The Paper Lords: How Zoning Laws Repeat Feudal Exclusion
Zoning's deepest harm is delegitimizing informal cities like Dharavi, not just restricting supply—reform must recognize, not displace, existing communities.
Exclusionary zoning functions like medieval land tenure, restricting who can build and what counts as legitimate development. The real gatekeeping lies not in supply restrictions but in delegitimizing self-built cities that house the urban poor. Dharavi demonstrates that dense, mixed-use, economically vital neighborhoods can emerge without permits, challenging the reflex to demolish and redevelop. Effective reform requires tenure recognition and incremental infrastructure investment, not merely deregulation.
In Mumbai’s Dharavi, roughly a million people have built an economy of small-scale manufacturing, recycling, and trade—none of it with zoning permits. The state calls it a slum. But in terms of density, mixed use, and economic vitality, Dharavi is less a failure of planning than a rebuke to the gatekeepers of formal urban development. That rebuke reframes the familiar argument that modern zoning is just feudalism with paperwork. The Cato Institute, among others, has drawn the parallel: exclusionary zoning, like medieval land tenure, keeps the lower classes out. There is evidence for that view. NAHRO reported in 2022 that 70 percent of residential areas in major U.S. cities restrict or ban apartments, a direct legacy of class- and race-based exclusion documented in a 2023 Annual Reviews analysis. Density-reducing regulations—height limits, minimum lot sizes, prohibitions on accessory dwelling units—impair affordability, as the Harvard Law Review argued the same year. But focusing only on the supply-side chokehold of zoning misses a deeper feudal pattern. The real gatekeeping is not just about who gets to build, but about what kinds of building are treated as legitimate in the first place. When the state defines legality through formal permits, it delegitimizes the self-built cities that have housed the urban poor for generations. That forced formality can be more destructive than any height restriction. Consider the counterexample of informal settlements. A 2024 review in Wiley found that unplanned neighborhoods often achieve better sustainable urban development outcomes for the poor than their zoned counterparts. They tend to be dense, walkable, and mixed-use by necessity—qualities that planners in formal cities struggle to engineer through code. In Dharavi, the recycling industry alone employs thousands and serves the entire metropolis, all within a fabric of narrow lanes and live-work units that no zoning code would have permitted. The policy implication is not to romanticize informality or ignore its real deficits in infrastructure and tenure security. But the reflex to demolish and redevelop—to impose formality from above—repeats the feudal gesture of revoking use rights from those who lack the right documents. The YIMBY movement’s focus on deregulating zoning to increase market-rate supply is a necessary but insufficient response. Without mechanisms that recognize and upgrade existing informal settlements, upzoning can become another form of displacement, clearing the ground for formal capital rather than strengthening the communities already there. Governments have a choice: treat Dharavi as a problem to be erased, or as a demonstration that affordable cities are already being built, albeit outside the lines. The evidence from informal settlements across the Global South suggests that the path to more equitable urbanism runs through tenure recognition, incremental infrastructure investment, and legal frameworks that accommodate rather than bulldoze. Zoning reform, in that light, is not just about removing restrictions—it’s about making room for the cities that the poor have already made.