Finding Urbanism in Strange Places: Reviewing Pro-Housing Parts of Three Non-Housing Books

I see zoning like the sixth sense kid sees dead people. So can you!

What do a conservative catholic journalist, a British feminist activist, and a liberal arts history professor have in common?

They all hate strict residential zoning! (Ba dum chsh)

During my eclectic readings over the past year, I’ve come across urbanism in unexpected places.¹ Pro-housing, pro-transit advocates often get stuck in our own little internet bubbles, but our goals resonate with different people for completely different reasons than the generic hipster city slicker. Whether helping families raise kids, improving women’s safety and accessibility, or impacting the fate of the American empire, urbanist ideas impact broad facets of our lives.

In this very special edition of Hot Urbanist Thots—a semi-regular column in which I summarize my favorite recent housing reads—join me on a tour through three books where I encountered urbanism in the non-urbanist wild.

Urbanism as pronatalism

Tim Carney is not your stereotypical urbanist. He writes for the right-wing Washington Examiner and has spoken at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Yet in his 2024 book Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be, Carney spends an entire chapter criticizing car-centric urban planning with a chapter titled “Want Fecundity in the Sheets? Give Us Walkability in the Streets.” Awkward, and I love it.

The chapter starts with a journey into “Car Hell,” a Carney shorthand for the car-oriented suburban model urban planners embraced from the 1950s to today. Car Hell forces parents to spend hours driving their kids everywhere, robs children of independence, and isolates families from each other. Between 1969 and 2016, the number of kids who walked to school fell from more than 40% to around 10%. In a subsection titled “Car Seats As Contraception,” Carney describes parents reaching between “a slurry of goldfish, toddler saliva, and butt sweat” to buckle a car seat. Vivid stuff.²

Some parts feel right even if I’m not sure solid evidence backs them up. Carney argues “High home prices and rents are the single biggest cost obstacle to family formation,” citing a single working paper from 2019. The finding matches my intuition, but birth rates are even lower in countries with more reasonable housing costs like Japan and Korea so I’m not fully convinced of causality yet.³

Still, his not-quite-fully-substantiated assertions inspire Carney to support a YIMBY wish list. Mixed-use zoning that allows more apartments and local businesses in the same areas as single-family homes. Elimination of setbacks that cause dead, empty front yards. Single-stair reform, rules that make it harder to build small, affordable apartment buildiings because the second staircase requirement eats up space and cost. He gets into some nicely wonky weeds.

Carney neatly frames his proposed solutions as “‘Kid walkability’ versus ‘hipster walkability.’” He’s not against people driving to work or intent on putting trendy bars all over the suburbs, but he supports urban planning that ensures “houses, fields, a few restaurants or grocery stores are within a 15 minute walk or at least a bike ride, with safe, slow streets and ample sidewalks to provide child-friendly access.”

If “kid walkability” makes the 15-minute city concept more appealing to a conservative audience, then I’ll trash my urbanist hipster ways as much as anyone.

I found “Family Unfriendly” while looking for information connecting housing costs to family formation and childbirth rates. I didn’t find quite the rigor of information I was hoping for, but the portions of the book I read are filled with quotable lines and quips.

Urbanism as feminism

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez explores the many ways that the gender gap in data perpetuates existing inequalities between men and women, including in urban planning. A large part of differences in experience with the built environment derive from the ongoing disparity in caretaking responsibilities between men and women: Even in our “woke” world, women do 75% of the world’s unpaid childcare work, three times more care taking labor than men.

Their outsized care taking responsibilities mean the average woman with children, especially working women, have different travel patterns than the average man. Whereas men are more likely to commute to and from work in linear patterns, women are more likely to “trip chain.” Trip chaining refers to travel patterns that involve completing multiple tasks in multiple locations. Dropping off and picking up the kids, grabbing groceries, swinging by the doctor, attending sports practices or play dates or parks, often while taking shifts at work before, after, or in between—these trips often require going to a variety of areas.

Modern urban planning largely fails to accommodate these needs. Criado Perez illustrates how many public transit systems around the world, such as those in London and Chicago, are designed radially. Lines run from residential suburbs into commercial urban centers, forming a “spider web” shape designed to facilitate commutes. In this design, there’s no direct connection between neighborhoods; everything runs toward the city center. As a result, trip chaining between nearby neighborhoods often requires going from the outskirts to the center and back to a different outskirts, adding unnecessary travel time.

Residential zoning makes the problem worse by separating housing and necessary commercial spaces like grocery stores far from each other, weaving “a male bias into the fabric of cities and around our world.”

The specter of sexual assault looms over the zoning and transportation conversation, and Criado Perez comes prepared with some brutal statistics. More than 60% of public transit riders are women, yet sexual assault is rampant on transit. In 2016, 90% of French women reported experiencing sexual harassment of some form on public transit. Just mind bogglingly bad. Adding panic alarms, digital schedules, transparent bus shelters, and sufficient lighting could reduce the risk. But most transit agencies don’t even collect data on where assaults occur, so they don’t know where interventions would be most effective.

Optimistically, Criado Perez shares success stories from Vienna and London, where modest, low-cost changes to transit systems and street design made transit safer and more reliable. Urbanism holds the keys to planning accessible communities for all genders, but urbanists must proactively seek data to understand how we can design systems that meet everyone’s needs.

“Invisible Woman” presented compelling information, loaded with data and anecdotes illustrating how data—and the absence of data—often influences women’s experience in the world.

Urbanism as anti-imperialism

History book How to Hide an Empire by Northwestern professor Daniel Immerwahr only covers zoning in passing, an aside squeezed into a larger narrative about former President Herbert Hoover’s obsession with standardization while he was Secretary of Commerce.⁴

Nonetheless, it was an informative aside. Today, we take state and local residential zoning powers for granted. In the 1920s, residential zoning powers were still conceptually new. A few cities had passed them, but they didn’t have a clear legal framework.

Hoover believed broad standardization among private companies would unlock new market efficiencies, and he thought the Department of Commerce could help facilitate new standards. He successfully encouraged dozens of industries to voluntarily embrace standardization of everything from the size of cereal boxes to the width of a screw thread. As part of his pro-standards world view, Hoover also supported zoning.⁵

At the time, despite its racist origins, many early 20th century social scientists and politicians saw zoning as part of a progressive platform for bringing order to the supposedly chaotic growth of cities.

To promulgate zoning, Hoover convened hundreds of engineers, developers, architects, and other housing industry professionals to draft model legislation legalizing local zoning laws. The draft legislation these convenings produced became the Standard State Zoning Enabling Acts (SZEA), the blueprint states used to give local governments residential zoning authority as we know it today. Every state voluntarily adopted a SZEA in some form or another, a powerful example of Hoover’s effectiveness spreading the gospel of standards—for better or worse.

Hoover himself embraced zoning for utopian idealism, not racism. He actually refused to sign a racial covenant, a clause legally barring nonwhite people from buying the home, for his own house. Though Hoover’s embrace of local zoning authority “provided the pretext for local officials to create racial segregation,” he himself seemed more interested in broad standardization for the sake of efficiency, as he perceived it.

“How to Hide an Empire” gave an eye-opening, nuanced overview of U.S. empire over time, without the sort of kneejerk anti-U.S. sentiment I’ve found in other lefty histories. Critical at times, certainly, while also fair and informative. The book itself didn’t take a strong stance on urbanist issues, yet it filled in a piece of housing history that was new to me.

Final Thoughts

These three books reminded me a core lesson of political persuasion: Urbanism can’t be merely a trendy hipster city slicker concern. Our zoning maps, building codes, and transit systems shape much more than our skylines. As much as I personally might want to prance around on a bike or bus or train to access all my earthly needs because I think that would be inherently good, the ideas of zoning liberalization and transit accessibility can appeal to other people for a wide range of reasons.

If we want to build a broader pro-housing, pro-transit coalition, we need to keep looking for reasons to support urbanism in strange places.

Image made by prompting Gemini to Create a cover photo illustrating urbanism in strange places, one in a cave-like setting, one in a forest, and another underwater. The AI has a techno-futurist taste; it made the exact same image when I asked for images that look more like modern cities.

1. Thank you Oakland Library system for forgiving my late fees 🙏🏻

2. Other choice lines from Family Unfriendly:

“If you’re currently living in Car Hell, you have to wonder whether any of the planners had ever heard of children—or had ever been children themselves.”

“‘We do not encounter one another in cars. We grind along together anonymously, often in misery’” (quoting a Vox essay by David Roberts).

“It’s a crime against families that so many local governments deliberately make walkability impossible.”

3. While writing this piece, Kelsey Piper published a piece in The Argument titled "Pronatalism isn't just for illiberal freaks," with helpful data references:

"One analysis found that Federal Housing Administration mortgage insurance programs encouraging the rise of homeownership likely drove 10% of the excess births of the baby boom, credit for three million new babies. An analysis of a housing lottery in Brazil found that being awarded housing when between the ages of 20 and 25 increased the odds of having children by 32% and the number of children by 33%."

Those are pretty impressive results! Though the studies merit more investigation.

4. Admittedly, I am writing this based on my memory of a book I read over a year ago + a summary I wrote at the time + some online fact checking because the library waitlist for How to Hide an Empire is too long for me to check it out again in time for this article to go out.

5. Hoover probably never imagined the clusterfuck most zoning codes would become, each cities' code unique, with dozens and sometimes hundreds of zones, none of which are interchangeable between local jurisdictions or state lines. Zoning, in its lawless inconsistency, probably turned into Hoover's nightmare, in many ways the opposite of true standardization. The few codes that existed in the 1920s were much simpler; Hoover had no way to know the perversion they would become.