Urban Zoning for Sustainable Tourism: A Continuum of Accommodation to Enhance City Resilience

While governments around the world are embarking on the path to recovery from the COVID-19 crisis, sustainable tourism planning is crucial, in particular in the hospitality sector, which enhances the resilience of destinations. However, many destination management models overlook the role of urban zoning. Little is known about the impacts of land-use zoning on the hospitality and property industries, especially with the current disruption of short-term peer-to-peer accommodation like Airbnb. Euclidean zoning, also known as effects-based planning, has long been criticised in destination management for its exclusionary nature and lack of flexibility. With exclusionary zoning, property owners may only be able to use their land sub-optimally, and cities will be less efficient in responding to market changes in short-term and long-term accommodation demands, but planning intentions can be better controlled, and the property supply can be more stable. Taking Hong Kong as a noteworthy case, this study puts forward a conceptual framework that enables comparison of a novel zoning approach with the traditional zoning approach. This novel zoning approach encompasses both the short- and long-term rental sectors as a continuum of accommodation, ranging from hotels and serviced apartments to Airbnb and rental housing units under a unified regulatory and planning regime to enhance the switching options value. This novel zoning system can gear up the tourism sector with the rapid growth of the sharing economy and aligns with sustainable tourism to ensure long-term socioeconomic benefits to related stakeholders. We extract the data of Airbnb listings to construct the first Airbnb ADR Index (ADRI) by Repeat-sales method, and the results support our Switching Option Hypothesis.

Stop Worrying (So Much) about Exclusionary Zoning and Fight Our Real Enemies: A Reply to My Critics

In this short reply, I attempt to address my critics in the limited space allotted. I show, inter alia, how the Anti–Exclusionary Zoning (Anti-EZ) Project: (1) brutally reproduces White supremacy, rather than subverting it; (2) employs pernicious neoliberal and antidemocratic means to achieve its—at best—inherently modest ends; (3) emanates from and reflects the elitist politics of the liberal professional-managerial class that locks in the neoliberal status quo, instead of building upon the emancipatory potentialities and power of grassroots, street-fighting mobilizations for housing justice and the right to the city; (4) takes massively uneven capitalist development as a given, rather than the object of contestation and resistance; (5) denies lower-income/working-class people of color vital human longings; and (6) embraces the same progrowth mentality fueling the climate crisis. We must stop worrying (so much) about EZ and fight our real enemies: neoliberalism, White supremacy/racial subjugation, elitist skepticism of democracy, and the growth machine.

Growth + Climate Emergency: We’re Already Too Late Getting Ready. Exclusionary Zoning Makes Matters Worse

The other two respondents have carefully articulated many objections to David Imbroscio’s essay, responding to its arguments on its own terms. Rather than another point-by-point response, I offer a counternarrative that looks toward the future. In my view, ending exclusionary zoning (EZ) is an important element in a campaign to avoid some of the suffering low-income people in the United States will experience as the global climate emergency becomes increasingly acute, the national population ages, and the entrenched power of right-wing libertarians sustains inequality. Parochial actions like EZ will further complicate responses to these challenges. My response argues that for these reasons, Imbroscio’s essay is neither ethical nor logical.

The Privileged Few: How Exclusionary Zoning Amplifies the Advantaged and Blocks New Housing—and What We Can Do About It

“Rethinking Exclusionary Zoning” provocatively claims that the movement to eliminate exclusionary zoning is misguided, and will create a worse set of social, economic, and political conditions than those currently produced by contemporary land-use regulations. In this response, I present several challenges to this claim. First, I demonstrate that “Rethinking Exclusionary Zoning” misses the well-documented political harms wrought by exclusionary zoning. Second, I illustrate that “Rethinking Exclusionary Zoning” misidentifies the central problems and solutions proposed by scholars and policy makers comprising the so-called Anti-EZ Project. These advocates seek fair and equitable land use—not the elimination of all regulations—as part of a broader housing policy agenda to increase the supply of housing in places that need it. They do not view local land-use reform as a panacea to urban inequality.