“Let every house be placed … in the middle of its plat,” said one of America’s best-known city planners, “so there may be ground on each side for gardens or orchards or fields, that it may be a green country town, which will never be burnt and always wholesome.”It’s a tribute to the framer of this dictum that modern city planners still fervently adhere to it. The trouble is, it was made by William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, around the time he laid out Philadelphia in 1682. A lot has changed since then, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at our planning codes.

Essentially, setbacks are reserved areas on each edge of your property — like margins on a page — that you’re not allowed to build upon. The idea is to help ensure William Penn’s ideal of houses spaced well apart, with usable land on all sides. Given the long historic trend toward higher land prices, smaller lots and bulkier houses, however, many suburban setback requirements no longer make sense. Today’s typical 5-foot side-yard setbacks, for example, serve mainly to mandate sunless, useless slivers of land between houses. Yet rather than doing away with these vestigial separations altogether, moribund planning codes stubbornly cling to them, stymieing the growth of more intelligent arrangements.

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