Over the past two years, news from the housing industry has not been good.  Housing starts are down – way down.  New home sales are way down.  Resales are down (I don’t know how many friends have told me they cannot buy a new house until their old house sells).  And of course prices are down.  Builders tell me they have to suspend construction because the few buyers in the market can buy last year’s houses out of foreclosure for less than the cost of building this year’s house.  And of course there is “jingle mail” – where homeowners simply mail the house keys back to the bank in hopes of minimizing the time and expense of foreclosure.

So with prices falling, the housing affordability crisis must now be behind us – right?  Wrong.  In A Better Way to Zone I describe the housing affordability crisis as a structural problem of the U.S. economy and that is still true.  Business cycles come and go, and this recession will in time bottom out and the housing economy will rebound.  The long term effects may be a slight lowering of average housing prices – but not much, and not over the long haul.  The key problem remains – the U.S. economy is simply not creating jobs that pay (on average) what it costs to build new housing (on average) and that gap continues to widen. 

In fact, that difficult fact is what fed the desire to create sub-prime mortgages – since we could not increase average wages and we could not lower the costs of building a house, the home finance industry found a way to bridge that gap by letting less money buy more house (temporarily).  The recession may narrow that the gap by deflating home sale prices and bringing them a little closer to the buying power of some households, but it doesn’t change the basic mismatch between wages and housing construction costs.  And the problem will get worse, because global economic pressures will continue to push wages down and the burgeoning demand (especially from the exploding middle classes in China, India, and elsewhere) will keep driving the price of housing inputs up.

I see the results of this pressure in my consulting practice, where cities are asking for broader and more powerful tools to address housing affordability.  What can local government do?  It cannot solve the macro-economic problem, but it can remove barriers that drive housing prices even higher than they need to be.   Minimum lot size and minimum house size requirements are two of the main culprits.  Artificially low multi-family densities are another, and narrow definitions of allowable housing types are a third.  The simple fact is that economic pressures are going to force many American households into smaller single-family units and sometimes into multi-family housing even if they would prefer to buy something larger.  Responsible cities will find ways and places where that can happen and will revise their zoning to allow it to happen in ways that strengthen the community.  Local governments can also remove barriers to modern modular homes, co-housing, live-work products, cottage housing, and a variety of innovative smaller home options emerging to serve our aging population.  Other innovative products are described in more detail in A Better Way to Zone.  These are not just “quick fixes” — they can result in long-term changes in the American housing stock that responds to changing economic realities. 

The long-term housing affordability crisis is not going away, and responsible local government will use this “breather” from development pressure to rethink their approach to the issue and to re-evaluate the housing barriers embedded in their zoning and subdivision controls.

I just returned from a week of work in Jakarta, the booming capital city of Indonesia.  Jakarta has an estimated population of 13 million, which works out to about 44,000 people per square mile, compared to about 26,000 for New York City.  Yes, it has a lot of people, and it’s growing.  You can see the growth on the skyline, which has been transformed by high rise development over the past 15 years.  Skyscrapers of mundane design jostle for attention next to some exceptional examples of modern and post-modern architecture.  At least ten cranes dot the skyline as new contenders strive to meet the growing demand for office space, headquarters, and hotel rooms.  Lower to the ground enclosed three and four story shopping malls proliferate – malls that would not look out of place in any large U.S. city, or in Bangkok.  Broad multi-lane avenues like Jalan Jenderal Sudirman carry steady streams of new private cars, taxis, mini-buses, and old public busses at all hours of the day.  Crossing on foot is impossible (and illegal). Pedestrian overpasses are well-used and often funnel long lines of commuters to crowded bus stops along the dedicated busways bordering the central median.  Where the streets cross broad canals, the slow-flowing dirty water reminds you that the global capital of the world’s fourth largest country is sited just barely above the level of the Java Sea.

Why is Jakarta booming?  Well, like many Asian economies, Indonesia’s economy is growing – but not as fast as those of India or China.  The real reason is urbanization.  Indonesia is only 46% urbanized, compared to almost 80% for the world’s third most populous country — the United States.  Like many developing countries with one dominant city, a disproportionate amount of rural-to-urban migration finds its way to that city, and the government struggles to keep up.  The story in Jakarta is the same as the story in Delhi or Shanghai – urbanization is happening far faster than municipal governments can plan for it, build for it, or pay for it.

Does Jakarta hold any lessons for U.S. cities?  Yes, probably.  Although traffic always threatens to overwhelm Jakarta’s street network, the city has chosen to set aside valuable lane areas for the public bus system, and those dedicated rights-of-way make the busses a welcome escape from the slow moving auto and motorbike traffic.  During my stay I met several Jakartans who were proud to say they owned cars but quick to add that they did not use them to get to work – they took the much faster busses even though they were more crowded.  On the downside, Jakarta’s street system is pretty bi-polar – very big roads move most of the commuting traffic, but feed directly onto tiny barely-two-lane neighborhood streets only feet from single- and two-story houses from another, slower era.  There does not seem to be much in between the largest and smallest of streets – the intermediate level of collector streets is often missing.  When arterials get overcrowded in the U.S. commuters seek the collectors as secondary routes, but in Jakarta escaping the boulevards puts heavy traffic on the smallest of streets.

The second lesson is the inevitability of mixed use development.  When cities grow rapidly, they tend to both densify and sprawl.  Even if a competent and effective city government wanted to enforce separate residential, commercial, and industrial development areas on the new growth edge, that would be impossible in the older core.  In Jakarta this plays not only in a mix of high-rise residential and commercial towers along the major arterials, but in a fine grained mix of residential, commercial, and light industrial uses in the one- and two-story buildings immediately behind the towers.  As Jakarta struggles to keep up with its urbanization, the primary focus will almost certainly be on providing roads and infrastructure, with a secondary focus on the scale of development.  Attempting to separate uses will probably be only a minor theme – just as it has declined in importance in the U.S.  The “Mixed Use Middle” that I identify in A Better Way to Zone has always been the norm in most large cities outside North America.

Planning is just like other professions – it’s subject to the “bandwagon” effect. A new idea comes along – usually a good one that addresses some important weakness in the current system. People take notice because it seems to work – it solves a problem the profession was trying to solve. That’s when the bandwagon effect kicks in. Not only is the new idea a good idea if you are facing that particular problem – all of a sudden no project is complete unless it includes the new idea. The new idea comes up in planning commission meetings, maybe even in city council meetings – usually in the context of “that’s a good idea, why don’t we have one of those in our system?” The problem with the bandwagon effect is that it stretches the logic of the new idea beyond the problem it was intended to solve. All of a sudden planners have to start explaining why they don’t use the new tool – even if the answer is “it really isn’t designed to address this problem. This problem calls for a screwdriver and that’s a pair of pliers.” But planners work for elected officials, and once they start asking the “why don’t we have it?” question it’s often easier to say “we’re working on that right now” instead of explaining the difference between a screwdriver and a pair of pliers.

Form-based zoning is one of the latest examples of a popular planning idea. And it’s a really good tool in some circumstances. The basic idea is that zoning has gotten too pre-occupied with fine grained differences in land uses and has lost site of the “form” of development. The real issue may not be that the land use is inappropriate, but that the form of the building doesn’t fit in with those around it. Look around any dense urban area – particularly a downtown or a transportation hub – and you can find a very broad range of land uses. Offices, apartments, stores, condominiums, clinics, gas stations; how could any proposed use be inappropriate? This is an area where everything goes on. Clearly, zoning that focuses on acceptable land uses might be missing the point. But building a 15-story residential tower in a townhouse area, or a shoppette with parking in front right in the middle of a block of storefronts that you can enter right from the sidewalk – now that could be a problem. The new “form” could erode the character of the area and destroy the very things that make it desirable — a human scale, or walkability, or back yard privacy. Where an urban area has a definable character and form, form-based zoning may make a lot of sense.

But there are many areas of most cities where it is hard to find that form. Areas where there is a true mix of forms and styles. Row houses are mixed with single family buildings and apartment buildings – and the citizens like it just fine. Areas where a high-rise building is clearly out of scale with everything around it, but the neighbors have gotten used to it and actually like it. If another high-rise came along they would like that just fine, too. Areas that are in transition, where 70% of the “urban fabric” points to one style and the remaining 30% is a complete mix of mid-rises, high-rises, shoppettes, institutions with parking around them, and whatever. A skilled urban designer could look at the area and say that the dominant urban form is “X” and that should be reinforced. Or that it’s “X on the way to being Y” and that should be encouraged. But the neighborhood residents might disagree with both. Yes, it’s not a definable form, and yes it looks like a mess, but we like it that way. There are areas where the clear preference of the residents is not to have a particular form that you are trying to reinforce or work toward. And it’s not clear why the city should push for a different result.

I think this underlines one of the important disconnects in planning. Planners are trained to look at neighborhoods and see what they “could become” and urban designers are trained to study form and decide what the form “should be”. Sometimes that is exactly right – but not always. Cities are complex places, full of residents and property owners with different and conflicting goals. Isn’t it just possible that some areas could be happy without being on the way to something different? And that would be just fine for the future of the city?

That’s why form-based zoning is a great innovation – some of the time, and in some places. But to jump on the bandwagon and say that form-based approaches can cure the ills of zoning is overstating the case. It cures problems related to over-focusing on uses and under-focusing on building form in areas that have or want to have a particular urban form. But that’s not all of the city – and it may not even be a majority of the city. Like any legal tool, form-based zoning needs to be used thoughtfully and carefully. And that’s why most major of America’s major cities have chosen to use form-based zoning selectively – rather than trying to apply it everywhere.

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.

The American Planning Association just celebrated its 100th annual national conference in Las Vegas. With over 6,000 attending the conference, planning is obviously alive and well in the U.S. — and zoning is still at the heart of the action. I just returned from the conference and noted that one of the featured tracks was “Zoning, Codes, and Ordinances”. This year APA featured 17 sessions on zoning-related topics.

The sheer number of zoning-related discussions at APA and the topics of those sessions underscore the first lesson I identify in Chapter 6 of A Better Way to Zone — Euclidean zoning is both very durable and clearly flawed. While we continue to try to fix zoning in myriad ways, most of those fixes assume that the basic structure will remain in place. APA’s discussions addressed zoning from three directions

The first group of sessions fed our continuing interest in Euclidean hybrid zoning and its history.

• “An Instruction Manual for Advanced Regulatory Drafting” aimed at building mastery of the current system.

• “A Conversation with Richard Babcock” highlighted the career of a master land use lawyer best known for his book The Zoning Game and its analysis of how zoning really works.

• A second set of topics related directly to the Ten Principles outlined in Chapter 7 of A Better Way to Zone.

• “Market-Tested Zoning Tools for Mixed Use” was all about The Mixed Use Middle.

• “Controlling Large Houses” reflected our growing interest in Attainable Housing and communities that support it

• “New Zoning Techniques Using GIS” reinforced the need for Better Webbing

Finally, a third set of discussions focused on the increasing use of zoning as a tool to promote environmental sustainability – the latest chapter in how we mold the robust framework of Euclidean hybrid zoning to meet new challenges.

• “Saving the World through Zoning” outlined a model sustainable land use code under development by the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute in Denver.

• “Integrating Planning and Ecosystem Science” discussed exactly that.

• “Permitting and Standards for Wind Power” addressed the increasing overlaps between zoning and alternative energy sources.

In 2008, APA is celebrating 100 years of conferences, and the landmark New York City zoning ordinance turns 92. For almost a century planners have looked at zoning to do the heavy lifting in American land use regulation – and there is every reason to believe that will continue.

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.