Why zoning does more harm than good

By Susan Darwin19 December 2025

Thomas Kuhn was a philosopher whose groundbreaking 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is credited with bringing the term paradigm shift to pop culture. Kuhn described how scientific communities stick to established paradigms, even as evidence of their limitations mounted. Widely accepted paradigms for understanding and interpreting knowledge don’t crumble under the weight of mere data. Instead, they tend to persist until a crisis emerges—when anomalies become so disruptive that a shift to a new paradigm is unavoidable.

Zoning was established in the early 20th century as a way to protect homeowners from unwanted industrial developments nearby. It was pitched as a way to separate heavy industry from residential areas, which made practical sense at a time when factories polluted neighborhoods. Early industrial cities were notorious for their noise, filth, sickness, and all-around misery.

The wealthy had options, so they’d put some distance between themselves and factory life. You can imagine that the elite would want to guarantee never having to deal with the industrial riffraff. Zoning would give such guarantees. You can also imagine that social workers and other empaths would want to guarantee the poor and middle class had the same separation from the dirty parts of a city as the elites had. Zoning would give such guarantees.

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But zoning wasn’t used merely as a tool to separate heavy industry from residential zones. Local power brokers segregated all the land uses—separating single-family homes from apartments, office buildings from retail, residential from retail, and so on. The regulatory framework became so normalized in America that it’s hard for people to imagine life without it: “Without zoning, my neighbor might build a strip club and a paper mill.”