Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is Nolan Gray.

Nolan is a professional city planner, an expert in land use regulation, and is obtaining

his PhD in urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles.

And he's an affiliated scholar with the Mercatus Center at

George Mason University. He writes frequently about land use issues for City Journal, and his

forthcoming book, throughout this month, is called Arbitrary Lines, how zoning broke the American

city and how to fix it. So Nolan, great to be talking with you.

Thanks so much for having me, Brian. It's a pleasure. So let's begin with this new book. It's partly

a history of zoning in the U.S. It's partly an analysis of the current composition of zoning rules

and partly a call to action, a kind of manifesto. Land use regulations too

often take the form of a dizzying array of confusing in pseudoscientific rules, that's your term,

that drive up the cost of living and impede urban innovation in dense cities

while seeking to basically freeze suburban life in amber, you know.

So what is your basic thesis and how does the book proceed?

Yeah, so, you know, there's been a lot of discussion about zoning, you know, we're in this

rare moment where people want to talk about zoning, you know, in opinion columns for national

papers, presidential candidates are now expected to have a position on zoning. But I found a few things.

The first I found that a lot of people didn't really have a clear idea of what zoning is or where it came from.

I found that a lot of people didn't really have a clear idea of some of the costs associated with the way we plan cities in the U.S.

And even less did anyone have a sense of what's going to come next, right?

So there's something like a consensus that the system we have today is dysfunctional, but what's going to come next, right? So there's something like a consensus that the system we

...