Zoning is justified in all sorts of ways today, but at its birth – arguably in New York City, in 1916 – it was aimed squarely at halting what upper-class New Yorkers saw as the decay of the city, as neighborhoods built for the rich filtered down to the city's growing immigrant masses. A century later, the movement is in the other direction – the rich are outbidding middle-class and poor New Yorkers for space, in a phenomenon known as gentrification. New Yorkers tend to view development as the cause, but a more careful reading of history shows that it's zoning and the housing shortage that it's created that are responsible for the reversal, and for the growing waves of displacement washing over cities from New York to San Francisco. Recorded at FEECon 2018