In Defense of Boring Zoning

In June of 2024 the California state legislature passed a small, technical revision to a state law most people have never heard of, called the Housing Accountability Act. The revision was twenty-three pages long, was not covered by any major California newspaper at the time, and is, by my estimation, the single most consequential piece of climate policy the state has passed in twenty years. It has nothing to do with electric cars and almost nothing to do with the grid. It has to do with the question of where, in a given city, you are allowed to build a four-story building.

This is, I am aware, not the most stirring opening to an essay. I have lost subscribers to less. But the boring policy is the policy that works, and most of what we will call the climate transition, in twenty years’ time, will turn out to have been the cumulative effect of a hundred boring policies that did the actual work.

What zoning is

A zoning map is a map of what a city has agreed, in advance, to allow on each parcel of land within its borders. Single-family residential. Multi-family residential. Commercial. Industrial. Mixed-use. Open space. Most American cities have maps that were drawn, in their broad strokes, between 1920 and 1955. The maps have been amended over and over, but the basic shape is generally older than your grandparents.

A 1947 zoning map is not a neutral document. It is, in most American cities, a record of how the local political class wanted the city to be sorted by race and income, written into law. The history of American urban segregation is, more than anything else, a history of zoning. That is not a contested claim in the academic literature; it is the consensus.¹

But the consequence of an old zoning map, in 2026, is not just historical. It is that the map decides what gets built, and what gets built decides who can afford to live in a city, and who can afford to live in a city decides how far they have to drive to get to a job. And how far people have to drive is, in a state like California, the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions. The zoning map is a climate document, even though it was not written as one.

The zoning map is a climate document, even though nobody wrote it as one.

The slow, technical fix

For the last six years, California has been doing what is, in policy terms, an unusual thing. It has been quietly, technically, and unspectacularly disabling the parts of municipal zoning that prevent housing from being built near transit. SB 9, in 2021, allowed lot splits and duplexes on most single-family parcels. SB 10, the same year, allowed up to ten-unit buildings in transit-rich areas. SB 423, in 2023, extended the streamlined approval process for affordable housing. The 2024 revision to the Housing Accountability Act tightened the screws further: a city that does not meet its state-mandated housing target now loses certain land-use powers it has had since 1953.

None of these laws is glamorous. None of them has been the subject of a documentary. Several of them passed in committee on a 5-2 vote that was not covered by the Sacramento Bee. They are, collectively, doing more for the climate than any single piece of legislation passed by the state in my lifetime, because they are quietly remaking the shape of where Californians are allowed to live, and the shape of where Californians live decides how much they drive, and how much they drive decides the emissions.

A confession of method

I should be honest about a methodological problem here. I am, by training and inclination, a person who likes the boring fix. I left municipal government in 2021 in part because I had concluded that the most useful work I could do was probably to write about exactly this kind of policy — the kind that does not generate a press conference and does not produce a satisfying enemy.

There is, I am aware, a respectable counter-position. The counter-position says that the climate emergency requires emergency responses, and that emergency responses require a clear villain and a clear deadline, and that boring incrementalism is what got us into this in the first place. I am not unsympathetic to that argument. I just do not think it is right.

The historical record of climate policy that actually moves the emissions curve is, almost without exception, a record of technical, unglamorous, often regulatory changes that happened slowly and persistently for many years. California’s vehicle-emission standards. The European Union’s building energy directives. Denmark’s offshore-wind feed-in tariffs. The American Inflation Reduction Act’s technology-neutral tax credits. The pattern is the pattern.²

What this looks like at the parcel level

I spent last fall walking a single block in West Berkeley with a friend who is a small architect. The block has, on its east side, a row of single-family houses from the 1920s. On its west side, the same block has — since the 2022 zoning amendments — four new four-story buildings, each with about thirty units, going up next to the Ashby BART station. The four buildings will, when finished, house roughly six hundred people on the same amount of land that previously housed fourteen. Almost all of those six hundred people will be able to walk to BART in under five minutes.

I am not, for the record, going to argue that the new buildings are beautiful. They are not. They are the slightly mediocre architecture of cost-constrained mid-rise multifamily, and they will, in twenty years, look like the slightly mediocre architecture of the 1970s does today. That is fine. The point is not the architecture. The point is that, in twenty years, six hundred people are going to be living a five-minute walk from a train station instead of a forty-five-minute drive from a job. Multiply that, parcel by parcel, across a state of forty million people, and you have a climate policy.

The boring policy is the policy that works. The zoning map is a climate document. The slow, technical fix is doing the slow, technical work. I would like, in twenty years, for it to be the kind of work we look back on with the same affection we now reserve for the interstate highway system, which is also boring, also technical, and also reshaped the country in ways nobody at the time fully understood.

In the meantime, here is to the staff lawyers at the Department of Housing and Community Development, who are not getting written about, and who are doing the work.