Buffalo views code reform as economic development

Buffalo, New York, a city of 261,000, is working on becoming the third major municipality — after Miami and Denver — to adopt a citywide, mandatory, form-based code.

“We haven’t generated 100 percent consensus on every issue, but there is enough consensus for the project overall,” says Chuck Banas, an activist who has been working on code reform in the city for six years — going back to a SmartCode conference that was held with 125 stakeholders in 2006.

There’s solid political support for the city’s Green Code, which is nearing completion and is expected to be approved and implemented within a year, he says. The Lake Erie city has not rewritten its zoning code since 1953, and it currently requires developers to jump through many bureaucratic hoops, often with multiple variances and in the face of opposition because the outcomes are not good. Planning committee members conduct hearings on even the smallest projects, effectively micromanaging the real estate economy. All sides — developers, public officials, and citizens — regard the current zoning as broken. “The absence of commitment to the current system was one of the greatest assets in reforming the code,” says Chris Hawley with the Buffalo’s office of strategic planning. “Few people wanted to defend the status quo.”

Mayor Byron W. Brown views the Green Code as an economic development initiative that will provide predictability to citizens, public officials, and developers. It would wipe away 60 years of regulations and replace them with clear graphics and plain English — the lawyerly “shalls” are replaced with “musts” for example. Hawley suggests an approach to zoning language: “Ask yourself how Ernest Hemingway would write it.”

It is based on a 2006 citywide comprehensive plan that won a Charter Award from the Congress for the New Urbanism. The intent is to communicate clearly what projects will win approval, and provide by-right approvals to most of those projects that meet the code. Smaller projects, under 40,000 square feet, would not have to go through public hearings — unless they involve clearly specified uses, like corner taverns, that require a conditional approval permit.

In a city that has lost more than half of its population since 1950, a more effective and streamlined approach to land-use regulation sounds appealing to many.

The code reform effort is innovative in that it is proposing no minimum parking requirements for the entire city — that would be a first for a city the size of Buffalo, says Hawley.

“There’s almost nothing more important to good urbanism than eliminating the parking requirements,” he says. Current parking laws often require tearing down adjacent buildings just to meet the code, he says, which lowers nearby property values and makes the city less appealing. Although there is fairly strong agreement on eliminating parking minimums, Banas says, the proposal is not without controversy.

Where parking is built, the Green Code tightly regulates the design of parking lots and specifies where parking must go (generally behind the building). It is also aggressive about bicycle parking. Despite Buffalo’s snowy winters, it is one of the top 20 bicycling cities in the US.

A mixed-use zone as depicted in Buffalo's Green Code, in the planning process

Basic code elements:

• The Green Code is a unified code in that it addresses all aspects of the built environment including streets, parks, buildings, parking, and signs.

• It is based on the urban-rural Transect. The regulations set appropriate standards — parameters that allow flexibility — aligned to the urban intensity of a particular location. There are three zones for the urban core, three for urban centers, four for neighborhood general and one “edge” or suburban zone. Plus, retail, educational, medical, and industrial special districts are allowed in specific locations.

• The code is form-based in that it focuses strongly on how buildings shape the streets and public spaces and less on separation of uses and density. It still regulates use, but it is less restrictive than conventional codes.

The city took a “tabula rasa” approach to the zoning, rewriting it from scratch. The Byzantine layers of the current code are based on old planning ideology, Hawley explains. Concepts like form-based codes, the Transect, the current thinking on parking regulations, and ideas dealing with sustainability are relatively new. “You can’t turn a typewriter into an iPhone,” he says of the city’s 1953 zoning ordinance, advising: “If it is broken, don’t fix it, throw it away.”

Dealing with old buildings

Most of the near-term development in Buffalo is expected to reuse old buildings, which are plentiful and underutilized. The proposed code is designed to help by reducing restrictions on use. Developers will no longer have to get multiple variances to get most projects through the pipeline — allowing buildings to be recycled more efficiently.

Buildings that are listed as city landmarks, such as old schools that have closed due to declining enrollment, will be allowed to be put to new use through an adaptive reuse permit. These buildings are often located in residential areas, but they could become office buildings or hotels, for example. The catch is that the outside of the building cannot change.

Like many cities, Buffalo is full of old buildings that were badly remodeled on the exterior within the last four or five decades. If they get converted into something new — a shopfront perhaps — they will have to meet the new code, which will facilitate urban repair of the city.

A sketch for a neighborhood green in Buffalo's Green Code

Sprawl repair

Another type of real estate activity anticipated is the redevelopment and revitalization of suburban-style commercial strips, which have been built along many of Buffalo’s major arterials.
There are two types — those that are dying and those that are thriving. The city takes two approaches.
Commercial strips on their last legs require full adherence to the form-based codes for redevelopment. These are encouraged to turn back into urban places.

For economically viable shopping centers and malls, however, the approach will be different. These can stay suburban in form, but as new development occurs the edges will be required to form a better transition to the more urban neighborhoods on their periphery. The stand-alone franchise restaurant built on the corner of the site will be required to have an urban frontage, for example, with a door opening to the sidewalk. Such centers also have a requirement for open space. Under the current code, this open space is typically a buffer on the edge with limited public utility. Under the new code the open space will take the form of a meaningful urban space, like a square, in a meaningful location — say, in front of the anchor store.

The code takes a flexible approach to setbacks. In Buffalo, there’s a great variety of setbacks that shift block by block — even in the same neighborhood. So the context becomes the standard. A house can be five feet in front or behind the average setback line on the block. If less than 20 percent of the block is developed, then the setback is established by the city planning board.

The Green Code identifies and deals with common Buffalo building types. That separates it from the current version of the SmartCode, the most commonly used off-the-shelf form-based code, which is Transect-based but focuses on frontages, not building types. There are advantages to dealing specifically with building types, Hawley says. “If you have a mixed-use building in a mostly single-family residential area, it always fronts directly on the street,” he explains. “But the houses do not. Different building types behave differently in the same location.”

Like Nashville, which approved a form-based code in 2010 for downtown, the Green Code is laissez-faire about architectural style. “It sets all of the basic parameters of urbanism, but it leaves architectural style to the designers,” says Hawley. Explains Banas: “At some point you have to trust the current culture of building and architecture.”

At 6,400 people per square mile, Buffalo is denser than many cities in the US despite its population losses. The density is higher than Portland, Oregon, for example. About 31 percent of Buffalo households don’t own a car, which is largely due to the high poverty rate in many neighborhoods. But the form of the city also enables them to live less expensively, relying on walking and mass transportation. The new code seeks to reverse decades of decline while building on the city’s walkable assets.

The budget for the code reform process is $1.7 million, most of which is funded through a New York State Local Government Efficiency Grant. The lead consultant is Camiros with a subconsultant, Code Studio, that is providing guidance on the code’s form-based approach.