The major reasons why zoning decisions take so long include:

• The need for multiple reviews – first by staff, then often by a planning commission, sometimes by a specialized (industrial, or historic, or loft) review group, and then by the city or county council;
• The opportunity for multiple appeals on controversial projects;
• Failure of applicants to submit a complete and accurate application, which results in failure of the government to start its review or slows down the process when the shortcomings are discovered later in the process;
• The desire of surrounding neighbors to review even projects that meet the city’s zoning standards before a building permit is issued.

While longer and repeated reviews sometimes result in a better project, often it does not – instead, the expense and delay involved burn money that could better be spent to improve the project itself, or result in projects being postponed until the applicant can round up more money.

Recently, the American Bar Association adopted a Model Statute on Local Land Use Procedure that addresses some of these delays.  The model statute calls for each significant development application to be the subject of one (but only one) substantive hearing and one (but only) one administrative appeal.  Local governments can decide whether they want the hearing to be before a hearing officer, a planning commission, or the city council – but not more than one of them.  For example, the planning commission could hold an informal meeting on the project (without following rules of evidence or creating a record) and then make a recommendation to be considered when the hearing is held at city council – but only the latter would be a formal hearing or subject to appeal.  Similarly, an administrative decision made by planning staff could be appealed to a board of appeals, but that decision could not be appealed again to city council or another city board – the next appeal would be to the courts.  These two recommendations alone would dramatically simplify and speed up zoning decisions.

A second solution is outlined in A Better Way to Zone – depoliticizing final approvals.  The American system of planning and zoning invites heavy public involvement in comprehensive planning for the city, and in neighborhood planning – in fact, all types of planning.  It also invites the public to be deeply involved in drafting the zoning rules – what kind of uses are allowed, how big can the buildings be, where is landscaping required, do existing trees need to be preserved, and where should the parking and driveways be located.  But it does not invite the public to be involved in individual review of how the property owner complies with those rules.  Once the rules are set, property owners design to meet the rules and if they succeed they are supposed to get approvals without additional discretionary review of each final site plan.  Land use decision making in America is participatory – but it is not designed and should not be used to create a popularity contest around each application.  Allowing staff to make final approval decisions as to whether the applicant has met the city’s zoning and quality rules, and to avoid discretionary hearings about how those rules have been met, would go a long way towards simplifying and streamlining development applications.

While these steps would be helpful in general, they are particularly important in our current economic climate.  Cities need reinvestment, and they need efficient decision-making systems to ensure that applications that meet city standards do not get held up by unnecessary bureaucracy.  That is one essential component of A Better Way to Zone.

Change, of course.  In A Better Way to Zone I wrote about how we have gotten off track in zoning our American cities and the high price we are paying for our mistakes.  Several of the themes in that book resonate with the kinds of change we need to see throughout our government and economy.  Lets’ name just a few.

Self-reliance.  Both as a candidate and as President, Barack Obama has made it clear that the next few months and years will be hard, but that the American people can rise to the challenge.  Obama has prepared us for the harder choices needed to build the foundations of a stable and healthier economy, and some of those decisions need to be made at the local level.  Washington did not create local zoning that creates exclusionary, expensive, and environmentally destructive patterns of growth.  Sure, federal road subsidies played a part, but many American cities have found ways to encourage more flexible, inclusive, diverse, and interesting neighborhoods anyway.  Our city governments created our local zoning problems, and they can and must be fixed at the local level.

Inclusiveness.  One secret to the Obama/Biden victory was broad inclusiveness, but zoning often heads the other way.  By reinventing zoning to promote sustainability, affordability, and transportation choice for less wealthy Americans, we can contribute to local inclusiveness and economic rebirth.  Zoning that reinforces the strength of existing neighborhoods makes the most of the bricks and concrete and energy and labor that they represent – and will help end the charade that rapid outward sprawl is a viable way to live.  By encouraging creative forms of attainable housing we can strengthen both the economy and the economic diversity of our cities.  Zoning that allows “non-conforming” structures and uses that do not threaten public safety to continue and even expand where they are can help weaker businesses to survive and thrive.

The Long View.  Obama reminds us that our current financial problems and environmental challenges did not emerge overnight and they will not be solved quickly.  Our current national crises are the results of decades of poor decision making by both our elected officials and individual citizens – decisions to take the easy way out while ignoring long-term consequences.  The same is true of zoning.  For too long we have empowered “Not in my Backyard” citizens to derail public investments and sustainable densities that are in the long-run interest of our cities – investments that would make our transportation systems more efficient, reduce pollution, and increase opportunities.  That needs to stop, and we need to focus our local governance on the long view.

In today’s inaugural speech, President Obama stated “The question is not whether our government is too big or too small, it is whether it works.”  For many American neighborhoods our current zoning does not work, and our local elected officials need to take personal responsibility to change that.  Our businesses, employees, families, and children will thank us.

My hometown of Denver, Colorado, was one of the first to see the real estate bubble start to pop earlier this summer.  After years of building more new homes than we had families to fill them, and without a significant price drop, we knew it was only a matter of time.  As interest rates rose the fastest growing moderate-income neighborhoods soon became some of the nation’s leading grounds for foreclosures — particularly to the northeast around Denver International Airport.  While southeast Denver had also enjoyed very robust growth, prices there were higher because of proximity to the Denver Tech Center and its tens of thousands of jobs.  To the northeast the airport was the only major employer, but convenience to the airport and less expensive land were powerful draws for new development.  Starter homebuilders often have to focus on areas where lower land costs translate into lower sales prices, and these become the “drive-til-you-qualify” corridors.  If you can’t qualify for enough loan to buy these houses, drive a little farther out and see if you can qualify for the slightly less expensive homes in the next subdivision.  But even when they did qualify, many buyers didn’t factor in the higher gasoline costs of driving back into town for work each day, and when gas prices spiked the combination of rising interest rates and commuting costs put them over the financial edge.

This is where Smart Growth and Sustainability come together.  Smart Growth advocates have long criticized the sprawl, high land consumption, and extra commuting that “drive-‘til-you-qualify” residential corridors represent.  But it turns out that those corridors were not only environmentally unsustainable, they were financially unsustainable as well.  Planners focused on the former, because the long-term financial success of buyers was not their concern, but it is important to realize that the effects of poor growth management turned out to be not only environmental damage but a very heavy dose of personal hardship as well.  In September and October of 2008, over half a million American families faced new foreclosure proceedings, many of them in these sprawling low-density corridors.

Our planning policies contributed to this failure in at least four ways:

• By failing to incorporate Smart Growth policies encouraging compact growth, and by allowing leapfrog development along major transportation corridors;
• By driving up housing costs through higher-than-necessary minimum lot sizes and very expensive road and infrastructure standards;
• By failing to remove barriers to redevelopment and higher densities in central locations already served by transit systems; and
• By failing to address the causes of NIMBY-ism, which tend to push new development out to the edges of our metropolitan areas.

Each of these failures is addressed, and alternative approaches discussed, in Chapter 7 of A Better Way to Zone.  More specifically, to avoid a repeat of these un-smart and unsustainable planning decisions, we need to focus on:

• Attainable Housing:  We need to allow a wider range of more efficient and creative forms of housing, and avoid trying to solve the affordable housing problem primarily through single-family detached units.

• Dynamic Development Standards:  We need to adopt development regulations that allow neighborhoods to densify and parking requirements to adjust automatically as the surrounding areas change and transportation systems evolve.

• De-Politicized Final Approvals:  We need to structure approval process that reduce opportunities for late-stage NIMBYism that discourages redevelopment and densification where new housing can be accommodated efficiently.

For years, Bengaluru has had the reputation of being a poster child for gridlock.  East-west traffic was funneled onto Mahatma Gandhi Road (“MG Road” – one of the most common names for main street in Indian cities) – including traffic from the international airport, which was bursting at the seams.  With revenues from high-tech firms flowing through the economy, however, Bengaluru’s municipal government has been working for years to tackle the problem.  Two of its main initiatives are the construction of a metro rail system (elevated through the downtown) and relocation of the airport.  The metro is underway and the airport is complete.  Unfortunately, the airport was relocated not only off the crowded east-west corridors, but very far away to the northeast.  While the world media covers China’s rapid construction of airports and roads, India is doing the same on smaller scale.  Nevertheless, when I travelled through India in 2006 and 2007 almost every medium and large city I visited was in the process of dramatically enlarging or replacing its existing airport.  Bengaluru’s is the first one I saw completed, and both it and the freeways leading to it are impressive.  Although the traffic still has to get into the city, it now gets there along the slightly-less-crowded north-south axis.

So what lessons does Bengaluru hold for urban planning and development in the U.S?  The main one is that competition is coming.  Not just competition for jobs and world trade – that was obvious long ago.  I mean competition for the resources we count on to build and rebuild our cities and their infrastructure – steel, concrete, and petrochemical products.  The combined demand of India and China for these products is likely to continue to drive prices up, so U.S. cities will face pressures to use less of them and to use them more efficiently.  And that probably means fewer miles of roads, pipes, and wires per person housed and employed – i.e. more compact development patterns.  Because the U.S. already has such dispersed land use pattern (most traditional downtowns now compete with multiple secondary employment centers and major suburban job hubs) more compact growth will not necessary mean more centralized growth.  It probably means more job and employment density in and around existing urban and suburban development nodes – and particularly those along transit lines.  American cities should be pro-actively zoning land to accommodate “densification” of those nodes – and should be using the tools identified in A Better Way to Zone to make that happen more smoothly.  More specifically, reforming zoning ordinances to integrate guidance in the sections on “The Mixed Use Middle”, “Attainable Housing”, “Dynamic Development Standards”, and “De-Politicizing Final Approvals” will help American cities compete with the Bengaluru’s of tomorrow.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.