By William Curvan
On Thursday, March 14, a crowd of about sixty college students and members of the community gathered in Doherty Hall to hear about affordable housing from Nolan Gray.
Gray, formerly a city planner in New York City, is the author of the book “Arbitrary Lines,” an examination of the history and practice of zoning in American cities. He is also the research director for California YIMBY, a pro-housing non-profit. YIMBY stands for Yes In My Backyard, the ideological opponent of a NIMBY (Not In My Backyard), someone who opposes new development in their neighborhood.
In a near two-hour talk that included a slideshow and Q&A with an enthusiastic audience, the event covered everything from racial segregation to parking minimums.
Though planned jointly by CMU Democrats and Pitt Democrats, a majority of attendees appeared to be well over college-aged (plus one exceptionally attentive baby). The audience was enthused to talk about zoning, as the lengthy Q&A (which still only addressed a fraction of the raised hands) can attest. The audience endured some good-natured ribbing by the speaker about what it means to be the type of person who spends a Thursday evening talking about zoning law.
Avalon Sueiro, President of CMU Democrats, said her goal for the event was to spread awareness of zoning policy to “a greater group of people,” especially college students. “Zoning reform is often overlooked since it’s not as flashy as many other policies and issues, but the impact it has on the day to day lives of anyone who lives in a home is staggering,” she told The Tartan.
The event also featured an introduction from David Vatz, the founder of Pro-Housing Pittsburgh, a grassroots advocacy group focused on pushing for more residential development in Pittsburgh to address the rising cost of housing.
Gray’s slideshow began with an overview of the current housing crisis and associated issues. “This crisis is a policy choice,” Gray claims, diagnosing the cause of this issue as an outdated, segregationist zoning policy that prevents the kind of development that would alleviate our current housing shortage. As defined by Gray, zoning is the means by which a city subdivides and categorizes its land to separate different kinds of housing, infrastructure, and commercial real estate.
Gray brought the audience through the history of zoning as a “social project,” which seeks to elevate the single-family house as the ideal home and the personal automobile as the default means of transportation. He was, however, not explicitly critical of the choice of any individual to buy a home and a car; his attitude was that if you want more space and are willing to pay a premium to get it then more power to you. But according to Gray, the current zoning policy elevates single-family development to the exclusion of other forms of housing that are more popular, more equitable, and less environmentally impactful.
Gray outlined the “three margins” on which zoning impacts housing affordability: It affects the density with which housing is allowed to be built, the amount of land developers must purchase to build a home, and parking minimums. Each of these parameters, Gray argued, create a feedback loop which encourages the development of urban and suburban spaces that are low- density, difficult to navigate on foot, and financially inaccessible.
After the presentation, Gray took questions from those in- person and those participating on Zoom. Many of the responses came from individuals who have similarly strong feelings about urban development.
Some audience members pushed back on Gray’s conclusions. One individual said that faster development may accelerate the pace of gentrification. Another, a self-identified architect for low-income housing, criticized the tendency for the YIMBY movement to alienate those who don’t understand the historical injustices of zoning practices.
One point that Gray emphasized was how zoning reform (which he characterized as “zoning revolution” in his book) could be politically expedient on both sides of the aisle. Changes to our urban zoning law can be framed as an act of racial and environmental justice, or as the deregulation of an overbearing municipal bureaucracy depending on whose vote you wanted to court. He was optimistic, and tried to convey his belief that zoning itself was an overhaul of the existing pattern of development: we may one day overhaul current zoning practices as well.
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