Suburbs,_Virginia via wikimedia commons

Unlocking the Mysteries of Zoning

Sara Bronin’s new book, Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World (Norton), is revelatory. It explains how zoning operates in the U.S., both its limitations and dynamic potentials for creating life-affirming built environments. Her explanations of how zoning works (or doesn’t) are geared for those who don’t have firsthand knowledge of architecture, planning, urban design, municipal government, or development. It’s a great book if you’re a beginner in these fields, but it’s also for folks curious about what zoning is and its impact on everyday life. 

Bronin doesn’t write with an academic slant, which is the book’s strength. A prolific expert in land-use research as well as an architect and lawyer, Bronin chaired Hartford, Connecticut’s Planning and Zoning Commission from 2013 and 2020 and recently stepped down as chair of President Biden’s Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. She describes many of her insights into zoning through personal experiences, starting with her childhood in Houston, the only large U.S. city without zoning. Her firsthand viewpoint gives the book immediacy. Moving beyond theoretical discussions, she zeros in on how zoning impacts the lives of real people in cities, towns, and suburbs. Many of her examples draw upon family trips—first as a child, then as a parent, architect, and lawyer—around the country. Her personal narratives at times reminded me of the voice of Jane Jacobs, who often wrote from her own experience with neighborhoods and how they functioned. As this book demonstrates, zoning’s impacts can’t be underestimated. 

Bronin starts her book in Hartford, a city she’s very familiar with. She has a talent for describing the cumulative effects of bad zoning decisions. She writes of touring Hartford’s Upper Albany Avenue neighborhood with a local resident, Denise Best, discovering all the ways that this once-vibrant Black neighborhood has been sabotaged by bad decisions, and how such zoning mistakes have been repeated nationwide. Hartford zoning changes in the 1950s and ’60s made it impossible to rebuild the substantial and close-knit housing stock that once made this neighborhood great. Minimum parking requirements promoted asphalt for cars over green community spaces and places for people. Zoning preferences to move people through the city by car added to air pollution levels, making Hartford the state’s asthma capital, and this neighborhood the worst in the city. Dwindling sit-down restaurants and the disappearance of grocery stores resulted in skyrocketing obesity rates; today, the neighborhood has the highest diabetes and hypertension rates in the city. Life expectancy here is six years below that of the town of Avon, a nearby suburb.

 

The effects of bad zoning decisions—some unexamined and unchanged for more than 75 years—are replicated across America. Bronin’s book is a call to understand, revisit, and revise existing zoning codes nationwide. She writes that the book’s goal is to lift the “shroud of mystery” that most people have about it so that citizens can “harness the power of zoning.” She wants her readers to understand how it shapes the built environment, how outdated versions continue to negatively impact our quality of life, and how new approaches can make a positive difference. 

The book is structured in three sections: “Vibrant Economies,” “The Essentials,” and “Designing for Delight.” The first explores the economic impacts of zoning decisions: how zoning can fertilize local economies by getting the right mix of uses, with an accent on the creative arts (contributing to a city or neighborhood’s economic vitality, demonstrating their financial “worth” to a place). The second looks at how zoning can impact a neighborhood’s ability to provide the basis of a good life, such as affordable housing, transportation options, and food security. And the third considers how zoning can help to “create delightful experiences and meaningful places,” with an emphasis on building design and historic preservation. In all three, Bronin never loses focus on how zoning can make our lives richer and more equitable.

Throughout the book, Bronin weaves stories of zoning through case studies (I counted more than three dozen) that she has either been personally involved in or is aware of thanks to her extensive research in zoning and implementation. Her approach is quite catholic; she’s not afraid to venture into some realms where you might not expect zoning to have an impact. For example: Exactly how did Baltimore decide where its red-light districts should go? Or what are the zoning implications of a city like Austin creating a “nightlife-industrial complex”? How did car-centric zoning in Garden Grove, California, help start the world’s largest drive-in church? And what part does zoning play in the preservation of Las Vegas casino signs? 

But much of the book is devoted to how zoning shapes our day-to-day lives. The impacts of parking and lot-size minimums on housing affordability, environmental degradation, and transportation alternatives are subjects that Bronin turns to often. The city of Buffalo was one of the first cities to finally decide enough parking was enough (or maybe too much). Buffalo’s 1953 code did everything it could—single-use zoning, minimum lot sizes, and new parking requirements—to celebrate cars as the transportation of choice for those who had taken flight to the suburbs, at the cost of hollowing the city out. A vibrant, dense, walkable city lost half its downtown buildings to parking and plowed widened roads through thriving neighborhoods. Over the years, Buffalo lost both industry and people—more than half its population of 580,000 after the code went into effect. 

To stem its economic decline, in 2016 Buffalo adopted a new land development ordinance—the “Green Code”—to help arrest the devastation. It relegalized small-scale commercial uses, but its biggest impact has been realized through citywide parking reforms. (Buffalo was one of the first major U.S. cities to do this.) Developers proposing new construction, renovation, or changes in building use are required to submit a “transportation demand management plan” that outlines how the new development will reduce the number of solo car rides and vehicular miles traveled by the project’s site users and also promote alternative transport means, such as biking, walking, and public transit. To make the requirement less onerous, the Green Code suggests options for developers, such as free or subsidized public transit passes or carpooling programs. Buildings need to be sited to promote safe pedestrian access to public transportation, for instance. Other uses must provide bicycle storage. “Instead of requiring infrastructure for cars,” Bronin writes, “the city requires infrastructure for walkers and bikers—in other words, for actual people.” The impacts have been dramatic: by 2020, Buffalo saw the first increase in its decennial population in 70 years; more than 10,000 units of new multifamily housing have been built; and new developments have reduced the number of parking spaces. Now other cities are looking at the Green Code for inspiration. 

 

In the chapter “Completing the Street,” Bronin examines a nationwide design epidemic: Why do streets in cities and towns so often fall short of being memorable, much less functional? It turns out that no one in particular is responsible for their overall design. City engineers and public work departments make design decisions for the publicly owned parts of the street: roadways, buffer areas between the street and sidewalk, and all or part of the pedestrian realm. Meanwhile, planning and zoning establish codes for the privately owned portions: the buildings, sometimes all or part of the pedestrian realm, but typically not much of the buffer. The results are often a mismatch of pieces and parts: gigantic cobra street lights in front of low-scale housing, for example, or narrow sidewalks in a commercial zone because of road widening. “If we want better streets,” Bronin advises, “we need to plan for them—holistically, not haphazardly.” She points to Vermont’s Act 34, created in 2011 as the state’s first “complete streets” policy governing all state-built highways, roads, and arterials, as well as those local governments’ streets. Act 34 requires that streets safely accommodate people of all abilities, whether public transit riders, walkers, bikers, drivers, or those using assistive devices. Now 37 states, Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia, and about 1,600 local governments have embraced complete streets policies. Many jurisdictions have also developed new “form-based” codes in tandem with complete streets policies, which set forth aesthetic guidelines for building design (older codes typically don’t do this). The organization Smart Growth America’s Center for Zoning Solutions is just one resource for communities to audit and update codes to promote form-based zoning. 

“Zoning hides in plain sight,” writes Bronin. It’s behind whatever you look at: homes, schools, workplaces, restaurants, transportation, the corner store. Indeed, it governs our movement through, and experience of, the built environment. Key to the City helps reveal it and shows how it might unlock the positive potentials of our cities, communities, and neighborhoods.

Featured image via Wikimedia Commons. 

Newsletter

Get smart and engaging news and commentary from architecture and design’s leading minds.

Donate to CommonEdge.org, a Not-For-Profit website dedicated to reconnecting architecture and design to the public.

Donate