How zoning went wrong, and how to shape places better

A new book by Emily Talen traces the unfortunate history of zoning codes, and argues for clearer vision.To borrow a phrase from Winston Churchill, we shape our communities and then they shape us. But how do we shape communities? Mainly through arcane and complex land-use codes.

Arizona State University city and regional planning professor Emily Talen tells the story of these regulations in her insightful and intelligent new book City Rules.

“A crucial point, which is sometimes lost, is that sprawl is not the result of no rules, it is often the result of too many rules.”

Codes pertaining to streets, parking, setbacks, lot size, building heights, sidewalks, block size, allowed uses, and many other aspects of communities are ubiquitous from Midtown Manhattan to a leafy suburb. They are the unseen determinants of whether we will live in a compact, walkable community or in a place where an automobile is needed to get anywhere.

Codes play a big role in the greenhouse gases that we emit, how much we spend for transportation, and the accessibility to things we need in our daily lives.

Talen explores the beginnings of land-use codes, going all the way back to ancient city-states like Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus River Valley, which emerged 4,500 years ago. In Mohenjo-Daro, in what is now Pakistan, there is evidence that street width and building height were regulated in tandem. Many European cities have been continuously coded since the 11th or 12th century, a fact that has contributed to the character that makes these cities appealing today. In 15th-century Nuremburg, Germany, codes stipulated how many windows and how much ornamentation buildings could have, and how buildings should be lined up to create an “undeviating building line.”

Physical city plans likewise have a long tradition, from Amsterdam in the Netherlands, to Savannah, Georgia, and from Philadelphia — with the five downtown squares and ordered rowhouses that followed William Penn’s decree — to railroad towns across America. These plans worked hand-in-hand with simple land-use codes that regulated rights-of-way and other aspects of the built environment.

So far so good — but how did we get from commonsense codes aligned with clear visions to the undifferentiated sprawl of the early 21st century?

Land-use regulations were stripped, during modern times, of any sense of “spatial logic” and of an overall vision of how communities should look, Talen explains. Instead, cities and towns are now shaped by abstract formulas based on parking ratios, lot sizes, lot coverage and floor-area ratios, setbacks, and other criteria.

Talen’s critique is sometimes scathing: “Communities seem to pay little attention today to the random and disorganized patterns that their rules are creating. Compared to the simplicity and clarity of earlier zoning codes, zoning ordinances now seem indecipherable. In order to satisfy the increasingly paranoic need to control, sort and exclude, rules became more and more complex over the course of the 20th Century,” she writes.

Communities are currently trying to correct the regulatory mistakes through form-based codes and other zoning reforms, but this is a long, difficult struggle. City Rules offers an essential basis for how to proceed.

Zoning invented

A turning point in land-use regulatory history took place in the 1870s, when German engineer Reinhard Baumeister invented the idea of organizing codes according to “zones,” which evolved into what we now call zoning. In Europe, zoning focused more on the intensity of urban development than separation of uses; in America, separation of uses became the bedrock idea of zoning, which has been a major contributor to sprawl, Talen notes.

In 1916, New York City was the first US municipality to adopt comprehensive zoning. Two years later, the planning committee and staff were fired, but the rules endured — showing that once zoning is adopted, getting rid of it is very difficult. New York’s law was highly influential — zoning took off like wildfire in the 1920s, promoted by the indefatigable Herbert Hoover, who as Secretary of Commerce headed a federal commission in 1926 and published an educational text on zoning. By 1929, nearly 800 cities in the US had zoning ordinances.

Hoover’s commission, which promoted single-family housing and discussed separation of uses apart from a specific plan — in other words, without a vision — set the tone for US-style zoning in the 20th century.

The 1920s launch of US zoning, at a time when the automobile was taking hold as the dominant mode of transportation, had a powerful effect on the built environment in North America. Making streets “generously broad was considered a virtue,” and thus overly wide streets were encouraged and coded into law in municipalities all across the US, Talen notes. This is ironic because one of the early justifications for zoning codes was prevention of pedestrian deaths from automobiles. In recent decades, research has shown that excessive street widths contribute to automobile speeding and higher death rates for pedestrians.

Early zoning ordinances were uncomplicated and simple to read — many of them a mere eight pages long, Talen reports. The early codes were applied to cities with a fine-grained mix of uses — Phoenix’s zoning in 1930 reflected an urban pattern with high-density residential very close to the center. Later revisions to Phoenix’s downtown code illustrate how zoning had become “coarser and less nuanced” over the past eight decades — see images on page 6.

Early codes were relatively permissive — the most restrictive residential zone in Baltimore in 1924 allowed accessory units, boarding and lodging houses, hotels, and dormitories, for example. Many codes permitted unrestricted home occupations. Zoning became progressively less permissive of mixing in the second half of the 20th century. Most municipalities took separation to extremes — Phoenix has 264 zoning categories. Prince William County, Virginia, requires not only separation of uses, but also buffer zones between uses.

Geared to cars

Early advocates of zoning in the US never envisioned sprawl, as we know it today, as the outcome, Talen notes. Yet land-use regulations became more geared to an automobile-only environment. Blocks built according to legal requirements in Gilbert, Arizona, for example, are anything but human scale. The quarter-mile-long, straight blocks prioritize traffic flow over pedestrian flow. The emphasis is on limiting ingress and egress, which limits connectivity, explains Talen, who works in nearby Tempe. Important intersections in Gilbert are required to be fronted by broad swaths of landscaping rather than buildings, and are designed for fast-moving traffic through large turning radii — again mandated by code.

Talen documents that many of the early advocates of zoning stated on the record that they supported land use control for the purpose of class segregation. In Atlanta, officials went further — they zoned the city into white, black, and “undetermined” racial populations. Segregation of uses, as well, was based on stereotyping functions with “erroneous and fear-based generalizations.” One example: mixing of uses was said to promote juvenile delinquency because sidewalks obstructions and carts thwarted kids’ play.

Widespread and unfounded fears held that mixing of uses would degrade land values (in fact, mixed-use centers today have far higher land values than single-use zones, whether residential or commercial).

Small neighborhood shops, including grocery stores, were among the first casualties of mixed-use restrictions. “A significant problem was that the relationship between where people lived and the things that they needed to go about their daily lives was being undermined by city rules that were oblivious to those required patterns,” she writes. In Phoenix, typical of US metro areas built after zoning, it is assumed that everyone has the means to assemble what they need for day-to-day life from far-flung destinations.

Multifamily residential was considered a nuisance — as opposed to a tool for bringing more families closer to needed public facilities. High-density mixed-use blocks surround great urban parks, like Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. In North Phoenix, all parks are bounded by low-density, single-family housing, which ensures that they are underused. Urban parks need sufficient density and access — a Jane Jacobs observation ignored by many zoning ordinances, notes Talen. She adds that modern codes are mostly intended to create private open space, rather than public open space.
“Planners had no faith in the ability of design to solve incompatibility issues,” Talen explains. “Planners for a while sought to balance the need for services with separation, but in the end, widespread separation of uses prevailed.” With the loss of these connections, “American cities are now saddled with rules that work against the formation of compact, diverse, walkable, urban places,” she observes.

“In twenty-first-century America, there is wide agreement that a new approach to city building is sorely needed,” she writes. “Cities need to be less wasteful and more efficient, less land consumptive and more compact, less dispiriting and more vital.”

Sources for inspiration

Readers can look to the best urban places in America for inspiration. Parts of San Francisco, Denver, and Salem, Massachusetts, are offered as examples. “Here are codes requiring that a build-to line maintain frontage, that main entrances face the street, that weather and wind protection be provided for pedestrians, that blank walls are not allowed, that windows need to be at street level, that street trees must be provided, that it is okay to have porches and bay windows, that café tables and sidewalk sales should be encouraged, that lighting and signage must be scaled to pedestrians and not cars, and that parking lots and garage doors should not face the street,” she says.

Some have advocated for “minimalist coding”: Code the essential and let the rest go, in the hope that professionals and developers will come up with more imaginative solutions. That is easier said than done, because Americans have six or seven decades of experience with development patterns that tend to detract from quality of life. Many assume that if something is not coded, the worst will happen.
Internationally-known planner Andres Duany, in the foreword, notes that codes are necessary to protect urban municipalities from disinvestment because the market seeks stable investment environments. The right kinds of codes make cities and towns more competitive with homeowners associations and office parks and shopping centers that have their own rules, which create predictable outcomes that lure investment, he says.

Talen reminds us that codes have a “great and extended” history in support of city-building. “The decentralization and separation that corrupted city rules, set in motion at the First National Planning Conference in 1909, can be viewed as a blip in the historical record,” she says.

A new vision on what makes a great city is needed to move forward. Talen asks: “Will planners now be able to present as clear a consensus and vision about what the effect of rules should be as urban planners did a century ago?” That’s a question that cities and towns must answer in the coming decade.

The 236-page paperback is published in 2012 by Island Press ($35).