Pearl River If there’s a community organizer in America who has not been involved at some time or another in a neighborhood zoning fight, I’d like to meet them and hear how that was possible. In this line of work, never working with a group that deals with a zoning issue would be a miracle equivalent to sighting the yeti or the immaculate conception and just beyond normal imagination and belief. For that reason, I couldn’t help but want to talk to Professor Sara Bronin about her book, Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World on Wade’s World. Add to all that the fact that she teaches at the Cornell University City and Regional Planning operation, who under Professor Ken Reardon, department chair at the time of Katrina, was our great partner in developing a plan for the Lower 9th Ward development, and it had to happen.
I have to quickly add, Bronin also turned out to be from Houston, the largest city in the US to have almost absolutely no zoning code. To come out of Houston, which historically has seen zoning as a political and ideological issue hard baked in the libertarian business and boosterism that built the town, to become an expert on zoning is almost an example of making a career out of heresy. No wonder she lives now in the DC-area and previously was the volunteer director of the Hartford, Connecticut zoning board, where she and her fellow commissioners rewrote and updated an older, almost antique, code.
In fact, a central theme of her book is that cities need to take a hard, good look at their code and update for now and the future. It’s hard to argue with that point! She does critique the problems in Houston, while discussing what other cities have done right like Galveston for historic districts, Nashville for its music area, Tucson for its environmental adaptation, Amsterdam for its “night mayor” system, and many more. She is spot on about how parking is a problem that unrealistically assigns more spaces than needed or good for climate policy. She pulls no punches on how zoning has sometimes been a tool of racial discrimination and nails the huge acreage requirements, including in Connecticut and elsewhere, that have stymied affordable and diverse housing developments.
I expressed surprise that politics and the role of developers and their political contributions played no real role in her book or her Hartford story. I couldn’t believe how she had gotten away with disbanding public meetings, which elsewhere are the lifeblood of zoning fights and neighborhood democracy. She reminded me that Connecticut was the only state in the country that legally isolated zoning as a stand-alone operation from elected officials. Wow! I had missed that note, and it explained a lot, even while making many of her recommendations likely to be ignored by planners, mayors, and others who don’t have the political capital to rewire zoning rules.
Her positions on inclusionary zoning were also a bit too chamber of commerce, developer-speak for me as well. At one point talking about Pittsburgh, she was critical, but measured, saying the jury was out on how it would work, but then later in the book talking about San Diego, took at shot at Pittsburgh by saying their introduction of inclusionary zoning was “flubbed.” This is not to say that she argues against affordable housing, quite the contrary, but it also seems her heart isn’t in it in the same way as she touts other zoning achievements. Mainly, it’s a situation where it takes a horse to beat a horse, so if you want to attack inclusionary zoning, mandating a certain number of units be affordable in new housing developments, you need to suggest a better horse to ride than simply market forces.
These mild disagreements and weaknesses pale compared to the many strengths of the book’s recommendations, as well as her current project which is mammoth and potentially a gamechanger for cities everywhere. She’s launched the National Zoning Atlas, which is trying to collect information on local zoning codes. She already has 5000 of the 30,000. This could be huge.
Professor Bronin is right. Zoning is often the “key” to a city and how it works. We need to do better, and her work may make the difference.