Ep 27: Minimum Lot Size Reform with M. Nolan Gray

“Find ways to give vocal minorities opt-out mechanisms where they can have some of the land use rules that they want, but they don’t get to drag the whole city down with them.” That’s one of Nolan Gray’s primary lessons from the success of minimum lot size reform in Houston, and a prescription for land use reform more generally. Houston’s reform, which took place in 1998, reduced the minimum parcel size for new homes from 5,000 to just 1,400 square feet per unit, and it’s produced tens of thousands of low-cost townhome-style houses in the city’s “inner loop.” It also allowed individual neighborhoods to opt-out of the reform, creating a political context in which reform could move forward. Gray, a doctoral student at UCLA and author of the new book, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It, joins us to talk about the lessons we can learn from the famously unzoned city of Houston, and the promise that minimum lot size reform holds for improving affordability and giving residents more choice in how they live their lives.

Show notes:

• Gray, M. N., & Millsap, A. A. (2020). Subdividing the unzoned city: an analysis of the causes and effects of Houston’s 1998 subdivision reform. Journal of Planning Education and Research.
• Gray, M. N. (2022). Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. Island Press.
• Gray, M. N., & Furth, S. (2019). Do minimum-lot-size regulations limit housing supply in Texas? Mercatus Research Paper.
• Glaeser, E. L., & Gyourko, J. (2002). The impact of zoning on housing affordability. National Bureau of Economic Research working paper.
• Monkkonen, P., & Manville, M. (2020). Planning knowledge and the regulatory hydra. Journal of the American Planning Association, 86(2), 268-269.
• Siegan, B. (2020). Land Use without Zoning. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
• On Minneapolis’s triplex zoning reform: Hamilton, E. (2022). Want More Housing? Ending Single-Family Zoning Won’t Do It. Bloomberg CityLab.
• On California’s ADU reform history: Casey, D. (2021). A Guide to Ending Single-Family Zoning: Lessons Learned from 39 Years of ADU Legislation. California Renters Legal Adovcacy and Education Fund.
• Hertz, D. (2015). The immaculate conception theory of your neighborhood’s origins. City Observatory.
• More about housing in Houston: Kinder Institute for Urban Research.
• UCLA Housing Voice Episode 10: Upzoning and Single-Family Housing Prices with Daniel Kuhlmann.