Citiwire.net

For Release January 18, 2009
Citiwire.net

Take any great place that people love to visit. You know, those lively tourist haunts from Nantucket to San Francisco. Or those red hot neighborhoods from Seattle’s Capital Hill to Miami Beach’s Art Deco district. Or those healthy downtowns from Portland, Oregon to Chicago, Illinois to Charleston, South Carolina. What do they all have in common?

The mix of uses that gives them life are presently outlawed by zoning in virtually every city and town in all 50 states.

Crisis offers opportunity. With real estate in a freefall, there is an opportunity to lay the foundation for a more prosperous and sustainable American landscape.

If only there is the vision and political will.

Scrapping zoning codes is the single most significant change that can be made in every town and city in America. It would aid economic development, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, foster healthier lifestyles, reduce dependence on foreign oil, protect open space and wildlife habitats, and reduce wasteful government spending.

Zoning is a legacy of Herbert Hoover. As Commerce Secretary, he championed the “Standard Zoning Enabling Act” to address “the moral and social issues that can only be solved by a new conception of city building.” In 1926, the Supreme Court upheld zoning to protect health and safety by “excluding from residential areas the confusion and danger of fire, contagion and disorder which in greater or less degree attach to the location of store, shops and factories.” The quite sensible idea that people shouldn’t live next to steel mills was used to justify a system of “zones” to isolate uses that had lived in harmony for centuries.

Under zoning, new neighborhoods were segregated by income, and commerce was torn asunder from both customers and workers. Timeless ways of creating great places were ruthlessly outlawed. The sprawl spawned by zoning spread from sea to shining sea.

Almost everyone admits the environmental and social devastation caused by sprawl. Yet it remains the law. What’s been lacking is the tool for producing great places instead of bleak, auto-dependent landscapes. If “zoning” is the DNA of sprawl the coding that endlessly replicates the bleak landscape of autotopia, then what is the DNA of livable communities?

It is found in timeless ways of building, updated for the 21st Century, including the need to accommodate cars. It regulates incompatible uses without the absurdities of conventional zoning. It is calibrated for new buildings to contribute to their context and to the larger goal of making a great place. It does so primarily by regulating the form of buildings, since that is what determines the long-neglected public realm of streets and sidewalks. It does that by regulating setbacks, heights and the physical character of buildings. For example, a form-based code could protect the existing scale of a neighborhood from the “teardowns” of traditional homes for replacement by McMansions–or facilitate the evolution of an auto-oriented commercial strip to a mix of uses, including residential and/or office over retail.

Called “form-based codes” or “smart codes,” this alternative framework for shaping great places exists, and it’s quietly spreading.

Where it’s been tried, it’s been a success. Seaside, Florida, the poster town for “new urbanism,” was “coded” rather than zoned, and ended up on the cover of Time magazine. In 2003, Petaluma, California scrapped its zoning regulations and adopted a new code for 400 underdeveloped acres in their Downtown, producing more than a quarter billion dollars in new investment. Now cities as diverse as Miami, Buffalo, Tulsa and La Jolla are pursuing “form-based codes.”

Unlike zoning, “form-based coding” is not a “one-size fits all” solution. The rules for form in a dense urban center are distinctly different from those for a predominantly residential suburban neighborhood. In each case, the form and character of buildings are “calibrated” to achieve a cohesive and complimentary sense of place.

Still, widespread adoption waits upon the widespread recognition that the time for reform has come. The real estate meltdown provides that wake-up call. The model is broken. Financing generic products (class A office; suburban housing tract; grocery-anchored strip center; business park, etc.) through globally marketable securities has become radioactive. By the time supply and demand right themselves, the financial and economic unsustainability of sprawl will be laid bare.

Of course, one can never underestimate what historian Barbara Tuchman called “the march of folly.” Perhaps in the interest of “stimulus” to the moribund economy, we will be willing to spend trillions more to subsidize sprawl. But in the end, as economist Herbert Stein pointed out, “That which cannot go on forever, won’t.”

Before that day comes, we can save untold environmental, economic and social damage by the widespread adoption of coding that respects human scale, restores the proximity of complimentary uses, and repairs the damage done to the American landscape and our rich (but abandoned) tradition of creating fine neighborhoods, towns and cities.

Scrap zoning. Adopt coding. Legalize the art of making great places that people cherish, that produce economic value, and that leave a lighter environmental footprint on the land.

Citiwire.net columns are not copyrighted and may be reproduced in print or electronically; please show authorship, credit Citiwire.net and send an electronic copy of usage to webmaster@citiwire.net.