6A - Grow Zone Amendments - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

ZONING: .READY TO BE REFORMED by Neal Fence CHICAGO-Are the zoning codes that shaped America's great 20th century suburban boom ready for a retread--or a replacement? Chicago is in the midst of a massive rewrite of its zoning codes, aimed at preserving pedestrian life and the city's vitality by protecting the great shopping streets from strip malls and drive-throughs, and the residential neighborhoods from looming blank walls and loss of front yards. But in selected spots from South Florida to Tacoma, Wash., Nashville, Tenn., to Fort Collins, Colo., the very practice of zoning is getting challenged by alternative land regulations--increasingly called "form-based codes." Old-fashioned zoning practices are delaying and discouraging the current surge of mixed-use developments in the nation's cities, Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution asserted at a meeting here in January jointly sponsored by Brookings and the American Planning Association. We're not about to jettison all land use regulations--they've been around since the Norman invasion of England and are necessary on many grounds, APA executive director Paul Farmer told the group of public-sector planners, architects, developers, and land-use academics from across the nation. But, said Farmer, it's time we develop new and more flexible codes that can "serve all citizens far more effectively than their 20th century predecessors." The central problem, say critics, is that we've stopped creating--as earlier Americans did--great cities, towns and neighborhoods, places with public squares and greens that invite monuments. Nor such inviting features as shopfront windows lined up along inviting sidewalks. The chief villain, they say, is zoning, and not just because most of it is written in arcane language with complex mathematical formulas. Even worse, zoning focuses so narrowly on protecting us from bad development that it ends up thwarting healthy mixed-use communities in our time. Zoning first sprang up to segregate and separate uses--to protect residential areas, for example,from such blight as tanneries and industrial plants. In today's world of office, light industrial and residential uses, that's an almost irrelevant concern. Now zoning fosters the big single-use pods of suburbia--malls and big box stores, subdivisions, industrial parks, isolated office buildings, plus massive parking Pequot Lakes Staff Report 6(a)-4 December ii,2oo8