POP THE CAP 2: What Does Craft Beer Teach Us About Crafting Cities?

More choice allows for more innovative developments.

RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA | Sean Lilly Wilson wasn’t thinking about opening a brewery in 2003. He liked craft beer, and he was spending more and more of his time lamenting its rarity with other fans and friends. But when he saw a need to remove a legal “vestige of prohibition” from state legislation, he unknowingly created the conditions for more breweries to open in North Carolina, including his own.

Proposing an amendment to remove the six words from a state statute that prevented breweries from opening—“and not more than six percent—” Wilson and friends took on the stubborn opponent that is the state legislature and won.

In the years that followed the amendment’s passage, North Carolina took off as a microbrewery hub.

Wilson is careful not to bestow all credit on their campaign and the amendment change, noting the many other regulatory dispositions that make North Carolina uniquely well-suited to host a thriving craft beer business: the energy, determination, and skill for making good craft beer was present. But the success of the microbrewery industry in the state could not have happened under the former law.

Though it was impossible to predict with the cap in place, the only thing standing in the way of North Carolina and a statewide microbrewery boom was a number.

“When there is no choice, there can be no adjudications on preference.”

-COBY LEFKOWITZ

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WHAT OTHER CAPS CAN WE POP?

In this sense, one can draw easy parallels between the beer industry and the current residential scheme in the state. The argument that the prevalence of single-family housing is proof of the public’s preference for single-family housing is insincere. As urbanist blogger and developer Coby Lefkowitz puts it, “When there is no choice, there can be no adjudications on preference.”

In both the housing market and the beer market, it turns out, people respond well to more choices.

Once the arbitrary limits on choices are removed, even folks who didn’t see themselves as having something to contribute, like Wilson, start to pursue creative alternatives. “I was sort of an entrepreneur in waiting,” Wilson remembers. “I figured I was someday going to start my own business, and I just really enjoyed the community, the sort of excitement, around craft beer.”

One main difference between land use regulation and alcohol regulation is the level at which the regulation occurs: locally in the case of most housing and other zoning codes are regulated locally. In contrast, while at the state level in the case of alcohol brewing and sales are regulated at the state level.

Likewise, statewide pushes for regulatory reform on land use are not nearly as common as those at the municipal level. But there are some ongoing state land use bills, and there is reason to anticipate more.