: end rent control, building codes, rehabilitation subsidies, public housing, eminent domain, and urban "renewal."
     There is much potential left in the private housing industry, and there will be more after the shackles are lifted.  The record is compelling.  While government canceled out its addition of one million subsidized housing units by net urban renewal demolitions (1950-1968) of 1,087,000, private builders added some 33,000,000 units to the nation's housing supply.  In twenty years, private enterprise boosted the percentage of "standard" housing from 66 to 94%.45  As urban renewal and community development programs have concentrated substandard housing (thus intensifying the dissatisfactions of low-income residents and increasing the political visibility of the housing issue), the independent private housing boom has in spite of it all upgraded the livability of low-income housing generally, on its way to improving all housing.46
     Recent studies of private urban renewal in East Boston, St. Louis, Birmingham, Dayton, Pittsburgh, and Houston47,48 lend support to the idea that renewal of housing will proceed rapidly once it is freed to do so.  The Libertarian position was voiced by Dr. Thomas Matthew, a representative of a Harlem neighborhood, when he told an Urban Renewal Board, "Get out of our way and let us try something!"49

TABLE 2
 
 

LAND USE PLANNING, COERCIVE AND VOLUNTARY MEANS



 
 
 
 
 
 

Coercive
Voluntary
* Zoning * Landowner planning within a framework of land and environmental property rights
* Esthetics, "open space," and sign controls * Voluntary covenants to restrict land uses
* Subdivision controls * Private agreements concerning the availability of utilities and access to roads
* Government agricultural districts * Voluntary covenants concerning conflicts between farmers and their neighbors
* Building codes * Building guarantees
* Flood insurance-related building standards imposed over entire flood-prone area * Agreements to provide private flood insurance only to those abiding by insurers' standards
(and leaving others alone)
* Eminent domain * Skilled long-term purchasing
and aggregation of properties on completely voluntary basis
* Urban renewal and "community development" * Redevelopment by individuals, corporations, improvement associations, and the developers of "proprietary communities" such as hotel complexes, shopping malls, etc.

 
LAND USE and HOUSING NOTES

 
1. "Russian Mayor Likes Houston," AREA Bulletin (December 1975), p. 3. The same article noted that "it should be interesting to hear where Vasily Isaev and colleagues will place the blame for New York's financial crisis." Moscow's mayor was soon thereafter quoted by the New York Times that Moscow could never go bankrupt like New York because Moscow did not have capitalist system.
2. New York News World, February 10, 1977.
3. See R. Dale Grinder, "The Industrial Revolution and the Law of Nuisance and Smoke," Fourth Annual Libertarian Scholars Conference, October 1976. Cf. Morton Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1977).
4. Horace Gay Wood, A Practical Treatise on the Law of Nuisances in Their Various Forms (Albany, N.Y., 1875, Ist edition), p. 476; cited in Grinder, op. cit.
5. See Ernst Freund, The Police Power, Public Policy, and Constitutional Rights (Chicago: Callaghan, 1904).
6. 272 U.S. 365 (1926). An earlier case concerning Boston's height control ordinance is Welch v. Swasey, 214 U.S. 91 (1909).
7. John McClaughry, "The New Feudalism," 5 Environmental Law (Spring 1975), p. 675.
Historically, it is well recorded that zoning promoters Ernst Freund and Edward Bassett, among others, undertook an extensive campaign to discredit the notion that police power regulations such as zoning were limited to nuisance-type application. See, e.g., Seymour I. Toll, Zoned American (New York: Grossman, 1969), p. 264; and Richard F. Babcock, The Zoning Game: Municipal Practices and Policies (Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966). Cf. Edward M. Bassett, Zoning (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1940).
8. McClaughry, "The New Feudalism," 5 Environmental Law 675.
9. Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (New York: Random House, 1969), p. 105.
10. See Bernard Siegan, Land Use Without Zoning (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, D.C. Heath & Co,. 1972), pp. 117-120.
11. Ibid., Chapter 6.
12. The quote is from Robert Venturi, et. al., Learning From Las Vegas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,, 1972).  Spring's opposition to strict esthetic controls is discussed in William D. Burt, "More Than One Way to Skin a City," AREA Bulletin (May-June 1977), p. 5. Cf. R. L. Bjornseth, "Environmental Appearance Council Formed," AREA Bulletin (January-February 1977), p. 1.
13. Siegan, "No Zoning Is the Best Zoning," in No Land is an Island (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1975), p. 163. For a fuller treatment, see Siegan, Land Use Without Zoning, pp. 93-95, which cites John B. Lansing, Charles W. Clifton, and James N. Morgan, New Homes and Poor People: A Study of the Chain of Moves (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1969).
14. Siegan, "No Zoning Is the Best Zoning," p. 160.
15. For an investigation of opposition to rural zoning, see William D. Burt, "Zoning Fight Spreads in Western New York State," AREA Bulletin (January 1976). This article reviews the several votes against zoning proposals recorded in Western New York 1972-1975. The AREA Bulletin has carried occasional articles reporting such votes against zoning in the Midwest, and John McClaughry discusses the popular sentiment against land use control in Vermont, in "How to Fight Land Use Planners," Reason (October 1976), p. 12.
16. Senator Thomas F. Eagleton, "Why Rent Controls Don't Work," The Reader's Digest (August 1977), p. 111.
17. "Our Dying Neighborhoods," New York Daily News, August 1. 1977.
18. Richard Craswell, The Failure of Federal Housing (Washington, D.C.: American Conservative Union Education and Research Institute, 1977), P. 9.
19. Eagleton, op. cit., p. 109. 
20. Craswell, op. cit., p. 10.
21. Ibid., p. 6 and p. 8. Cf. William G. Grigsby, Housing Markets and Public Policy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1963), p. 258.
22. Martin Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1964), p. 222.
23. The St. Louis Pruitt-Igoe Project proved such an abject design
failure that after several yea';s of low occupancy (down to 20%) it was finally dynamited by the   using authority.
24. Craswell, op. cit., p. 11.
25. Richard F. Muth, Public Housing: An Economic Evaluation (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1973) p. 39; cited in Craswell, op. cit., p. 12.
27. U.S. News and World Report, June 7, 1971, p. 48; cited in Craswell, op. cit., p. 16.
28. Sven Rydenfelt, "Sweden Rent Control Thirty Years On," in Verdict on Rent Control: Essays on the Economic Consequences of Political Action to Restrict Rents in Five Countries (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1972), p. 77.
29. Civil Engineering-ADCE, December 1976
30. Chester County, Pennsylvania Stormwater Management Bulletin. (1977) See also William D. Burt, "Erosion Arbitration Proposed," AREA Bulletin (January-February 1977). p. 5.
31. CDS address is 140 West 51st St., New York, NY 10020.
32. John McClaughry, "Farmers, Freedom, and Feudalism," South Dakota Law Review, Vol. 215 #3 (Summer 1976), p. 521, his note 126.
33. CLS address is 200 Park Avenue South, #911, New York, NY 10003; AREA address is P.O. Box 906, Greenwich, CT. 06830
34. Siegan, "No Zoning Is the Best Zoning," p. 166.
35. Ibid., p. 159.
36. For further details, see Siegan, Land Use Without Zoning, Chapter Two.
37. Proper measurement of such damages to be assessed could be facilitated if courts were to require parties to a covenant to specify the type and amount of restitution ( "damages" ) they expect to pay should they default on performance of the covenant.
38. This point originates with Murray N. Rothbard, cited in note 24 in Williamson M. Evers, "Toward a Reformation of the Law of Contracts," Journal of Libertarian Studies, vol. 1, #1, (Winter 1977), pp. 3-14.
39. Siegan, Land Use Without Zoning, p. 236.
40. McClaughry, "Farmers, Freedom, and Feudalism," p. 159. Cf. Allison Dunham, "Private Enforcement of City Planning," 20 Law & Contemporary Problems 463 (1955).
41. Craswell, p  1) @20
42. New York City building inspectors have become so brazen about their corruption that their union's attorney recently denounced an informer working for a grand jury as "Not a lion, but a worm."  The union demanded reinstatement of over 100 city building inspectors fired for bribe-taking since 1975.  "Union Burned by Bribe Spy Files Suit," New York Daily News, April 26, 1977.
43. Craswell, p. 20.
44. Present federal subsidies for flood insurance require that municipalities impose building codes upon all, not just purchasers of the insurance.  Libertarians suggest that building codes may very well have a role to play in free market flood insurance, but that they could only be applied to those who voluntarily participate in such a program.  On flood insurance generally, see A Flood Insurance Alternative, Position Paper #1 of the Association for Rational Environmental Alternatives (April 1977).
45. Craswell, p. 3.
46. Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer, pp. 208-213.
47. John McClaughry, "Recycling Declining Cities: Give the People a Chance!", AREA Bulletin (September-October 1977). See also forth- coming article in The Urban Lawyer (Spring 1978).
48. A recent conference, "Recycling the City: The Entrepreneur as Hero," underscored the facts about private urban renewal in unzoned Houston. Proceedings available from the conference's sponser, the Association for Rational Environmental Alternatives. ( See note 41 ).
49. Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities, p. 199; cited in Craswell, p. 21.



Chapter 2
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