It might seem like policy-wonk stuff, but zoning actually shapes the dynamic world around us. Sara C. Bronin, architect, attorney, and policymaker, and professor at Cornell University, joins host Krys Boyd to talk about how code dictates our daily lives from parks, housing, restaurants, and the architecture around us, and why it’s difficult to overcome inequalities built into the books. Her book is “Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World.”
- +
Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] This show is all about taking a different perspective on things we might have thought we understood. We’ve talked about surprising developments in brain and behavioral science. We’ve taken on myths like the 10,000 Steps rule, and we’ve considered how a long ago California law requiring triplet prescription forms shaped the geographic boundaries of 21st century opioid addiction. So today, I trust you will stick with me as we consider a fascinating, counterintuitive proposition. Local zoning laws are fascinating and highly influential determinants of where and how and how well we all live. From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. If you are still skeptical, my guest might just convince you to start paying closer attention to the power of zoning laws to make our lives easier, more affordable, just generally better or generally worse. There’s been badly or not updated as local conditions change. Sara C. Bronin is an architect, attorney policy maker and professor at Cornell University. Her book is called “Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World.” Sara, welcome to Think.
Sara C. Bronin [00:01:07] Thank you so much for having me.
Krys Boyd [00:01:09] To start with, the very most basic question, what kinds of entities and activities are regulated by zoning laws?
Sara C. Bronin [00:01:17] Zoning regulates all kinds of land uses, including residential, commercial and industrial uses. It regulates the size and shape and bulk of buildings that can be built in any particular jurisdiction with zoning. And it also regulates lots. So how big a parcel of land has to be before, for example, a house can be put on it. And also the way that that lot has to be developed. Zoning has actually cumulatively some pretty significant powers over how an entire city is developed and by extension, the economy and and social bonds in that city, the transportation patterns and much more.
Krys Boyd [00:02:03] Even something like whether or not we need a car to get around is shaped by zoning. Can you talk about minimum land restrictions for single family housing?
Sara C. Bronin [00:02:17] Sure. So, you know, one is it so so lot sizes are the thing that comes to mind when you say minimum land restrictions. What that means is that zoning codes across the country say that if you’re going to build a single house, if you’re going to build a apartment building as well or other kinds of uses. But let’s focus on housing right now. If you’re going to build a single house, you need a parcel of land that’s maybe 5000ft² in some places, maybe an acre in other places, two acres. That’s true in about 50% of Connecticut, a state that I, I I’ve worked in for a little bit. And what that means is, especially when you get up into the half acre or more minimum lot size requirement, you’re essentially mandating that sprawl be built. And as you said, as you pointed out, it means that you are forcing people in those communities to drive because you can’t get very easily in across a neighborhood when every single lot is is a half acre or one acre or more. And you kind of have to drive in order to get around.
Krys Boyd [00:03:23] So I like to use metaphors to understand things. And this book, strangely enough, made me think about shoes and how like the wrong fit or design can make every step painful and difficult. The right pair can enable us to easily walk or run for miles. You’re a believer in the power of zoning, but you’ve also seen how zoning done wrong can create real impediments for people.
Sara C. Bronin [00:03:45] Yeah, and that’s really the case that I try to make in Key to the City. It’s really about how even if we recognize that zoning has been done so poorly in so many places, and I think it would be hard to argue that zoning is perfect even in a single jurisdiction. There are things to improve. But what I try to make the case in the book is that we know zoning has been filled with with with issues that its very genesis, its origins came from the desire to separate people from each other. And and even racial segregation was written into early zoning codes. So we have to recognize all of that. But what I’m really trying to do is present a forward looking vision and say, well, even though zoning has gone wrong, actually we can harness the very same powers and zoning to create communities that we desire and deserve. And so all of the different technical levers of zoning and we just talked about minimum lot sizes are the things that people should understand because those are the levers that they can pull in order to make the improvements that they need in their communities.
Krys Boyd [00:04:55] You also remind us in the book that because cities and towns are dynamic, neighborhoods are dynamic because they change over time. Zoning ordinances need to change accordingly. What kinds of amendments to zoning laws might be a good reason for changes to a neighborhood, might be a good reason for urban planners to amend zoning laws.
Sara C. Bronin [00:05:20] Well, I mean, if you look at changing neighborhood or residential preferences, you can see, for example, that people may not want to live anymore in some of those really large lot single family housing that was built in virtually every city and suburb and small town in the country. People are gravitating more towards walkable environments, towards places where they can grab a bite to eat down the street in mixed use communities. And zoning hasn’t really changed to reflect that. My argument that’s really covered in the first part of the book is about how we need to create through zoning or at least enable more vibrant and better connected neighborhoods with a mix of uses to reflect people’s just generally changing preferences. I also point in the book to things that we’ve learned from the Covid 19 pandemic, for example, the fact that people prefer to work from home while zoning in some cases prevents you from doing that, because the zoning rules might say, for example, that you can’t have a home occupation is what it’s typically called in your home. Well, what do you do when you have a law office in your home? You don’t you don’t necessarily need to go out. And every so often a client comes your way. If that’s prohibited by zoning, that prevents you from actually realizing your livelihood. At the same time, we have office parks that are emptying out and there are two, you know, that sort of lack of imagination in zoning, the lack of options that we have provided to those places that were predominantly commercial, predominantly office. We need to rethink those and we need to rethink that through zoning. And so whether it’s just broad societal shifts or the Covid 19 pandemic that sort of made some of these issues much more urgent. I think zoning has been exposed as being a regulatory power that really hasn’t necessarily quite caught up to the times.
Krys Boyd [00:07:18] Speaking of the Times, how and when did the first ancient, maybe proto version of zoning laws start to emerge as a way that cities would regulate activities?
Sara C. Bronin [00:07:28] Well, about 100 years ago, we really saw zoning start to spread in the United States. And it was thanks in part to a couple of Pioneer Cities, an ordinance in L.A. and and New York City’s 1916 zoning resolution that gave way to interest in other cities of zoning and actually in the 1920s led to then Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, creating through the U.S. Department of Commerce a model state zoning enabling act. And it was essentially written to allow states to pass on the power to delegate, to delegate, rather, the power to regulate land uses to local governments. And those zoning enabling acts have been passed or passed very quickly in all 50 states. And so jurisdictions around the country, cities, towns, counties, boroughs, villages, all kinds of local governments have been given the power to zoning. And we actually don’t know how many cities have the power to zone. We’re trying to figure that out through a research project that I have called the National Zoning Atlas. It’s online at Zoningatlas.org. But we don’t know how many communities don’t. My guess is about 30,000 do.
Krys Boyd [00:08:39] So that online atlas sounds pretty fascinating for those of us who like to nerd out on this sort of thing. What what kinds of data can we find there?
Sara C. Bronin [00:08:47] Wow. So for readers in the states of Colorado and for listeners out there in the states of Colorado, Arizona, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Hawaii and a couple others, D.C., we have completed a map with all of the zoning in your state. For listeners in other metro areas, there’s a whole bunch online, about half of California and a bunch of other places, and a bunch of Texas, a bunch of New York State, including New York City and the surrounding suburbs. But what it does is it actually digitizes in a map, the regulations for that local governments have for zoning and particularly housing. So you can, in one click, go to your town. It’s up on the map. So far, we have about 6000, almost 6000 jurisdictions up on the map out of the 30,000. But you can go to your town, you can say, show me where people can build single family housing, Show me where people can build apartments. And in one click you can see, hey, how does my town compare to the next town? Where do they where do we allow single family housing? Where do we allow multifamily housing? And I think it’s a pretty cool tool for people who are visually inclined and or for people who are just interested in how their community welcomes or doesn’t welcome housing.
Krys Boyd [00:10:08] It’s remarkable to think that not that long ago, like just a little more than a century ago, there might have been livestock pens next to homes, next to market stalls in big cities like Chicago or San Francisco or New York. Then, you know, these early housing or these early zoning laws came in and they were duplicated in much of the country. But at that time, some zoning ordinances also played a role in creating what, different conditions and places, depending on the race of most of the inhabitants.
Sara C. Bronin [00:10:39] You’re absolutely right. And so zoning has been seen to try to achieve many different objectives. And so when you talk about the pigsty next to a residential unit, you might say, okay, that’s pretty logical. Like we need to separate those things out. But you did see many jurisdictions, including Baltimore, including Louisville, Kentucky. That one went to the Supreme Court actually steeped in zoning codes, segregation based on on race. And it was black and white typically where the categories. But you see not only that in zoning, but across so many different types of property law documents, including racially restrictive covenants. I talk about how covenants which are private laws and regulate the use or the disposition position of particular parcels, how those also kind of play a role in the way our country developed. But zoning is, I guess, in many ways even even more egregious when you put those kinds of racial restrictions in because they are laws passed by duly elected officials. And that kind of attitude and the impulse to harness zoning for those ends was obviously a moral failing and one that we wouldn’t repeat today. It’s important, though, to recognize fast forward that we have lots of zoning laws on the books that may not be explicitly racially and they might not have explicit racial components, but that actually have implications on the way that communities develop and on the diversity of communities. In looking at the Connecticut Zoning atlas, the first state to be completed. And we actually did a report with Urban Institute finding hugely significant correlations between exclusionary zoning practices across Connecticut’s 180 plus zoning jurisdictions and the relative whiteness and wealth of the communities we studied. So in other words, it’s not just an old problem, and it’s very much a potentially a new problem. We need more research on that, which is why which is one of the reasons why we built the zoning atlas in the first place.
Krys Boyd [00:12:48] How does that happen in cases where the zoning laws don’t contain a single word referring to race directly?
Sara C. Bronin [00:12:56] Well, that’s a great question. I mean, you you mentioned one of those ways, minimum lot sizes. So that just by definition reduces the number of housing units that can be built within a jurisdiction because you have town boundaries. And if you’re dividing it in two acre lots, you get X number of housing units. If you divide it into half acre lots, you get four times as many units. And there’s also that just the basic kind of problem that many jurisdictions will allow for single family housing but not apartment buildings. That’s something that we found out in the National Zoning Atlas. And I guess third, even where they do allow for apartment buildings, they are requiring that those applications for those buildings have a full public hearing and go through much more onerous process than if. They simply then if they were a single family house. And so there all of these layers of regulation and process that a jurisdiction can put in place through their zoning codes that that tend to thwart the number of units that can be created and thus the access to particular communities.
Krys Boyd [00:14:07] Sara, Hartford, Connecticut is a really interesting place, and I know you were chair of that city’s planning and Zoning Commission. This is, if I understand correctly, a pretty low income city in a generally high income state.
Sara C. Bronin [00:14:21] It’s one of the poorest cities in the country and one that is very diverse from a race and ethnic perspective. It is 85% nonwhite, 15% white, and sits in the middle of a region in Connecticut that is one of the wealthiest in the country. And the wealth is concentrated in the suburbs outside of the city and certainly not within the city itself, which has seen the same patterns of disinvestment that central cities across the country have seen. In other words, case it’s a little bit more stark because the city is so small from a geographic perspective, only 17 or so square miles.
Krys Boyd [00:15:06] So you wanted to get on the ground and really understand this place you wanted to serve. What did you meet when you met? What did you learn when you met with neighborhood leaders in Hartford?
Sara C. Bronin [00:15:17] I start Key to the City with a walk around a particular neighborhood in Hartford with one of those very leaders, a woman named Denise, who had lived for decades in the city. In fact, in her very same house, in the very same neighborhood, and had notice quality of life issues all around her neighborhood, whether it’s it was fast food restaurants that provided limited healthy food options for neighborhood residents, whether it was a proliferation of of curb cuts and gas stations and car washes or whether it was the demolition of many of the historic buildings in her neighborhood. Often, you know, she had she had kind of seen these conditions happening and she had actually had some knowledge of zoning. She served on a zoning advisory board, but she hadn’t really had the chance to connect the conditions she was seeing in her neighborhood to the zoning code. I became the chair of the city’s Planning and Zoning commission in, I guess about ten years ago now. And I served for about seven years. And through meetings with Denise and others, I realized that the quality of life and development issues that people were seeing in their neighborhood were directly tied to the city’s very outdated 1950s era, suburban style zoning code. It imposed a whole series of, I would call it suburban values on an on a very dense, compact, walkable city. And the city suffered tremendously as a result.
Krys Boyd [00:16:50] So to go back for just a minute to the idea of a fast food restaurant in that neighborhood, I take your point that, you know, it’s not necessarily providing healthful things for people in the neighborhood to buy. Some people might hear that and say, you know, government has no business regulating for that reason. However, it would be hard to argue, like the effect on people who are trying to walk down a particular street of having to dodge traffic coming into and out of a drive thru lane.
Sara C. Bronin [00:17:18] Well, I mean, some of these lanes, some of these some of the curb cuts that we see on Albany Avenue are as big as 20, 25, 30ft wide. And the whole the fast food lanes, you know, people dart darting in and out from from a pedestrian standpoint, the safety issues on the avenue that we were talking about as we start the book, Albany Avenue were such that it was one of the most unsafe corridors in the country. And actually, since I took that walk with Denise, there were some significant state investments in that quarter that improved the pedestrian safety aspects of it in addition to the zoning reforms that we undertook. And I think in general, the all of that asphalt, you not only has the the consequence of creating an unsafe environment for pedestrians, but it also makes the neighborhood hotter because again, you have instead of trees and shade, you have asphalt and it facilitates a lot of car traffic through that neighborhood, which I would think contributes to the fact that that neighborhood has some of the highest asthma rates in the country. So, again, the issue of zoning is is really multifaceted with lots of different impacts. And I think you see that really clearly on Albany Avenue in Hartford and and so, so many cities across the country.
Krys Boyd [00:18:39] You write about researchers at Johns Hopkins studying the ways that zoning choices can affect the general physical health of people who inhabit a particular place, in this case the city of Baltimore. What recommendations did those researchers make for changing the way zoning worked there?
Sara C. Bronin [00:18:59] Well, I think part of their research pointed to the health benefits of mixed use communities. So going back to what I was saying earlier in the conversation, the fact that people can pop over to a grocery store for for, you know, banana or salad or whatever, the fact that they can walk to and get a haircut or maybe drop off dry cleaning or go to the laundromat, you know, those are things that encourage people living in mixed use neighborhoods to to walk into and to move their bodies in a way that the larger lot developments don’t and the larger lot. And I would also say many of these larger like communities are single use. So it’s only residents residential uses and you see blocks and blocks and curb road after curve road with with, you know, suburban residences, including, as I mentioned, in in some central cities which adopted suburban style zoning, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s.
Krys Boyd [00:20:02] As a child, you live for some time in the Houston area, and Houston is famous, maybe infamous for being the only large U.S. city without traditional zoning laws. What does that mean in terms of how projects are developed and sited there?
Sara C. Bronin [00:20:18] Gosh. I mean, Houston is such a dynamic and diverse city. So I’ll just start with the positive. It also has excellent food, as I always am very careful to say. But from an urban farm perspective, Houston leaves a lot to be desired. And part of it is that the lack of controls, the lack of land use regulations, has meant that anything can pop up anywhere. It meant that the apartment building that I spent my first six or so years of life was right across the street. When I revisited that from a strip strip mall, a nightclub, a gas station and a self storage facility and other uses that are not really conducive to, you know, small family with small children in a city. And that resulted from a lack of zoning. You also see what happens in Houston when it rains. There’s over pavement, there’s lots of flooding. People lose their lives in their homes because of, I think, land use planning decisions. So I think Houston has suffered from a lack of zoning. And I think that, you know, I would encourage Houston and any other medium sized city without zoning to to really consider how zoning might actually benefit residents and business owners.
Krys Boyd [00:21:44] The first time I visited Houston long ago, I knew about the no zoning and I thought maybe you’d see, like, you know, a fancy house next to a church’s fried chicken next to a school. It doesn’t work that way because no zoning laws doesn’t necessarily mean people don’t exert any restrictions on what gets built. Let’s go back to this thing you mentioned a few minutes ago, permanent deed restrictions, which are sometimes called covenants. How do those operate around Houston?
Sara C. Bronin [00:22:12] Well, Houston did. It has seen, especially in the early part of the 20th century, some of its residential developments within city limits sprang up with these real estate covenants, with these restrictive covenants associated with them. That is particularly true for the neighborhoods that people would consider to be wealthier neighborhoods in Houston, wealthier, older neighborhoods where the deed restrictions say you can only put a single family house on this lot forever and ever and ever. Nothing can ever change. And in many cases, also, because of the time they were adopted, they still have on the books, even though it’s illegal to enforce them racially restrictive covenants. So I tell the story in the book of my uncle, who owned a building that was formerly a house that was slated to be an extension of his veterinary clinic, where he discovered, among other things, that the single family restriction, even though the whole street and turned commercial as well as a racially restrictive covenant that would have prevented him as a Mexican-American from owning the property if the Supreme Court had instructed the enforcement of those down. Still, it’s on the books, as is the case for so many covenants across the city. But I guess my point in bringing up covenants in that instance was really that covenants are actually worse than zoning, in that they are extremely difficult to change such that you have to go to court to change even a single parcels restrictive covenant and prove that there’s a good reason for you to be able to do that. So they’re they’re much harder to change than zoning. And even even if we complain about zoning, lack of responsiveness to modern conditions ruling by restrictive covenant, it’s far worse. And that’s been Houston’s approach in many neighborhoods. And it’s I think it’s resulted in some unintended consequences.
Krys Boyd [00:24:23] So in other words, those still enforceable aspects of restrictive covenants prevent communities from adapting over time to changing needs and desires, which will happen in every single neighborhood.
Sara C. Bronin [00:24:34] Every neighborhood that that those restrictions are in place.
Krys Boyd [00:24:39] Euclidean zoning sounds like some kind of precise mathematical formula applied to how this is all done, but the term actually has nothing to do with geometry. Right. Can you explain what it does mean?
Sara C. Bronin [00:24:51] Sure. Well, the city. Yeah. And Euclid not, not a not does not have anything to do with the famed mathematician. It has everything to do with a village in Ohio called Euclid, where the Supreme Court in 1926 heard a zoning dispute and determined that when the zoning of a particular site, one owned by a company called Ambler Realty, was disputed. Went all the way up to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court said, well, you know, actually zoning is rational. And that decision in 1926, which came around the same time as those state zoning enabling acts were starting to proliferate around the country, really helped secure the status of zoning as a legitimate form of regulation by local governments and kind of accelerated its adoption in cities across the country. So Euclid is really about this tiny little village. And by the way, that city is up on the national zoning site. People who want to dig in to that plot to to go ahead and check out check it out on zoning atlas.org.
Krys Boyd [00:26:05] So the biggest effect of Euclidean zoning is creating a whole lot of places where you can only build single family housing.
Sara C. Bronin [00:26:12] Exactly. And I should have said that the the issue in that case was whether the local government could actually create districts that had different that allowed different uses in some districts and not those same uses in other districts. And one of the uses that was allowed in one of the districts at issue in the case was apartments. And the court at the time called apartment buildings, parasites, parasites on single family neighborhoods and said for that reason, you know, and among others and I’m greatly simplifying the case, by the way, but for that reason, among others, it was totally fine for local governments to zone because they had a strong interest in separate separating out the parasites of apartments from from others among and and to separate out commercial uses, which was the other issue in the case.
Krys Boyd [00:27:04] It can be a little hard for us, Sara, to recognize the ways that zoning works or doesn’t work, because if we’ve lived our entire lives in the United States, we just know how it is. This is our reality. Why do people in many other parts of the world see U.S. style zoning as bizarre?
Sara C. Bronin [00:27:24] It’s because we have so much of our land devoted to single family only zoning on large lots, as I mentioned in Connecticut, just as one example, 50% of the land in the state requires a two acre minimum zoning requirement. 80% requires a one acre minimum zoning requirement. Two acres is over the size of a football field. So when other countries look at those mandates that we impose on property owners, it kind of scratch your head and go like, what’s going on here? How is this the most one of the most productive countries in the world? Right. It’s it’s it’s it’s kind of counter to, I think, not only economic growth and development, it’s counter to environmental issues, environmental protection, because it forces development to be pushed outward much farther and requires the use of cars. And just from a sort of social cohesion standpoint, creating these communities where people have to live so far apart, you can’t walk over to your neighbor’s house very easily. As So it’s a little bit of a hike, two acres apart to get a cup of sugar or whatever. And I think other countries look at that and think like, Wow, this is really bizarre. I mean, in some ways our zoning has forsaken our central cities because of the way that we’ve, you know, also imposed in some cases that style of development, even in cities, which prevents people from having good choices, especially in light of the fact that we’re seeing more people want to have have that more walkable environment.
Krys Boyd [00:29:04] What counts as mixed use zoning and what makes you think it can be used potentially to bring communities together?
Sara C. Bronin [00:29:13] Well, I mean, mix it. Mixing uses can come in a lot of different flavors. So you could have a neighborhood that mixes a single family, two family, three family, four family and retail. You could have a neighborhood that like more of a downtown district that mixes offices and apartments for, you know, four plus family housing that we call in the zoning atlas retail and service uses like nail salons and and things like that. You could have a neighborhood that mixes light industrial uses as well as office uses, maybe throw in some residential housing there as well. So again, mixed mixed uses can come in a lot of different flavors. I should also add actually transit oriented development, which is usually mixed use neighborhoods that cluster around fixed nodes of transit like train stations, and you are seeing more of that. But fortunately, we are seeing more cities try to experiment with the mix of uses, recognizing that if you allow for people to to have neighborhoods where you see more different kinds of things, they can get the services that they need. They can access things conveniently and their environment is a little bit more lively. So I guess I would just say there’s not one specific formula for a mix of uses, but lots of different communities are doing different things and trying new things.
Krys Boyd [00:30:37] To your point a moment ago, Sara, about mixed use zoning. I think it’s fair to say nobody probably wants to live right next door to some big like industrial business. But, you know, maybe allowing small scale industry in some neighborhoods could be transformative. Something like craft brewing. Tell us about that.
Sara C. Bronin [00:30:56] Sure. And you know, in Key to the City, I highlight an example of this very thing, which it was a brewery hookah brewery which was trying to locate within an old industrial complex that has been painstakingly rehabbed and that. Development had kind of been stuck in industrial only zoning even though the industry where that that that built the complex in the first place wasn’t coming back to Hartford. It’s certainly not at that location. So a rezoning enabled for a variety of uses and those uses included on that site, a school, a some office building, some office space, residential and a whole bunch of other things. And actually there are a few large buildings are kind of connected. But in one of the spaces which had been the, the developer been trying to lease for some time, there was a great space for what somebody hoped was a brewery would be a brewery, but zoning prohibited that. So even though we had rezoning to allow for this mix of uses, we had had this provision in the code that said you can’t put any brewery type uses next to a school. One of the things I wanted to point out by telling the story in the book was that we found out that this was an unintended consequence. This particular type of development is really different from what you might see in a sort of standalone school in that maybe just a strip bar opening next is right next door to the school. This was really exactly the kind of development that could benefit from a place that served food and and served the the people who were attending the Dillon Stadium, Hartford Athletic Games down the street, as well as residents wanting to find a place after hours. So we modified the code to allow for those kinds of uses. And in fact, the zoning code in Hartford has a whole category of craftsman industrial uses, we call them, and those uses are intended to be small batch maker type uses. I also use the story of Baltimore and Remington in the book to the Remington neighborhood, which, like Hartford, actually was as post-industrial as a post industrial neighborhood with lots of old buildings and industrial buildings. And the city had to think about how to reuse those too. So the solution for many cities and in looking at historic assets has been to focus those those rehabilitations on a much broader set of uses than the heavy industrial uses of the past. And in many cases those have included what you might consider light craftsmen and just industrial type uses where people are building things. And I think that adds vibrancy.
Krys Boyd [00:33:44] People love to visit Nashville. I know a lot of people love living in Nashville. It has its famous music row. But one problem cities face when particular neighborhoods really thrive is that they can become unaffordable. What’s the situation there?
Sara C. Bronin [00:34:00] In the book, I cover two parts of Nashville. One is the downtown area, which has seen a lot of reinvestment and is really the center for nightlife and bars and the honky tonks and so on. But the other is Music Row, which is a neighborhood where you might consider the business side of Nashville’s music scene is located. So the recording studios, the the the record companies more generally. And that has been the case for for decades. That neighborhood, which actually grew out of a zoning change decades ago, to kind of address some other issues that that the city was seeing and the city enabled the kinds of office buildings to be built in that neighborhood decades and decades ago. But it transformed into this this hub where almost all of the famous musicians that country music stars and have come out of Nashville have have gravitated towards in order to start their careers. Dolly Parton is one of them. And she has a song called Down on Music Row, which I referenced in the book, and I won’t sing it for you today, but look for it on your favorite streaming app. But in any case, as that industry has continued to to grow and you’ve seen country music only continue to expand, Music Row has actually suffered a bit. And part of the reason for that is that growing interest in living in Nashville has led to a lot of new development, but maybe not fast enough because you see some pretty high prices in the city. And so development, especially for residential development, has pushed out into Music Row, which is in turn meant that many of those places that the history making aspects, the business aspects that that bloomed the that launch the country music industry had started to fall to to denser development. So the city there decided to institute a program to to help property owners keep some of those institutions there. They I’m sorry, they’re considering instituting a transferable development rights program. Where the people who own those buildings might be able to sell off development rights that would be otherwise allowed by zoning, but they would be able to sell those to neighbor, a neighbor or someone nearby so that that property owner could build higher. Without the property owner, where there’s a music business in place and actually demolishing the music business. So a bit of a mouthful there. But the point is, is that Nashville has recognized that there are affordability issues leading to the demolition of many of the places that have supported the growth of Nashville, supported industry there, supported the music industry in particular, and that that’s something that probably needs to be reviewed. So, you know, cities try different things. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. That Nashville does pass this transferable development rights regime in the coming months or years. I’ll be interested to see how it goes. But I point them out in the book because I think it’s a creative way that cities are at least brainstorming and how to respond to a number of different issues that that might affect them.
Krys Boyd [00:37:26] One huge issue for a lot of cities these days is a shortage of affordable housing. How can zoning policy at least help to ameliorate this?
Sara C. Bronin [00:37:36] Well, zoning policies that do the opposite of some of the neighborhoods and zoning that I was talking about earlier. So zoning policies that maybe don’t have minimum lot sizes that allow for apartment buildings to be built without public hearings across much larger parts of the city that don’t have minimum parking requirements, which require developers to build parking spaces with every single housing unit, sometimes unnecessary. You see minimum parking spaces all over New York City, for example, people don’t have cars in New York City all the time. So the idea that a developer who’s building housing has to also build an extremely expensive garage to support that housing is a bit a bit ludicrous. Now the city has just moved in zoning reforms to the city of Yes to change that. But, you know, we’ll hope that and we’ll hope that that doesn’t get challenged in court and that it can be fully implemented. There are lots of different strategies and a lot of the strategies that would enable more affordable housing require rolling back some of the regulations and eliminating some of those regulations. It’ s common sense, if you think about it, the more rules you have on something, the harder it is to build. And if you want something to happen, you got to loosen or right size the rules. And that’s what I think zoning needs to go next.
Krys Boyd [00:38:55] You mentioned public comment. I don’t get the sense from reading your book or from talking to you that you don’t care at all about what the existing residents of a community want. However, sometimes when someone is proposing new development that could create new housing or potential benefits. The stakeholders who will benefit from those things, they don’t yet exist because they’re not in that place that the thing has not yet been built. Can can you talk us through how public comment can be helpful and where the limits lie?
Sara C. Bronin [00:39:26] Public comment is great and it is very important to shape how a community grows. I think my main view and after having served on the Planning Commission for seven years, having seen so many different communities approach housing in particular, is that oftentimes public comment is coming at the wrong time. So I think public comment and involvement should come in shaping the zoning rules themselves and articulating how specific things should be built and not at the time of individual applications. In other words, like, let’s set out the rules of the game so everybody can be comfortable with them and then allow for individual applications to be reviewed by the staff to make sure they meet the criteria. But but not to have this sort of negotiated off an emotionally charged situation that you see at public hearings that that, again, you often see when it comes to individual housing applications. So that’s my push for public comment. And public involvement is is really important. But in in many cases, it comes at the wrong time. And I think that hurts everybody.
Krys Boyd [00:40:33] What are complete streets principles, Sara?
Sara C. Bronin [00:40:37] So a complete street refers to a street that’s designed to accommodate a wide variety of users, not just drivers, but bikers, walkers, people who use wheelchairs and and end users of all ranges and abilities. So young olds in the middle, athletes, you know, the whole nine yards. So a complete street is one that takes all of these concerns into account in all of these capabilities and develops the street that they can meet the variety of needs. A complete street can be something that zoning can help to inform and facilitate. So in the code for Hartford, for example, we have all chapter that’s devoted to street design, a chapter that lays out specific cross sections for what must be included in different types of streets, including, in some cases, bike lanes or street trees or of course, in every case, sidewalks. But we lay that out so that future development can can include the variety of users, include and anticipate the variety of users and complement the buildings that zoning codes typically do, do regulate. So our code goes a little farther. The Hartford Code goes a little farther in, in reaching out into the street and in Key to the City, I make the case that that that’s something that more cities should do.
Krys Boyd [00:42:01] How can zoning ordinances shape the aesthetics of a given neighborhood and when is that appropriate?
Sara C. Bronin [00:42:07] I’m a big proponent of beauty in cities. I believe that people deserve to have cities that are that are beautiful and not just functional. And I think that there are few ways that cities can do that one way, and that’s maybe emerged more recently. Maybe over the last 15, 20 years has been the advent of form based codes, which include much clearer provisions on esthetics than what you might call a traditional code or a code that focuses predominantly on uses. So a form based code adds in and in some cases subtracts use related restrictions, but adds in requirements on on things like the shape of a roof or whether there’s a porch or not or the location of a door. And in laying that out in advance, again, you get a little bit of predictability. You get some rhythm to the street. And I think they have been helpful in creating, in some cases, creating, or is that a pleasing development? Another way is through historic preservation rules. So in the book, I talk about Galveston, Texas, which is a community I’m familiar with, having grown up in Houston, and some of the rules that they put in place to evaluate changes to historic neighborhoods and to ensure that they’re compatible.
Krys Boyd [00:43:25] Yeah. How can zoning strike the right balance between preservation of what is old and maybe historically valuable and development of what is new and necessary and desirable for kind of modern living.
Sara C. Bronin [00:43:38] Zoning and the right zoning is all about finding that balance. I think for for on the aesthetic front, communities have to recognize the capacities of people living in them, including financial capacity, by the way. You don’t want to have a in a low income city, a requirement in the zoning code that doors be gold plated. Right. So, you know, I mean, you have to be reasonable. But I think that finding the balance is is imperative. And it’s something that elected officials, zoning experts, planning staff should be really working to do. And again, that can come in a variety of forms and it can come in different levels depending on the community’s expertise, capability, interest. And it may happen in some neighborhoods and not others for, for example, industrial neighborhoods. Maybe you don’t have any real design standards on those, but in historic parts of the city, on a main street, you might say, well, listen, we want this to be a little bit more coherent. Delray Beach, Florida, is an example that I use in the book. And walking up and down the Atlantic Avenue and the colorful buildings and the arcades and the awnings and it does kind of not every building is alike, but it does kind of hang together as a as an urban form. And part of the reason for that is the zoning code.
Krys Boyd [00:45:10] Sara C. Brown is an architect, attorney, policy maker and professor at Cornell University. Her book is called “Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World.” Sara, thank you for the conversation.
Sara C. Bronin [00:45:23] My gosh. Thank you. Great questions. I really enjoyed it, Krys.
Krys Boyd [00:45:26] Think is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram and listen to our podcast. Anywhere you get podcasts, just search for KERA Think. Again. I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
