The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #6: Zoning. You can listen to and subscribe to this weekly audio podcast at KunstlerCast.com.

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Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to The KunstlerCast, a weekly conversation about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl, featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency and World Made by Hand.

I’m Duncan Crary. Today’s topic: zoning.

Duncan Crary: Jim, welcome back to another KunstlerCast.

James Howard Kunstler: Nice to be back in my Künstler realm.

Duncan Crary: I want to start today’s show with a story, but I think you’ll know where I’m going with this. One of my favorite things to do in my neighborhood is walk through the miles of alleys in downtown Troy. And they’re very interesting; in fact, Norman Rockwell once painted one of these alleys in “The Homecoming (Soldier)”.

But it occurred to me the other day that the alley is actually outlawed in most of America.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, it’s become sort of an anachronism in urban design. It’s something we used to do when our cities were organized differently, years ago. And it was a benefit, it was an amenity because you were able to put all the services in the alley and get them off the front of the house. That’s where you could put the garbage, and the stable—later the garage—and the electrical poles and everything, and that allowed the front of the house to have a lot of decorum and beauty, and made our streets beautiful; and we stopped doing that.

Probably the main reason why that’s not done anymore is that the fire marshals all over America have determined that they can’t get a fire truck down the alley. Therefore, we must eliminate them. Actually when Andres Duany and his crew of planners tried to do a project in Florida that had service alleys, the fire marshals hassled them about it really, really hard.

And so Duany actually took them out to this giant parking lot—a Wal-Mart parking lot or something—at six o’clock in the morning, and they put down tape to indicate what the size of these alleys would be. And they had the fire marshals drive their trucks down these taped out lines to demonstrate that they could get their trucks down there. And so the complaints of the fire marshals weren’t even grounded in reality—it was just a complete fabrication and delusion. But it caught on and became popular all over America to not do this, to not have alleys and to deny them and not let people build them.

Duncan Crary: OK, Jim, fire codes are just one of many elements putting pressures on the towns to adopt these zoning codes that prevent things like alleys and smart planning. When did America adopt this one-size-fits-all zoning mentality?

James Howard Kunstler: It’s kind of a tortured story and it goes back to the early 20th century when the city was really changing very rapidly, becoming, in many ways, an extremely unpleasant place because the scale of industry was getting enormous and it was all mixed in with the other stuff, and it was hurting property values.

So we developed this idea in the early 20th century that you had to rigorously segregate all the uses in the city. The residential neighborhoods had to be rigorously cordoned off from the places where industry was allowed to do its thing and be dirty and noisy, smelly and all that. And that became the classic model for zoning.

And it certainly is understandable in the sense that the industrial city had never really been seen before. It was a new emergent thing that was developing; people really weren’t prepared for it. It self-organized in the classic sense of emergence and then there it was; what do we do about it?

So zoning is supposedly the rational response to it.

Duncan Crary: From what I understand, if you lived in an industrial city you could have a soap factory go in right next to your house, you had no control over it at all. So there was some good reason in trying to prevent that, some more order?

James Howard Kunstler: That’s the point I’m trying to make. It was a rational response to a set of circumstances, which at the time were pretty difficult. How do you manage, how do you regulate the behavior of these industrial activities, which are taking our cities and making them really unpleasant in a way that we’ve never experienced before?

And of course, the scale issue was also a new thing because of the size of the factories. As you leave the late 19th century and get into the early 20th century with things like electrification and the assembly line, all of a sudden factories are no longer just 300-foot long boxes in the middle of the city. Now, they’re the size of a whole neighborhood—an automobile plant in the 1920s was huge.

So we developed this idea called zoning. And then the 1920s are over, and you had the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression and the construction industry is really one of the hardest hit industries during the Depression, and not a whole lot is built during that period.

And the zoning codes are now in place; we’ve had the first iterations of the suburban residential neighborhood, cul-de-sacs, and subdivisions in the 1920s.

But a lot of that comes to a halt with the Depression and World War II. And it’s after World War II that we really start to get going on the refinements of zoning, and we start to enter this ‘territory of the absurd’. And among the things that we do is that we decide that shopping is now classified as an “obnoxious industrial activity” that nobody should be allowed to live anywhere near.

So not only does that create huge problems for traffic now—by doing that you basically mandated that everybody has to get in their car 11 times a day to make a trip for every little thing they need. But you’ve also now eliminated the most common kind of affordable housing that is found virtually everywhere else in the world, except the United States after 1950, which is people living above retail establishments, people living above stores—normal urban typologies of buildings that are more than one-story high.

And after 1950 we built very few commercial retail buildings that are more than one story high. And so that then engenders this unanticipated consequence of having an affordable housing crisis. We’re now obliged to provide this artificial commodity called ‘affordable housing’ because we were too stupid to provide it organically by allowing buildings to be more than one-story high.

It’s really a horrible, awful, tragic tale.

Duncan Crary: I believe, in The Geography of Nowhere, you mentioned that a lot of towns across America just adopted the same zoning codes.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, there was a company somewhere in Indiana—I forget the name of it now. It was an engineering company that built a template for zoning for pretty much any municipality. It was like the generic vanilla zoning code.

Duncan Crary: Which is part of the reason why every development, housing development in America looks almost the same.

James Howard Kunstler: Well, there was also a very, very firm and strong level of consensus among the people who are delivering suburbia about how things should be done. By that, I mean: the traffic engineers, the developers, the real estate salespeople all agree that this is the way we should do it. The streets should all be 80 ft. wide, and the houses should all be on a half-acre lot, and the shopping centers should all be far away from this so that people aren’t bothered by grocery shopping.

And that’s how it becomes normal. And the consensus is adopted by all the professional organizations like A.S.H.E., the American Society of Highway Engineers, and all of their cohorts, and the professional builders, etc., etc. For about 60 years now we’ve had this very, very firm agreement about how this stuff should all work.

Now, the fact this it is all on the verge now of collapsing is another story. But as one of my favorite correspondents never tires of saying, “Shit happens, and shit un-happens.”

Duncan Crary: Well I think one of the larger issues that you mentioned in The Geography of Nowhere is that urban planning has now simply become public administration, pushing papers, and you know all these SEQRA requirements, and—

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, urban planning has no design component anymore. It’s simply about administering the codes, and about the minutia and trivia of measuring the width of the curb cut, and making sure that the signage is exactly within a centimeter of the specifications, and having nothing to do with excellence in design or having standards of excellence, or having a consensus for excellence, or least of all any consideration for how the buildings will behave in their relations with the other buildings so that we have some kind of a coherent urban structure. So that’s totally absent.

They threw it in the garbage in about 1950. They decided “We don’t need this anymore. All we need is the traffic engineering; and the highway geometries, and statistical analysis, and nothing else is necessary. So here’s 5,000 years of architecture and urban design, and we are throwing it in the dumpster now along with the old Boston cream pies, and the half-eaten tuna fish sandwiches.”

Duncan Crary: Well I used to work for a suburban weekly newspaper for like a month, until I couldn’t stand it—

James Howard Kunstler: I did too, but I did it for almost a year.

Duncan Crary: I used to actually interview you, Jim. You probably don’t remember. I probably spelled your name wrong, too. But one of my jobs was to sit in on these suburban town planning meetings.

James Howard Kunstler: That’s an odious chore, isn’t it?

Duncan Crary: Yeah. They caught me on TV a couple times. The TV news would be there and I’d be sleeping. [laughs]

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, you have to get some toothpicks and put them under your eyelids when you’re in a situation like that.

Duncan Crary: But here’s the thing. One of these town planners, I mean this is a big suburban mess of a town, he actually told me that he was looking forward to moving to Manhattan when he retired, to be able to live in a walkable mixed-used community.

James Howard Kunstler: Well these poor bozos, they come out of planning school because they made some bad choice or they were deceived into thinking that they were in a design discipline, and then they spend the next 40 years working for a city piling up a pension plan. They hate their work; they hate themselves for doing it. They realize that the whole thing is a mummery.

Finally they gaze at that golden, glowing finish line of retirement. And then they can go to a place where it’s exciting, that’s mixed-used—a place that, in short, displays all the qualities that they’ve been preventing from occurring in the place they’re in charge of for their whole career. Or they move to Key West, or Europe, or some other place.

So yeah, the damage that these municipal officials have done all over America is just out of this world.

Duncan Crary: So we’ve spoken about the new urbanists before, we’ll speak about them again, but what are they doing with zoning? Are they developing more zoning codes, or are they just trying to get rid of it, or what?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, there have been these tremendous efforts for 15 years to reform the existing zoning codes that mandate the suburban outcome everywhere. The new urbanists have certainly come up with some wonderful templates and models, which have been adopted by quite a few municipalities around the country. But they’re still only a small statistical fraction of most of the places. Most of the places in America remain clueless, and it’s very tragic.

I have sort of a different view of what the outcome is going to be. I do have this, what I call “Long Emergency” point of view about where we’re headed. I think that the suburban codes will be self-evidently useless within a fairly short span of time, and they’re basically not going to be reformed after a certain point.

What I think you’ll see is they’ll just basically be abandoned and ignored, because we’re going to be a much less affluent nation. We won’t be able to pay for the enforcement of these codes, nor are we going to follow a lot of the mandated coddling of the automobile, because the automobile is going to be a troubled element of our life.

It’s going to become incrementally less of a mass democratic prosthetic extension of our lives, and become incrementally more of an elite activity. There’s going to be a lot of political friction over people who are not in the elite paying for the motoring comforts of people who remain in the elite. That’s going to be a problem, and that will be expressed politically on the local scene in the people who are appointed to boards, etc., etc.

So, incrementally I think we’ll get back to a place where we’re going to recover some sanity. But it may not be a very coherent kind of reform process; it may be, by default, the abandonment of practices that have proved to be unsustainable.

Duncan Crary: Well, I’m looking forward to that day. Jim, thanks a lot for speaking with us.

James Howard Kunstler: Nice to be here with you in our little realm.

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Duncan Crary (as host): You’ve been listening to The KunstlerCast, featuring James Howard Kunstler.

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I’m your host, Duncan Crary. Thanks for listening.

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