*Arbitrary Lines*, by M. Nolan Gray

The subtitle is How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It, and here is one bit:

By today’s standard, New York’s 1916 zoning code is surprisingly liberal.  Modern zoning mainstays, like use subcategories or explicit floor area limits, are absent.  This is because the framers of New York’s zoning ordinance saw themselves as balancing a desire for some control against a natural skepticism of this new institution.  After all, as a historically unprecedented curtailment of property rights, the constitutionality of zoning was very much in question, and one ill-conceived regulation risked a court decision that could imperial the entire project.  The strategy of starting small worked, and the code survived, expanding from just a small pamphlet to hundreds of pages over the coming decades, before the 1961 rewrite.

And this:

At the end of 1916, 8 municipalities had adopted some form of zoning, and over the next seven years, a steady stream of municipalities would follow, such that by 1923, 218 municipalities had adopted zoning.

Nolan is an urban planner who is very skeptical of such zoning.  Recomnended, and I am pleased that both Mercatus and Emergent Ventures had a hand in supporting this project.