M. Nolan Gray
Goodreads Author
Member Since
June 2013
URL
https://www.goodreads.com/mnolangray
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“Even before zoning, differing locational needs help to nudge the most incompatible uses apart: • Industries need to be where land is cheap and transportation is accessible, and complaining neighbors are few and far between. • Large office and commercial centers thrive on the visibility and access afforded by major corridors and transit interchanges. • Residential developments are content to fill up the quiet side streets in between, along with inoffensive retail—think corner stores and cafes. Homeowners don’t want factories or malls showing up on their cul-de-sacs—and they can rest assured that those factories and malls don’t want to open up on their cul-de-sac either. As the legal scholar Bernard Siegan observed in his landmark study of Houston, the city achieves much of what we might consider to be desirable use segregation”
― Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It
― Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It
“If an American wants to live a greener life and scrap their car, why should zoning stand in the way?”
― Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It
― Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It
“Pursuant to city regulations, slaughterhouses—an early zoning boogey-man—must remain 3,000 feet from the nearest residence; oil wells cannot be within 400 feet.19 Strip clubs and other adult-oriented businesses cannot be within 1,500 feet of a school or church; liquor stores and bars cannot be within 300 feet.”
― Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It
― Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It
“As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense.”
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“The views of intellectuals influence the politics of tomorrow...What to the contemporary observer appears as the battle of conflicting interests has indeed often been described long before in a clash of ideas confined to narrow circles.”
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“Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them, while on the other hand to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new.”
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“The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so.”
― The Death and Life of Great American Cities
― The Death and Life of Great American Cities