Zone as if There Was Already a City There – Because There Is.

Unfortunately, we sometimes do just the opposite – at least in America’s older urban neighborhoods. We draft our plans after looking carefully at the neighborhoods and cities that are already built. We study the scale, the form, the uses, the traffic flow, the parking. But then we prepare solutions as if our cities were blank pieces of paper – as if they were greenfields. We look at all that the “messiness” that makes up most neighborhoods and we squint hard and say “Hey – I think I see a pattern there. You know, maybe it should all fit into that pattern.” And then we draft zoning to make that pattern happen. If we use traditional Euclidean zoning, the pattern is set by traditional tools – land uses, lot sizes, minimum setbacks, and building heights. If we use form-based zoning we define the pattern with different tools – building types, façade types, parking location, specific mixes of uses, and minimum and maximum setbacks.

Sometimes finding and strengthening the pattern inside all that urban fabric is exactly right. The neighborhood is fraying at the edges – owners are not investing because “there’s no ‘there’ there.” Supporting a major redevelopment project that strengthens the urban form could be exactly the catalyst needed to spur investment and save the neighborhood. But if you’re not planning for a big redevelopment project – if the only investments are being made by small-scale property owners who come forward in ones and twos over the years as their needs and desires change, forcing those individual investors into a preferred design pattern could be exactly the wrong thing to do. It could discourage investment and force existing uses into buildings that don’t work for them in order to reinforce a pattern that only designers can see.

Planners may look down an older residential block face and see that the third house from the end is a sore thumb – someone tacked on a commercial façade and its been operated as a small florist shop since pre-zoning days. Neither the use nor the building fits the residential block pattern. But to those who live and work on the block, it’s always been there – it is part of the neighborhood even if you can’t find a pattern or a typology that fits it. When the building needs to be substantially rebuilt, traditional zoning says “Time’s up – gotta move three blocks over to the commercial strip” – even if the residents of the block disagree. More modern zoning might say “OK, you can stay, but the new building has to look like a house – none of those display windows on a residential block.”

Either way, zoning theory says that forcing a change to fit into the pattern is all for the best. The business will either move or fit in better, and either way the block is better off. But what if the florist moves to the commercial strip and the odd looking storefront (or the whole house) stays vacant. It’s hard to sell because it’s not quite a house and not quite a store. If it’s a “hot” neighborhood some speculator might pick it up, strip off the storefront, and resell it as a house-that-looks-like-a-house. But everything works in “hot” neighborhoods. What if it’s a “not-so-hot” neighborhood and speculators are not standing in line to invest in odd houses. The building stands vacant (or at least the storefront is vacant) and the block is worse off than it started.

When it comes to mature cities, many blocks and many neighborhoods don’t fit into a visible pattern – and they don’t need to. The goals of planning should shift from finding and reinforcing the design pattern for every block to allowing reinvestment that will keep the structures occupied and productive without increasing negative impacts on the neighbors. For those neighbors, the improvement created by forcing the florist to move away or to work out of “patterned” building is theoretical, but the damage caused by an odd, vacant building is real. In mature cities and “not-hot” neighborhoods, zoning should probably pay more attention to the micro-impacts of small scale reinvestment decisions than the macro-level impacts of imposed patterns.

A Better Way to Zone discusses these concerns and identifies “Living with Nonconformities” as one of the ten principles that can help us create more livable cities.