We Used to Build Some of the Best Streets in the World. Then We Made It Illegal.

Alexandria, VA

There's a neighborhood near you — maybe it's where you grew up, maybe it's where you go on weekends, maybe it's just a place you drive through sometimes and feel something shift — where everything just works.

The buildings come up to the sidewalk. There's a coffee shop on the corner. Trees line the street. People are actually outside, walking somewhere, stopping to talk. The buildings are four or five stories, maybe six — old brick or stone, windows that open, stoops with people sitting on them. It feels like somewhere. It feels like it belongs to someone.

You probably don't spend a lot of time thinking about why it feels that way. But I do. It's my job. And I can tell you exactly why it feels that way — and exactly why we stopped building it.

The neighborhoods Americans love most were mostly built before 1950.

New York, NY

That's not a coincidence or nostalgia. It's a data point.

The most walked, most photographed, most economically resilient, most sought-after urban neighborhoods in America — the ones that command the highest rents and the most passionate preservation fights — were almost entirely built in the hundred years between roughly 1840 and 1940. Brooklyn's brownstone neighborhoods. Chicago's greystones and three-flats. Boston's triple-deckers. The French Quarter. Georgetown. Pittsburgh's Mexican War Streets. The Pasadena bungalow courts. The streetcar neighborhoods of Portland and Seattle.

These places weren't built by visionaries. They were built by ordinary developers and builders working within the rules, customs, and economics of their time. And what they produced, block after block, city after city, was something we have almost entirely failed to replicate in the eight decades since.

Why?

Because sometime around 1950, we made it illegal.

Not all at once. Not with a single law or a single decision. It happened incrementally, through a series of well-intentioned regulations that each seemed reasonable on their own but added up to something catastrophic in aggregate.

Euclidean zoning — named after the 1926 Supreme Court case that upheld it — separated land uses that had always been mixed. Shops had to be here. Homes had to be there. Offices somewhere else entirely. The corner store that had anchored neighborhoods for a century became a zoning violation. The workshop above the garage became illegal. The mixed-use block — the fundamental unit of every great city ever built — was systematically dismantled, one ordinance at a time.

Parking minimums hollowed out what zoning left standing. In 1950, just one in five American cities required parking for new buildings. By 1970, 95 percent of cities with over 25,000 people had made the parking spot as legally indispensable as the front door. Every new building had to provide parking — which meant every new building needed land for parking — which meant buildings moved away from the street, spread out across lots, pushed back behind seas of asphalt. The street wall that had defined urban neighborhoods for centuries collapsed almost overnight.

Setback requirements finished the job. The city's most basic human gesture — a building that comes up to the sidewalk and says "I'm here, you're welcome" — became prohibited in most of America. Buildings had to step back. Yards had to be minimum sizes. The relationship between building and street that makes a neighborhood feel like a neighborhood was severed by ordinance.

Single-family zoning locked large swaths of every city into a typology that simply cannot support walkability. You can't walk to a coffee shop if there's no place to put a coffee shop. You can't have a bakery on the corner if every corner is required by law to be a single-family house with a two-car garage.

Each of these regulations had defenders who argued, in good faith, that they were making cities better. Safer. More orderly. More modern. Easier to drive through. And maybe, in the short term, in some narrow sense, some of them did.

But the sum of them was the destruction of the American city.

We knew it, too. Almost immediately.

Jane Jacobs published "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" in 1961 — ten years into this regulatory overhaul — and described with devastating clarity what was being lost. Mixed uses. Short blocks. Buildings of different ages. Concentration of people. These weren't aesthetic preferences, she argued. They were the conditions that made city life possible, productive, and safe.

She was largely ignored by the planning establishment for two decades.

Meanwhile, the regulations hardened. The highways came through. The urban renewal projects leveled entire neighborhoods in the name of progress. The people who could afford to leave, left. The cities that survived — the ones that kept their pre-war fabric, that never quite got around to tearing everything down — are the ones people are now paying extraordinary premiums to live in.

History has delivered its verdict. We just haven't fully absorbed it yet.

This wasn't just about aesthetics. It was about economics.

Here's the thing that gets lost in conversations about traditional architecture and walkable urbanism: this isn't just about beauty, though beauty matters. It's about the fundamental economics of how places work.

Walkable, mixed-use, human-scaled neighborhoods generate more tax revenue per acre than sprawl. They support more jobs per square foot. They produce better health outcomes — lower rates of obesity, heart disease, and depression. They have lower infrastructure costs per resident. They hold their value in downturns better than sprawling alternatives.

Tax Revenue mapping by Urban 3 showing how urbanism generates more tax revenue over sprawl

The Harvard economist Raj Chetty, who keynoted this year's Congress for the New Urbanism, has spent his career documenting something that urbanists have argued for decades: where you grow up determines your economic trajectory, and the physical design of your neighborhood is one of the most significant variables. Walkable, mixed-income, mixed-use neighborhoods produce better outcomes for children across nearly every measure.

This is not a left or right argument. It's not about aesthetics or nostalgia. It's about what works.

So why aren't we building it?

This is the question I get asked most often, usually by developers and clients who look at a pre-war neighborhood and say "this is exactly what I want to build" and then discover that they can't.

The zoning doesn't allow it. The building code makes it too expensive. The parking requirements eat the lot. The setbacks push the building away from the street. The single-use zoning eliminates the ground floor retail. The two-stair requirement inflates the floor plate to the point where the building no longer fits on a neighborhood-scale lot.

It's not one barrier. It's a system of barriers, built up over seventy years, each one reinforcing the others.

The good news — and there is good news — is that the system is starting to break down.

Something is changing.

In the last five years, more zoning and building code reform has happened in America than in the previous fifty. Parking minimums are being eliminated in cities across the country. Single-family zoning is being reformed. ADUs are being legalized everywhere. Building height limits are being reconsidered. Use-separation requirements are loosening. And as I wrote recently, federal legislation is now moving to reform the two-staircase rule that has warped apartment building design for half a century.

None of this is happening because of a sudden ideological conversion. It's happening because cities are facing a housing crisis severe enough that the costs of the old regulations are finally undeniable. When the median home price in your city is $800,000, even the most ardent defender of single-family zoning starts to wonder if maybe something needs to change.

But here's what worries me.

The reform wave is real. The legislative momentum is real. What isn't guaranteed — what requires active effort and advocacy — is that the buildings that get built within these new rules will actually be good.

Eliminating parking minimums doesn't automatically produce great street-level retail. Legalizing single-stair buildings doesn't automatically produce the kind of human-scaled, street-oriented residential buildings that made pre-war neighborhoods great. Reforming zoning doesn't automatically produce mixed-use blocks that feel alive and welcoming.

Rules create permission. They don't create quality.

Quality requires architects who understand what we're rebuilding toward.

New Mixed-Use Town Center -Habersham Town Center by Rick Black/Ben Miehe

This is where I want to be direct about my own stake in this argument.

I'm an architect. I've spent my career studying what makes the neighborhoods people love work — not just aesthetically but structurally, typologically, economically. The traditional forms and classical language of pre-war architecture aren't arbitrary style preferences. They're the accumulated intelligence of generations of builders who understood how to make buildings that belong on streets, streets that belong in neighborhoods, and neighborhoods that belong to the people who live in them.

That knowledge didn't die. It got suppressed by the same regulatory framework that made traditional neighborhoods illegal to replicate. And now that the framework is finally starting to change, it's worth asking: do we have the design knowledge to take advantage of the opening?

I think we do. I think the generation of architects, planners, and urbanists who have been arguing for these reforms for twenty, thirty, forty years have produced a body of work and knowledge that is genuinely ready for this moment.

The question is whether developers, cities, and communities will demand quality — or settle for the first cheap version of "reform" that the market produces.

The most important thing happening in American urbanism right now isn't a building.

It's a change in the rules. And what we build within those rules — whether we use this moment to rebuild the kinds of places that make people's lives better, or whether we squander it on a new generation of forgettable boxes — is entirely up to us.

The regulations took seventy years to accumulate. They won't be undone overnight. But for the first time in my career, the direction of travel has changed. The rules that made great neighborhoods illegal are starting to be repealed.

Now we have to remember how to build them.

I'm an architect focused on traditional neighborhood design, new urbanism, and building code reform. If you're working on a project that could benefit from this kind of thinking — or if you just want to argue about cities — I'd genuinely enjoy the conversation.