Historically, front setbacks were regulated toward reasonable ends: they were designed to reserve right-of-way (or land through which anyone can freely travel) in the event that the municipality needed to widen a road or lay new pipes in the future. Beyond that minimum set aside, buildings could be as close to or far from the street as local conditions required.

This earlier system kept the power to discover the “right” front setback depth with people who had a stake in the project. With every building, developers and architects had to ask: How much of a front yard do I need to to sell or lease out this space? As with all pre-zoning land-use regulation, the answer was discovered through a distributed, trial-and-error process. Based on local conditions like land costs, demand for floor area, and cultural norms, a developer would guess and check at different front yard depths. Successful guesses could be replicated, while unsuccessful guesses could be phased out.

If you live in a city with a lot of development from the pre-zoning era, you can go and see physical evidence of this trial-and-error discovery process. As an example, let’s look at Astoria, Queens, a neighborhood that was partially built out before the adoption of zoning in 1916.