Zoning is here to stay. Almost all large American cities use some form of zoning to manage existing development and to guide new development. We’ve been doing it for almost 90 years and we’ve become more or less addicted to it.

Sure, we poke fun at the “planner-ese” and “legal-ese” jargon. And we shake our heads as we tell horror stories about how the zoning code tied some poor property owner up in knots. We bemoan the fact that in spite of all those laws we still seem to get pretty mediocre development most of the time. But complaining about zoning is like complaining about downtown parking - it’s everybody’s right even if you don’t have a workable solution at hand. In spite of all its problems, we have learned to live with zoning because we’ve found that it is almost infinitely changeable. There are as many flavors of zoning as there are cities. Zoning codes in real cities are like snowflakes - no two are alike. They have been modified so many times in so many ways for so many reasons that they ought to fit each city like a glove. But they don’t, and we still complain and amend them constantly.

While we’re learning to live with zoning, we should start learning from zoning. We need to look at how and why zoning evolved, how it got so complex, how well it does its job (or not), and how we can make it work better. The key is not just to change zoning — we do that all the time. When it’s too rigid we make it more flexible, and when that produces unexpected results we try to add predictability. The key is to learn from the mistakes of the past and not repeat them.

A Better Way to Zone tries to do just that. The first chapter reviews how zoning has evolved through PUDs and performance zoning and on into form-based tools. Each of those trends represents a reform movement that was and is partially successful, and we can identify what parts work. The next chapters identify three reasons why we have only seen half-solutions - why we still can’t seem to get zoning right.

• Some of the assumptions behind early zoning are no longer true;
• Land use is now driven by some powerful forces that zoning has not addressed; and
• We forgot that zoning is part of a city governance system - not a world unto itself.

The heart of A Better Way to Zone is a discussion of ten ways that we can change zoning to avoid false assumptions, respond to new land use drivers, and improve urban governance. It does not assume that most citizens want to throw out their zoning codes - even if the planners sometimes do. Just the opposite. It assumes that most citizens want the predictability that even flawed zoning provides - particularly near their homes. And that most city residents want zoning problems corrected in ways that don’t rock the boat too much or too fast.

Starting from the zoning code you have (not an idealized model) is one aspect of good governance. Fixing it in ways that do not repeat the mistakes of the past is another. So if the biggest lesson of the past is that zoning is here to stay, the second biggest may be just as obvious - that one size never fits all.