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.

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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.

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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.

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Zoning needs to do a much better job of living with non-conformities — buildings and uses that do not match the requirements of the zone district. Euclidean, performance, and form-based zoning all assume that it is only a matter of time until everyone conforms to the pattern — but history shows that it seldom happens. In the meantime, designing zoning around this false assumption can weaken neighborhoods and drive out the very uses and structures that give them vitality.

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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.

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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.

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