A substantial part of my planning career has been devoted to land-use regulations: writing them, administering them, and applying them. Even appealing them. I have helped craft codes in places as far flung as New York and Alaska. I have written complex new ordinances that established new directions, and I have fine-tuned amendments that adjusted a small section of code.
After all this work, the countless meetings and hearings, and the hundreds of pages, I have reached a startling conclusion: We need to radically "dezone" our communities.
We still need regulations. But we need regulations that are more direct, more explicit, more qualitative, and much more concise.
In many cities, land-use codes are a morass of lists, tables, diagrams, definitions, subsections, amendments,and footnotes. No wonder attorneys are hired to decipher (and debate) them.
Unfortunately, most zoning codes have an equal chance of producing bad OR good development. Most codes deal in quantities of things: heights, lot dimensions, parking stalls, and so on. And uses: permitted uses, conditional uses, prohibited uses, special uses. Long lists of categories with terms that get debated, refined, and reinterpreted.
If Jonathan Swift were alive and writing today, I'm sure he would have done a satire on land-use interpretations by government planners.
It is time that we look to our codes, make them more current, more manageable, and less exclusionary. We need more flexibility to create places that are diverse, sociable, and reflective of contemporary business and technology.
Over the past five years, I have had a couple of opportunities to put these ideas into practice. The first case was the city of Bainbridge Island, Washington, located across Puget Sound from Seattle. The town is booming, with a population increase from 16,000 in 1990 to over 20,000 today.
Our firm wrote a new zoning code in 1996. First the town center was divided into seven sectors, each reflecting a different historical pattern and role within the community. Rather than make everything mixed use, the new zoning districts allowed much more residential than commercial development. An older street containing 19th century houses was protected from an onslaught of larger, bulkier buildings, and new development had to borrow forms, rooflines, and details from older houses, even if the uses were commercial.
Building heights were generally kept under 35 feet, but a 10-foot increase could be obtained if parking was placed underground and out of sight.
Much development has taken place since the new code was adopted. New housing has been built throughout the town center. New offices have gone up. New banks and retail stores have been constructed. A village-like grouping of buildings contains retail, offices, and housing, along with a waterfront promenade.
All of these projects reflect five important ideas that are missing in most conventional zoning codes: respect for small-town scale, a close relationship to the street, the mixing of different uses, minimum intrusion from parking, and a variety of attractive and accessible public spaces.
Tacoma, Washington (pop. 150,000), also undertook a dezoning. The city's downtown was languishing, despite a robust economy in the Puget Sound region.
Tacoma wanted a new downtown plan that would reflect the investment being made in light rail and other public improvements. In 1998, the city council adopted a revised building code that encouraged mid-rise housing; it needed a new set of land-use regulations to address a broader, strategic vision.
The existing code governing downtown was a patchwork of numerous districts, special districts, and overlay districts. It was almost impossible to read the zoning map.
Four districts were eventually established, each allowing a broad mix of uses. The "commercial core" emphasized high-rise commercial development. The downtown residential district focused on mid-rise housing. And so on.
Development standards were kept to a minimum, and the entire land-use code fit on nine pages. It took less than six months to overhaul the entire code. Two important goals were achieved: The public could grasp the intended vision for downtown, and the real estate community was primed to develop.
Several important building projects have begun to take shape under the provisions of the new code since it was adopted at the end of 1999. One of them involves the city's working with a developer on the codevelopment of housing and commercial uses as part of the city's new convention center.
It is possible to drastically reshape our land-use regulations. This long-standing tool of public planning isn't just a figment of the 20th century; it is a key to the future.
--Planning magazine
--American Planning Association
This material is excerpted from a story in the June 2000 issue of "Planning" magazine. To download, see www.planning.org/pubs/june00.htm
Contact: The story author is Mark Hinshaw; copyright by the author. For more information, send email to Sylvia Lewis, [email protected]
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