Episode 136: Key to the City with Sara Bronin 

Sara Bronin: Our communities have for far too long been designed around the car, and a good zoning code would instead think about designing around people.

Sarah Goodyear: This is The War on Cars. I’m Sarah Goodyear, and I’m here with my co-hosts, Aaron Naparstek and Doug Gordon.

Aaron Naparstek: Hey, what’s up?

Doug Gordon: Hey, how’s it going?

Sarah: Good. How’s things with you?

Doug: You know, just enjoying our dense, walkable, mixed-use neighborhood, all enabled by zoning.

Aaron: Yeah, I was just thinking about how nicely it’s zoned here.

Sarah: Oh, very good zoning.

Aaron: The zoning is beautiful this morning.

Doug: You know, I moved into this neighborhood thinking, “Who wrote the zoning code? It is perfect.”

Sarah: We’re gonna get to that. We’ll talk about zoning much more. But first …

Aaron: Just want to remind folks that this podcast is possible because of your support. So please pitch in via Patreon. Just go to our website, TheWaronCars.org, click “Support Us.” Consider kicking in a few bucks. We will send you stickers and other goodies in addition to a personal note.

Sarah: So zoning. Zoning is an invisible force that shapes the world around us. It determines the kind of housing we can build, where we can build it. It dictates where factories, offices and shops can be located, as well as restaurants, bars, parks, sports stadiums, you name it. Zoning goes right to the heart of the war on cars, because laws that dictate where things are located shape how we experience cities, and they determine whether or not we need a car to reach the places we live, work and play.

Sarah: There’s a new book out that examines how zoning became such an important factor in the design of our cities. It digs deep into the historical and often problematic roots of zoning, while also arguing that it can be a force for good to create better communities and healthier lives. That book is called Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World, and we are delighted to have its author, Sara Bronin, with us today. Sara is an architect, attorney, professor and policymaker. She was the chair of the planning and zoning commission of Hartford, Connecticut for seven years. Sara Bronin, welcome to The War on Cars.

Sara Bronin: Thank you so much for having me.

Doug: So Sara, I love this book. It’s really entertaining, which is kind of a weird thing to say about a book about zoning, but it’s both personal and informative, and I think it does a great service to this hidden force that most people don’t really think about, but has such a huge impact on their lives.

Sara Bronin: Well, I think if we step back really broadly into human history, we’ve always tried to set out rules by which our communities could be organized. So ancient societies had building codes, the Romans had city plans. Zoning is really just a modern attempt to order our communities. And zoning as we know it today in the United States emerged really about a hundred years ago, in response in part to a standard zoning enabling act that was published actually by a federal agency, the US Department of Commerce, that set out a template for state legislatures to then authorize local governments to zone. And these state enabling acts, which enabled these local governments to regulate land uses and structures and lots were adopted in every state in the country. And it’s pursuant to those enabling acts, which have not really changed today, that we see about 30,000 jurisdictions in the country that have zoning.

Doug: So there’s sort of a mind-blowing fact that you include early on in the book, you write, “I estimate about 75 percent of urban and suburban zoned land requires single family detached houses and allows no other kinds of housing.” So yeah, that is really mind blowing—about 75 percent. I mean, that basically means no stores, as you write, “No nail salons or hair salons or coffee shops. Nothing other than basically just school, home and church.”

Sara Bronin: You know, I have to say that 75 percent might even be an underestimate. I have a project called the National Zoning Atlas that is mapping zoning across the country, and we’re seeing in some regions, in some states, 90 percent or more of land that is devoted primarily or exclusively to single family housing.

Sara Bronin: You know, that might average out, as we continue to do different metro areas, but we’re finding that the prevalence of single family-only housing is shocking in this country. We have this notion, maybe it was a post-World War II-era notion, that the American dream is a freestanding, detached single family home on a large lot with a lawn and two cars in the driveway. The imagined American dream.

Sara Bronin: The other thing that happened is that there started to be a narrative about property taxes and the belief, and actually since disproven belief, that single family homes were better for local governments because the people who live in them were more likely to be good, hardworking taxpayers and people who lived in apartments were not. If you look actually back at one of the first cases to tackle zoning by the US Supreme Court, you had Supreme Court justices calling apartments “parasites,” parasites on single family housing. This is in the 1920s, and that attitude has been one that continues to be reflected today, as evidenced through zoning codes that primarily allow for single family housing.

Sarah: One of the neighborhoods you talk about is the Gulfton neighborhood in Houston. And you write, “It may seem counterintuitive to start a book about zoning with a scene from the poster child for land use anarchy.”

Sara Bronin: Houston is the only large American city that lacks zoning, at least the only one that I know of. Gulfton is a neighborhood within Houston that I grew up in and that I revisited while I was writing this book. The neighborhood has changed over the years, but by and large, it’s maintained its affordability in that it has lots of apartments, it’s considered to be a community which is welcoming to immigrants, to low-income people, to people who may not speak English as their first language. And one of the reasons that Gulfton is that way, perhaps, is because Houston’s lack of zoning has meant that there have been lots of undesirable land uses that have popped up in and around the neighborhood.

Sara Bronin: So right across the street from the old multi-unit building that we used to live in is a gas station, a self-storage facility, a nightclub, really big swaths of parking. And I don’t even want to go so far as to say “planned,” but it’s sort of the opposite. I think “anarchy” might have been a good word there. My argument in the book is that a place like Gulfton argues for the need for some form of land use control so that the people who are lowest income and most vulnerable don’t get put in situations like the ones you see in that neighborhood still today. There are other neighborhoods in Houston that do have private land use controls, but again, neighborhoods like Gulfton, which don’t have those, end up suffering. So I think Houston makes a good case for the need for zoning, and the rest of the book really talks about the ways that zoning can achieve the goals that Americans at least have expressed a desire for, even if the zoning doesn’t give it to us.

Aaron: I sometimes hear this alternate argument that Houston’s lack of zoning has helped maintain Houston’s affordability. Is there any credence to that?

Sara Bronin: In any situation where you have light or no regulation, the cost of compliance is going to be reduced, and that’ll be passed on to renters or homebuyers. Certainly that’s the case in Houston, and I don’t make the argument that those people who’ve asserted that Houston’s affordability in part results from its lack of zoning are wrong. Rather, what I try to say is that affordability may not be the only thing, and that with better zoning, we can create not only affordable communities, but communities that are well connected, that are beautiful, that are amenity rich, and that with zoning, that brings that kind of approach to more places. By definition, we will have more options and more affordability because there will be more types of places where people can access those kinds of environments.

Aaron: So Houston lacks zoning, and in other cases we have bad zoning codes. What would a good zoning code look like?

Sara Bronin: A good zoning code would have as its goals the creation of lots of different neighborhood types that are accessible and well connected, and that take sustainability and affordability concerns in mind. In my view, first and foremost, a zoning code has to allow for a range of housing options, and it has to enable people who live in those homes to access a wide variety of amenities, be it retail stores or services, healthcare or parks within walking distance. Our communities have for far too long been designed around the car, and a good zoning code would instead think about designing around people.

Doug: Let’s jump over to California. It’s another colorful example in the book, the televangelist Robert Schuller and the program The Hour of Power. What happened in Garden Grove, California, with Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral?

Sara Bronin: So I stumbled upon this preacher from the 1950s whose services were held I think initially on the roof of a drive in. He was preaching to people as they were sitting in their cars, and eventually he amassed enough in the bank to build a rather fantastical facility close to Disneyland out in Anaheim. And that Crystal Cathedral uniquely had a wall that could be retracted so that he could continue the preaching to the people in the cars.

Sara Bronin: Just kind of thinking about that development surrounded by not only the cars that were listening to the reverend in the parking lot, but also the sea of parking, Garden Grove is an extremely car-oriented city overall and has huge parking requirements, in addition to what you see for the Crystal Cathedral. And I guess I would point readers who are fascinated by parking just as I am to Henry Grabar’s book that came out last year or the year before that. And what a parking lot says to people who are walking by is this is a community that cares about cars and doesn’t care about people. So to me, the whole story is a sort of sad example of the perceptions that powerful people have about the importance of catering to cars. In this case, again, tailoring worship services, buildings and huge developments to cars.

Doug: Sara, let’s talk about a place where zoning has been used for very destructive purposes, but that is also clawing its way back with better zoning, and that’s Hartford. And you have a personal and professional relationship with the city of Hartford and its zoning.

Sara Bronin: So Hartford is Connecticut’s capital city, a beautiful and historic city that is graced with lots of parks, and it maintains a lot of its historic architecture, much of which is situated in walkable neighborhoods that 80-100 years ago were served by a streetcar. Within that context, Hartford has changed significantly over the past hundred years, reckoning, as many post-industrial cities have, with disinvestment and a perception, particularly in the 1950s, that cities were not the desirable place to be.

Sara Bronin: In response, perhaps, the city in the 1950s and ’60s significantly changed its zoning code to cater to suburban residents who left Hartford and moved outward as more suburban communities were developed and more towns beefed up their residential subdivisions. So those commuters, they may have moved out of Hartford, but their workplaces were still in the city.

Sara Bronin: So if you look at Albany Avenue, which is one of the several corridors by which Hartford suburban commuters access the city, you will see that it takes on sort of a visual identity that almost entirely revolves around the car. You see car washes, gas stations, fast food drive-thrus, and other retail and service stores that are primarily meant to serve people in cars. Meanwhile, Albany Avenue cuts through a neighborhood where there’s lots of two- and three-family homes, where many, many of the residents lack access to cars in their households, where many residents are very low income. Albany is one of the most dangerous roads in the state for pedestrians. Fortunately, there’s been a big investment in a whole avenue street redesign, and that has really helped to reduce pedestrian casualties and fatalities. But the avenue itself, from a physical perspective, was dangerous.

Sara Bronin: Similarly, with all those cars driving through the neighborhood, this had some negative health effects. People in the Albany Avenue neighborhood have some of the highest rates of asthma in the state of Connecticut. I think Albany Avenue provides a really good lesson for how bad zoning can seriously hurt our communities. And in the book I write about how Albany Avenue really became a place where we tested how a new zoning code might slowly, over time, reverse those trends.

Sarah: I was so struck by your description of Albany Avenue, and it’s just completely dedicated to the car to the detriment and danger of the people who live there. You were the chair of the Planning and Zoning Commission in Hartford, so maybe you could talk about some of the reforms that have been implemented in Hartford and what effect those have had and might have going into the future.

Sara Bronin: You can maybe guess that one of the first things that we thought of was to ban those types of auto-oriented uses from being located on the avenue again. So the ones that were there can stay—Connecticut doesn’t allow local governments to phase out bad uses. That’s something that probably they should think about. But in the absence of that, we banned new car washes and gas stations and standalone parking lots. We also enacted a form-based code which requires new construction to comply with some design guidelines. For example, for Albany Avenue, we took the few remaining historic buildings that were left on the avenue and developed a set of rules for future development.

Sara Bronin: So those rules, among other things, require for the buildings to be pushed up close to the sidewalk to create more of a walking environment, require the buildings to be two, three, four stories tall, which is consistent with the historic heights of buildings on Albany Avenue and inconsistent with the strip malls that appeared in the last half of the 20th century, and required much more green space, tree planting, and even in some cases, stormwater management incentives, so that an avenue that was largely concrete could start to see a little bit of nature as well. So I think with all of those changes, over time as development gets proposed for the avenue, we’ll hopefully see in the next 50 years a complete changeover there and in other places in the city.

Aaron: You mentioned form-based codes, and I think that’s worth pausing on a little bit, because so much of what makes zoning tricky is it’s just really hard for people to understand zoning codes. You know, you go into these public processes, and typically the people who have time to show up at meetings are people with single-family homes and cars, and they’re sort of fighting for the status quo, and you’re also fighting over these really complex chunks of text and code that are just—they’re difficult for laypeople to understand. So can you talk a little bit about form-based zoning codes and how they help facilitate a better public process?

Sara Bronin: So my background is as an architect, and like many people, I see things better when they’re laid out visually than in words. A form-based code essentially puts regulations that could be in words into drawings and clear rules about things like the roof pitch or the building height or the percentage of windows on a facade, and lays out pretty clearly how a building that’s—we call them “building types” in Hartford, how a building that’s to be built to this building type must be built.

Sara Bronin: I think a form-based code can really help people to understand what’s expected of them when they go for a permit. Not only a property owner who’s seeking to build something on their lot, but also helps neighbors understand what to expect. A form-based code might also help to increase the beauty and the aesthetics in a community and make it more visually consistent. That’s not to say that we should be promoting cookie-cutter buildings, nor does it mean that a form-based code should require decorative flourishes that are so expensive that it drives up the cost of the building. But simple and clear rules in a form-based code can really achieve a lot of important goals.

Sara Bronin: By and large, we have exempted from a public hearing almost everything in the code. I think we are still one of the only large cities in the country that actually allows for every housing building—so any building with housing units—to be built as a right without a public hearing. And so you were just mentioning, oh, you know, what happens at these public hearings. People come and they protest perfectly fine and reasonable proposals based on sometimes speculative opinions about what they might bring. But in our code, we’ve avoided that by setting out the rules clearly in advance, in consultation with community members who help draft the code start to finish. And then we let the planning department staff administer the code for housing as applications come in. This has resulted in a much smoother process for everyone, and it’s taken out some of the angst that you see in other communities.

Doug: You’re right that as a result of these changes to the public process, almost 50 percent of the land in Hartford allows multifamily housing as of right, and 60 percent allows duplexes as of right, which is just a massive contrast to a lot of other cities. You mentioned Minneapolis in the book, and you talk about how so much of that city, despite the fact that they have done quite a lot of work to reform their code and do all kinds of stuff, is zoned single family only.

Sara Bronin: Minneapolis recently underwent a series of zoning changes that changes that zoning that was previously single family to allow for more units. That’s currently being challenged in court, which is silly because those changes were made in accordance with the plan and with wide public support. But you’re right that Hartford is an outlier in the amount of housing that is allowed in the city. Now cities like Hartford, historic cities, have always been dense, have always kind of allowed that give and take. Hartford’s a 400-year-old city. It was built in 1635, so throughout the first almost three centuries of its existence, of course, there was no zoning, and so the community changed and its buildings changed with it as needs change. And I think when researchers look at historic neighborhoods, they see greater density, in some cases far greater density than non historic neighborhoods, and certainly greater density than those outlying suburbs that are being built today.

Doug: So we’ve been talking a lot about housing. Let’s also talk about businesses and the types of businesses that can be located in certain neighborhoods. What does the Food Network show, Ace of Cakes have to do with zoning?

Sara Bronin: You know, it’s one of those shows that I watched years ago, and you always see images of Baltimore and of the, I guess you call it a light batch manufacturing facility where this quirky baker and his crew make these cakes that, in many cases, depict scenes from around Baltimore, famous buildings and parks and so on. As I was writing about this book, I would basically take a place that I was interested in and look at the zoning code to see what it says. In the case of Baltimore, that neighborhood, Remington, where the facility is located, has been an industrial area for many years, lots of worker housing, and had maybe seen hard times as the closing of the factories, as we’ve seen across the east coast and as the economy has changed.

Sara Bronin: So in part to try to revive some of these buildings, the city rezoned its code to allow for a much broader mix of uses. And so this neighborhood has seen that kind of development in the wake of a rezoning. And I think that helped to spur on some of the rezoning and the new thinking about zoning that is happening in Baltimore. So the reason I like that particular site is not only, of course, because the zoning change that makes it a great story, but because it kind of illustrates the progression in manufacturing, the changes in the economy, and the need for zoning to keep up, to make things more flexible, to allow for housing around, to allow for coffee shops. There’s a bookstore, fitness gym, you know, all kinds of things that are happening in and around that place, which was once just industrial but needed to diversify in terms of—in terms of the zoning which reflects or should reflect a community’s aspirations for itself.

Doug: You know, there’s a bad side of zoning where it can just freeze things in amber, creating the housing crisis that we’re seeing in so many cities. And then there’s the other side where it just bulldozes everything and erases history. You give us the example of Nashville and Music Row, historic part of that city, historic in American culture in terms of country music. Like, every big country music star from Dolly Parton to Taylor Swift has a connection to Music Row. And you talk about the challenges that it is facing. Now Nashville, like a lot of cities, has a massive housing affordability crisis, and that area is getting redeveloped, and lots of housing is going up, but it means that the historic buildings, old studios and music venues are being torn down. Where’s the balance?

Sara Bronin: Music Row, I think, is a really interesting neighborhood in that it was in part created by a zoning change that happened many decades ago that shifted what were once residential areas, and I think undesirably for residents of Nashville at the time, boarding houses and so on, and it actually enabled the opposite of what we see in lots of American cities, which is it enabled commercial uses. And so you had people from the music industry start to set up shop in what were formerly homes as a result of a zoning change, and then they created this ecosystem that has supported the development of the Nashville country music scene ever since.

Sara Bronin: The issues that Nashville is facing are exactly as you say, which is there is always a demand for housing to live in vibrant cities like Nashville and across the country, and never more so. And so some of these places which once allowed and enabled a creative ecosystem to flourish are being threatened. And to me, it’s not so much in this case about the buildings themselves, because if you wander around Music Row, I mean, I don’t know, I find many of them not super remarkable from an architecture standpoint. But what might be lost is the kind of cultural community that was able to thrive there decades ago and should be thriving today.

Sara Bronin: So how does Nashville deal with that? And there’s a lot of different ways to deal with that. My general approach is always well, zone for housing as dense as the city can manage. But Nashville has been considering what’s called a “transferable development right tool,” which would allow the owners of some of the most historic places in the area to auction off the right to build to someone in the surrounding area, maybe somebody even farther away in Nashville. And by auctioning off that right, they would then sort of get sufficient proceeds to preserve themselves, the use that they have there in place.

Sara Bronin: In tandem with that, the city is considering—should consider re-enabling what people call “third places,” the informal places that the creative types tend to gather, be it bars or coffee shops, and allow those to be sprinkled about the neighborhood as they perhaps once were. That kind of use combined with maybe the more nine-to-five-ish office uses of Music Row executives could really help to kind of revive the vibe of that community. And I’ll just say for your listeners, Music Row is not where the music happens. That happens downtown. Music Row is where the business happens, and that’s a really important part of the city’s identity. And zoning does play a pretty important role there, and I’m interested to see what Nashville does.

Sarah: So talking about music, there’s a whole chapter in the book about nightlife, because nightlife poses its own set of problems for cities—and opportunities as well. And you talk specifically about Austin, Texas, which, of course, is a place that’s famous for its music scene, its nightlife scene, and the way that that has evolved over the years. So what does South By Southwest and the music scene in Austin teach us about zoning?

Sara Bronin: I think this is another example of a place that I’ve experienced. I did go to college in Austin and visited 6th Street, which is the main drag for live music and nightclubs and bars. And watching how the street has evolved, kind of listening to critiques of the street, it got me thinking, well, what’s the role of zoning here? But I think my overall realization when I was sifting through the Austin code and some of the others I mentioned in that chapter, was that even zoning experts don’t think a lot about the way that zoning can affect nightlife. There’s nightlife in every city, whether it’s exposed or not, and I think that it’s something that should be brought to the fore, which is why I devoted a whole chapter to it.

Sara Bronin: As for South By Southwest, that was a festival that really gained steam while I was a college student in the late 1990s, and has since turned into just a full-blown citywide economic engine. And of course, it’s hugely important, too, for the creative scene and for the identity of Austin now internationally. And so I don’t want to take anything away from the importance of that event for Austin, for Texas, and for the world. But I do think that in some ways, it has led to a bit of a commodification of nightlife there in a way that might not be to the benefit of the year-round residents of the city, and even for the long-term health of the small businesses that are located in and around 6th Street. So when it comes to zoning, there’s lots of different approaches to bars and nightclubs in particular. The approach we took in Hartford, which is to take a serious look at applications for new bars, new nightclubs, and have a bunch of requirements on those. I didn’t see so many in the Austin code, and you can also see just by virtue of development on 6th Street, that they’re clustered together. And maybe the clustering is not so great either.

Sarah: It’s actually known as Dirty 6th, right? I mean, that says something about how people see it.

Sara Bronin: And I think that’s changed over time. And city leaders right now are trying to get a handle on lots of different ways to tackle some of the unintended and negative consequences of where we are on 6th Street, and zoning is going to have to be part of that solution.

Aaron: I have a sort of a general—I don’t know, I guess it’s a politics question in a way. But Sarah was just talking about—Sarah Goodyear was just talking on her way over here about how much the Gowanus Canal area of Brooklyn has changed, including suddenly a much cleaner canal. And that was due to a really big rezoning. This old industrial section of Brooklyn, suddenly in the last year and a half has all of these new residential towers popping up. It’s really quite remarkable. And that’s good, but it’s also there’s a lot of public suspicion and upset around that rezoning, as there often are in that this area that was sort of defunct and had some cool warehouse spaces and things like that, suddenly property owners down in the Gowanus were made incredibly wealthy by this rezoning, and real estate developers were able to make a lot of money. So you often have this phenomenon where rezonings, you know, the public is suspicious that they’re just being done to make developers and property owners richer. And I’m curious, how do you deal with that?

Sara Bronin: So the Gowanus rezoning is really interesting. And of course, the canal didn’t clean itself. So there’s a lot of public dollars that went into the actual cleanup, and that then enabled and unlocked the potential for the rezoned land in a way that again signals a significant multifaceted effort to change the nature of that community. You’re right that in some cases, rezonings can increase property values for people whose lands are affected, and give them a gift that other property owners might not have.

Sara Bronin: On the other hand, those people have to then use the zoning code to build something, and you hope that zoning doesn’t overly enrich a few, especially a politically connected few, to the detriment of others. You hope that aligning financial incentives to redevelop can actually have public benefits, not just in the form of increased property taxes that those people then pay, but also, as you point out in the Gowanus Canal example, in the form of a land use that is arguably much better than what came before it. So I think in many cases, especially when a community is doing a significant rezoning, you kind of have to look at it as: is the benefit of the rezoning to the public worth the potential inequities that are created? And I would say in that example, probably the answer is yes. New York City should make development of land clearer. It should make a development of land less expensive, and particularly for housing. And one of the ways to do that is to continue to rezone and to refine its zoning code.

Sarah: It did, however, encounter some really, really stiff opposition from people who had been in the neighborhood historically, artists and others who had, you know, really made the most of the industrial shells that were there previously. And I think it really speaks to the way that once a zoning code is in place, then it becomes very, very hard for people to re-envision it.

Doug: And I will say, taking off my podcast host hat and putting on my community board member hat, the Gowanus rezoning has come with all of this flood mitigation stuff that developers have to build into their projects, so stormwater retention tanks, green roofs. And there is a case to be made that the neighborhood will be better equipped to handle future flooding than if it had just stayed the same.

Aaron: Yeah. I mean, it was really an exemplary rezoning in a lot of ways. They also reduced parking requirements substantially. I thought it was a pretty great rezoning.

Sara Bronin: I was just gonna add one thing about the city of New York, which is that we have mapped it in the National Zoning Atlas, and it has 377 different zoning districts. That’s not even actually the largest number in the country. There’s a county in California with more, and the city of Boston has more. But the fact that this city, which is very complex of course, which has lots of different conditions across the boroughs, has that many zoning districts suggests that it’s probably just on its face, a really hard thing to understand, a really hard place to do business, a really hard place for even homeowners out in Staten Island to figure out what they can do with their properties. Can they build an accessory dwelling unit or not?

Sara Bronin: I think New York City and some of these places that we’ve seen with a hundred or more zoning districts really speak to the complexity of zoning, and in many cases, the unnecessary complexity of zoning. Different provisions, different nuances that have accreted over time, and that cities also need to look at and sweep away in many instances. You don’t need regulations for each and every element of a development in many cases.

Doug: So Sara, on that note, your book ends in the conclusion addressing people directly who say, “Just abolish zoning.” You know, you start with Houston, which is basically zoning free, and you go into all these examples—many very colorful and entertaining—about places that have creatively tweaked their zoning code. What do you say to the people listening to this who say, “No, no, no. The Houston example is right. Let’s just get rid of it, let people build what they want, where they want, and all problems will be solved”?

Sara Bronin: I think your listeners tend to be the kind of people who care about creating places that are accessible to lots of different kinds of people, moving in particular in lots of different kinds of ways. And I would say to your average listener, we’re not gonna get the communities that we want unless we help people, private property owners, understand the rules of the game that will allow us to get to those more transportation diverse, more housing diverse and more beautiful places.

Sara Bronin: For the average American, one who hasn’t necessarily come around to the view that cars are part of the problem, they might be asking, “Well, what’s in better zoning for me?” And I think what better zoning can provide are opportunities for people to live more fulfilling lives, whether they know it or not. Lives that allow you to walk down the street to pick up something or run an errand, that allow you to get to know your neighbors, that allow you to live in a walkable community, that allow you to have some spontaneous interactions that you might not have living alone in a detached house in deep suburbia.

Sara Bronin: Essentially, my bias is that cities, at many different scales, are great places for people to live. And so my book on zoning, while it certainly covers rural areas and promotes changes to suburban zoning codes, my book is really a love story about cities, and the ways that we can create not just urban but urbane neighborhoods. Because we’ve done so much to prohibit those kinds of places from ever being built again that we need to change that curve, reverse that, swing the pendulum, and change our zoning rules so that we can get the kinds of places that enable us to get out of our cars and see the world.

Sarah: Thank you so much, Sara, for coming on The War on Cars.

Sara Bronin: Thank you so much for having me. I admire what you do and really enjoyed the conversation.

Sarah: Sarah Bronin’s new book, Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes the World is out now. You can pick up a copy wherever books are sold, and at our shop on Bookshop.org. We’ll put a link in the show notes.

Doug: If you like what we do with the podcast, please support us on Patreon. Just go to TheWaronCars.org, click “Support Us” and pitch in starting at just $3 per month. We will send you stickers, and you’ll get discounts on merch and access to dozens of bonus episodes. So thanks.

Aaron: We want to thank everyone who supports us on Patreon, including our top supporters, Charley Gee of Human Powered Law in Portland, Oregon, Virginia Baker, Mark Hedlund and the Parking Reform Network. And a special thanks to the Helen and William Mazer Foundation for all of their support.

Sarah: This episode was recorded by Justin Fernandez at the Brooklyn Podcasting Studio. It was edited by Ali Lemer. Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear. Our transcriptions are done by Russell Gragg. I’m Sarah Goodyear.

Doug: I’m Doug Gordon.

Aaron: I’m Aaron Naparstek, and this is The War on Cars.

Aaron: Guys, I think we should change our tagline to “The War on Cars: A love letter to cities.”

Sarah: [laughs]

Doug: That’s right.

Sarah: Beautiful.