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Sara C Bronin

Sara C Bronin

Mexican-American architect, attorney, and Freda H. Alverson Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School; author of "Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World" and founder of the National Zoning Atlas.

Sep 24, 2026

6:23
Now, professor, true or false, has zoning contributed, tough question, has zoning since 1926 contributed to the housing shortage we have today?
6:36
Yeah, I think definitely the answer is yes.
6:39
It has gone into, zoning has been adopted in places where there used to be two, three, four or more family housing and down zoned it to allow for less housing, even that was there, let's say a hundred years ago before zoning.
6:55
In addition to that, in many, many newer neighborhoods and newer cities and towns, where zoning has been adopted, oftentimes that zoning will say only single family housing can be built here and that type of housing can only be on large lots.
7:12
So in the book, I talk about some of the stats for a few cities, but I'm also working on this project called the National Zoning Atlas, which is online at zoningatlas.org. And we've collected information about these trends nationwide.
7:31
And we found that the vast majority of residentially zoned land is zoned for single-family housing, and very little of it is zoned for multifamily housing.
7:43
So just as an example, in...
12:10
Is that right?

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