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How Overregulation Creates Sprawl (Even In A City Without Zoning), Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

Numerous commentators have suggested that the spread-out, automobile-dependent urban form (often referred to as "sprawl") that dominates metropolitan America is at least partially caused by government regulation of land use. Other commentators argue that the fate of Houston, Texas may seem to rebut that theory. Houston is America's only large city without a formal zoning code. Yet Houston is as automobile-dependent and sprawling as many cities with zoning. It could therefore be argued that automobile-dependent sprawl is the inevitable result of the free market, based on the following chain of logic: Assumption 1: Because Houston lacks zoning, Houston has an …