If you're an advocate of the Strong Towns movement, you likely have a conflicted relationship with local development regulations.

On the one hand, these rules, established at the local level, are often nonsensical and even harmful to our cities. Beloved, successful neighborhoods built a century ago are rendered illegal to replicate today by zoning that prohibits mixed uses or missing middle housing. Parking requirements ensure that our cities waste valuable land and remain auto-oriented, at great cost to their financial bottom line. And a bevy of standards attached to new housing, from design requirements to sprinklers to minimum floor area to maximum density, make homes more costly to produce and drive up the cost of living.

We've been consistently critical here of the ways that local regulations enshrine car-dependent development patterns, trap neighborhoods under glass, and prevent cities from evolving to meet their present-day challenges. We've been adamant that cities need to breathe and evolve and receive vital, even uncomfortable, feedback on what isn't working—and that means not trying to impose too much top-down order on them.

For this, Strong Towns often gets labeled a "libertarian" or "free-market" advocacy organization. You'd think we'd be excited about a statewide rollback of meddlesome local rules on what can and can't be built.

On the contrary, Arkansas just passed such a statewide rollback, and it is a terrible law. It is a textbook case of what not to do if you're trying to fix housing affordability problems. And understanding why illuminates a lot about why "pro-regulation" or "anti-regulation" are far too simplistic stances for anyone thinking seriously about how to make cities stronger and more resilient.

Eliminating an Important Local Toolkit

The bill that passed in Arkansas, Act 446, targets local design regulations, and eliminates many of them. Specifically, the bill says that local governments, in most cases, may no longer regulate any of the following for single-family homes:

Exterior building color

Type or style of exterior cladding material

Style or materials of roof structures, roof pitches, or porches

Exterior nonstructural architectural ornamentation

Location, design, placement, or architectural styling of windows and doors, including garage doors and garage structures

The number and types of rooms

The interior layout of rooms

The minimum square footage of a structure

This is egregious because such regulations are often integral to tools like form-based codes that cities use to encourage traditional, walkable development patterns. These codes are the most promising alternative to the use-based zoning in place in most U.S. cities, because a form-based code emphasizes requiring a building's physical design to "play nice" with its surroundings, rather than micromanaging what can or can't go on inside that building. Such codes allow cities to prevent the grave harm that a bad building can do to the public realm around it, while legalizing the kind of traditional neighborhood where you can walk to a corner store or pharmacy or to get a cup of coffee. These places are usually illegal today.

Put simply, design standards are often the most closely connected of all local building rules to the actual harms we're trying to prevent when we regulate local development.

I corresponded with Matthew Hoffman, who is chairman of the Planning Commission for the City of Fayetteville, and the Director of Urban Design for Miller Boskus Lack Architects. He was an active critic of the new legislation. Hoffman writes, “Fortunately, the law allows regulation of ‘height, bulk, orientation, [and] location of a structure on a lot.’ From an urban design perspective, we have the ability to make sure homes are in the right place, but not the ability to make sure they’re doing the right things once put there.”