Home, Sweet Home

Abstract

This paper explores the emergence of zoning in early twentieth-century America against the background of zoning in two European countries: Germany and England. The common interpretation is that zoning was first used in these countries and then imported to America. But this interpretation neglects the extent to which American zoning began to deviate from European traditions early on. Based on primary and secondary archival sources, this paper tells a story about two aspects of zoning that set U.S. practice apart from that in Europe. The first is the purely residential district and the second is the purely single-family residential district. The European–American comparison helps highlight the distinct nature of U.S. land-use regulation.

Planning Communities for All Ages

“…Creating child and age-friendly communities requires changes in land use and zoning. Zoning historically separated the private sphere-home-from the public spherework (Hirt 2013). This history of segregated land use, which isolated home and family, has its legacy in increased transportation burdens for women and greater isolation for children and seniors (Markovich and Hendler 2006;Rapino and Cooke 2011).…”

“…Housing policy is also shifting (Hirt 2013;Lehning 2012;Lipman, Lubell, and Salomon 2011). The rise in single person households requires identification of new housing types, such as accessory flats.…”

Representative Bureaucracy, Age-Friendly Planning, and the Role of Gender, Public Engagement, and Professional Management

“…This makes paradigm change difficult. Feminist planners have criticized the gender bias in zoning that privileges single family dwellings and separation of public and private spheres (Hirt, 2013). As residents change and needs shift, zoning codes need to be updated.…”

“…Lowi’s (1972) typology of policy arenas suggests that redistributive policy arenas will be more likely to be represented by women, while regulatiory, distributive, and constituent policies will have an imbalance toward men. For example, gendered power differences in economic development and infrastructure planning agencies (Siemiatycki et al, 2020) limit the voice of women, and this gender bias gets reflected in the focus and choice of planning policies (Johnson & Crum-Cano, 2011), and in the lack of attention to paradigm change to address the needs of women and the aging (Hirt, 2013: Micklow & Warner, 2014; Zhang et al, 2023).…”

Integrating tiny and small homes into the urban landscape: History, land use barriers and potential solutions

“…Some scholars have persuasively asserted that our entire system of American land use law is biased towards the affluent homeowner (Boudreaux, 2011;Bratt et al, 2013). The founding fathers of zoning never intended this; as a matter of fact, historic German zoning practices aimed to mix social classes as a means of achieving diverse communities that met the various needs of residents (Talen, 2012;Hirt, 2013). In the United States, however, zoning has frequently been employed as a method to keep poverty out of sight and to relegate the poor to small, often undesirable sections of communities (Fischel, 2004;Boudreaux, 2011).…”