(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 514: Zoning for Vermicelli
January 1, 2025
This week we’re joined by Professor Sara Bronin to talk about her book Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World. We chat about all the ways that land is regulated. And why zoning is an opportunity for people to reshape their communities. We also chat about food policy, connecting the street to property, and the relationship between land and natural systems.
You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosting archive.
Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:
[00:01:15] Sarah Bronin, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast. [00:01:21] Sara Bronin: Thank you so much for having me, Jeff. [00:01:22] Jeff Wood: Thanks for being here. Before I get started. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? [00:01:25] Sara Bronin: Sure. I am an architect and attorney and a professor at Cornell university. [00:01:31] And I am from Houston, Texas, currently living in Washington, DC with a foot in Hartford, Connecticut. [00:01:38] Jeff Wood: Nice. Were you always interested in this stuff? Was this something that, zoning codes, cities, planning, were those things they always interested you? [00:01:47] Sara Bronin: Yes, I came out of the womb interested in zoning. [00:01:52] Not quite, but as a kid, I was always interested in why Houston was so ugly. Great food, but we were constantly driving everywhere and I did not really like that much. And as I went to architecture school 1st, then graduate school and law school, I really tried to explore how these rules, including zoning, but also historic preservation and transportation rules work together to create cities. [00:02:18] That maybe we don’t actually love that much. And maybe you’re not fulfilling and beautiful and functional. And, my interest in zoning really, I guess you could say it started from the negative the absence of zoning because Houston does not have something and carried. Through my professional career, I also worked for 7 years, volunteered for 7 years as the chair of the City of Hartford’s Planning and Zoning Commission. [00:02:41] So I think really my whole life has been spent wondering how we get the built environments that we get and trying to figure out if we can possibly do better, which I think the answer is definitively yes. [00:02:52] Jeff Wood: I appreciate it in the book, reading your view on Houston. I grew up in Houston. I was born in humble Texas. [00:02:57] I, yeah, I lived in Kingwood for most of my life. [00:03:01] Sara Bronin: Wow. Okay. [00:03:02] Jeff Wood: Yeah. So I was reading the book. I was like, this all sounds very familiar. And so I was interested to hear your stories from that, because I remember growing up in Kingwood and, Kingwood’s a little different in that the design of the place is, it’s a suburb, but it’s also got a lot of bike paths and stuff like that, we have 95 miles of stuff, so that’s how I grew up. [00:03:19] I ran cross country and track. I rode my bike with my friends all over the place, but it was a different experience than perhaps you had. [00:03:24] Sara Bronin: Kingwood is a planned community, which makes it, I think, just different, certainly from Houston and actually from a lot of other communities around the country. I don’t even know. [00:03:33] I should look on our zoning atlas. I have this project called the National Zoning Atlas. And I may just zoom in to see briefly if Kingwood actually has zoning, but some communities around the country have used not zoning, but restrictive covenants to control land use. And let’s see if I have Kingwood. [00:03:52] I don’t see Kingwood up on the map. So we either haven’t gotten to it yet, or maybe it doesn’t have zoning. [00:03:58] Jeff Wood: It’s interesting. Texas is interesting because, there’s a lot of muds, right? Municipal utility districts that are built and there’s a lot of leapfrogging that happens because of that. [00:04:04] And a lot of it is in the county. And as the county, outside the E. T. J. You can’t hear anybody scream. [00:04:09] Sara Bronin: Okay. So this is why Kingwood is not on our map is because it was annexed by Houston in the 1990s. And so Houston doesn’t have zoning. Kingwood doesn’t have zoning. But the way that Kingwood is organized from a land use perspective, probably as a result of that plan community and private covenants. [00:04:25] You mentioned municipal utility districts. I have, I think, maybe the only law review article ever published on municipal utility districts because my father was on a mud. They call them a mud board and I published it in 2007. And it’s called wrestling with muds to pin down the truth of special districts. [00:04:44] Worst title of all time, but your point about how these special districts have been created to push land development further outward in Texas. They’re unique to Texas. That’s not just around Houston where there are hundreds of them, there’s, but also around Dallas and San Antonio and Austin. And you see these muds that actually are created by developers and managed and run by developers. [00:05:08] And yet they’re public entities. That’s yet another wrinkle in America’s land use story that goes beyond our conversation today about zoning. But like private covenants, these special districts have a very big role, particularly around Texas cities in unincorporated areas about how communities develop. [00:05:29] So I love that you know that I love that you’re a Kingwood native and glad to start the show by just underscoring that zoning is, I think the most important power of general purpose local governments, but there’s all these other private and special district type authorities that actually do play a role too. [00:05:48] Jeff Wood: You do make an impassioned argument for zoning in the book at a time when more people are looking to reform or to get rid of it. Ultimately, I’m wondering why you feel like it’s a construct worth saving. [00:05:58] Sara Bronin: I guess the way I look at it is zoning is inevitable. You do have folks that have talked about zoning and talked about, oh, we’ve got to abolish zoning. [00:06:07] But the truth is that zoning is here to stay. It doesn’t seem like we’re going to see a mass movement at state legislatures across the country. To abolish zoning and so in the absence of that, we have to work with what we have. And I argue in key to the city that there are some zoning codes that have been responsive to community needs and have actually successfully help to manage a variety of issues and actually had some decent results. [00:06:35] Which is why I think maybe if we learn from those places and we modify zoning everywhere to reflect our values and to reflect modern approaches to zoning, we might just be able to take the system we’ve got and make it better. [00:06:47] Jeff Wood: Some of those modern approaches, you talk about form based codes and a few other things. [00:06:51] I’m curious which one of those interests you maybe the most. [00:06:53] Sara Bronin: So in the city of Hartford, when I was planning and zoning commission chair, we did a complete overhaul of the city’s very outdated zoning code. It was by and large adopted in the 1950s and took a very car oriented approach and Really suburban style approach to what is a historic urban core in that code. [00:07:13] 1 of the main changes that we made was instituting a form based code into the city. And what a form based code is it’s a type of zoning code that actually has rules about the shape of buildings size, height of them, maybe roof types and whether it has porches or not. And much more, I would say, prescriptive rules on how a building can be developed in the jurisdiction than a normal zoning code. [00:07:39] And so the advantage of a form based code for a place like Hartford, a very historic city with very architecturally distinct neighborhoods is that people can plan out in advance the size and scale of new development in terms of the buildings. Now, oftentimes in form based codes, you have zoning rules, which don’t regulate uses as strictly as a typical zoning code. [00:08:03] So zoning is local land use regulation regulates uses regulates buildings and it regulates lots of form based code takes that building related regulation a little bit farther and sets out a menu for a community to know what kinds of buildings they’re going to get. So I think it worked really well for Hartford and those places that have balanced the requirements in a form based code against, costs, don’t make it gold plated shutters or anything like that. [00:08:30] I think I’ve been, by and large, pretty successful. [00:08:33] Jeff Wood: What made you want to write a book about zoning? [00:08:35] Sara Bronin: I am totally fascinated with zoning. Our project, the National Zoning Atlas, which if anybody wants to check it out, it’s at zoningatlas. org. We’ve read over 500, 000 pages of zoning codes. And every day, our team pops up in our Slack channel with Can you believe this city did this? [00:08:53] We’ve seen all kinds of districts. We’ve seen cities that have Industrial and mobile home zoning only we’ve seen cities that have extremely elaborate district names. We’ve seen the city of Boston, which has hundreds and hundreds of zoning districts in a city. That’s 40 square miles. And we’ve seen it all and I think it’s just endlessly fascinating how people have. [00:09:15] Already tried to use zoning to shape their cities. And I think with some pretty mixed, very mixed results, zoning is also where you see a lot of local drama. If you go to a zoning meeting, I think they’re absolutely fascinating. You have lawyers. You have not in my backyard people protesting new housing. [00:09:34] You have. Yes. In my backyard folks, you have. Industry representatives, you have environmentalists and you have these impassioned debates sometimes, which are in and of themselves fascinating. So I think zoning is really interesting. It’s practiced in different ways around the country. And I think it’s an opportunity for people to actually engage in civic life. [00:09:56] Jeff Wood: What’s the weirdest zone you’ve seen? One of my friends, Lee Einzweiler, who writes zoning codes, he said one time he went into a city and they said that they still had a zone for mod shops from the seventies. And so there’s all kinds of weird anachronisms I feel like in these codes and they pop out. [00:10:11] Sometimes randomly or and come into your face and you’re like what do you talk? What is this? [00:10:16] Sara Bronin: We in the city of Hartford had different zoning rules for vermicelli factories and rice factories. [00:10:23] Jeff Wood: Vermicelli factory. [00:10:24] Sara Bronin: We just, somebody at some point in the history of Hartford decided that there was a need to regulate those differently. [00:10:34] We actually had a 61 page use chart in the city of Hartford’s old zoning code. And we narrowed it down to three pages, actually, just simplifying it to core elements. And I think other cities could probably do a good job with that. [00:10:50] Jeff Wood: I was also thinking about what you shared about Feaster Gates in Chicago, and he created some really cool uses in some of the buildings that existed where he is. [00:10:56] And a theme of the book seems to be not squashing fun. I’m wondering if the inflexibility of zoning codes can sometimes like wring out the joy in some places. [00:11:05] Sara Bronin: Absolutely. There’s a whole part of the book that talks about the need for zoning codes to enable delightful communities to create maybe plan spontaneity. [00:11:16] I guess I talk in the book about the city of Las Vegas and their signage. By no means, by the way, a city that is perfectly planned. I’ve never been there, but I understand this is a very car dependent city and the roads are pretty wide and not pedestrian friendly. And, of course, it’s hot and all of that. [00:11:35] From an urban planning standpoint, maybe a miss. But from a signage and sort of fun standpoint, I think probably a hit. You had Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown writing their book, Leaving Las Vegas, taking Las Vegas signage and its sort of formalities seriously as a form of American architecture. [00:11:55] And in the book, I try to take that seriously too, and really look to that as an example of a place where the zoning code enables that to be possible. [00:12:04] Jeff Wood: The weird and the strange and Las Vegas is such a fascinating place. I’m not a huge fan of visiting myself, but from an architecture, from a science standpoint, it just hits you over the head sometimes. [00:12:14] Sara Bronin: Yes. Yeah. You’ve been there, so you have better experience than I do. It’s one of the few places in the book that I haven’t seen myself. And I don’t know if I ever will. [00:12:23] Jeff Wood: The only reason I was there for conferences. So maybe that’ll be what brings you there at some point in the future. I’m also interested in the paradox of a place like Gulfton, which you talked about a lot in the book, which is a neighborhood in Houston. [00:12:33] It’s very dense, but this affordable enclave for immigrants versus this land use free for all that happens in Houston, not free for all necessarily overall, because there are restrictions that happen, but from a zoning perspective. And it’s also one of the places that’s one of the densest it feels like in the state. [00:12:49] So I’m curious about Gulfton and how that paradox continues. [00:12:53] Sara Bronin: So this is a neighborhood in Houston, one of the poorest in the city that I grew up in. And part of my preparation for this book was actually going back to my childhood apartment complex and just taking a look around because I never remembered walking around my neighborhood or where was my park and you’re just walking to the door. [00:13:12] It was a bit of a, gate around the apartment buildings and to the gate and turning around and looking across the street and seeing. A gas station, a strip mall, a nightclub, a self storage facility, and just basically pavement as far as I could see. Reinforce for me that in a city without zoning. [00:13:32] It’s the people with the least. Income, maybe the least political power, they get a gas station right across the street from their apartment building. They get a series of uses. That’s not really great for a building where there’s a lot of families. That, to me, reinforce the need for zoning for rules. [00:13:52] I guess I’m a law professor, so I’m into rules, but not too many rules, and the first chapter of my book is called The Goldilocks Zone, because there is Such a thing is too many uses too much mixing of uses, but there’s also, I think, too few uses and I point to the quintessentially American form of zoning across. [00:14:15] The vast majority of land across the country, and that’s that single family only large lot zone that is destroying our environment and causing us all to drive more. [00:14:25] Jeff Wood: It’s interesting because Houston’s had so many votes on whether or not to have zoning and it always gets turned down. And also, we had Nolan gray on the show to talk about his book about Houston, mostly talking about zoning and those reforms too. [00:14:36] And so that’s an interesting kind of edge of where zoning could be useful and where maybe it’s not as helpful as, maybe we’d like it to be. [00:14:44] Sara Bronin: I love Nolan. I think he’s so smart. I disagree with him, though, about how Houston is actually operating. And, it’s certainly a place where a light on regulation approach has led to the ability for people to convert 1 unit to more units to split lots. [00:15:02] And of course, that’s great. But the news that we see even nationally on Houston. The city’s constantly flooding. It’s built all over the place where it shouldn’t have. I just gave you the example of my own child at home, going back to this idea of restrictive covenants. In the book, I also talk about how my uncle and his veterinary clinic in Houston went through tens of thousands of dollars of legal process because he wasn’t able to just walk into his zoning office and ask for a permit for A business on a street with buildings that were full of businesses, and that kind of uncertainty is a problem for small businesses, especially in a city where restrictive covenants have been used as a form of land use regulation. [00:15:48] No, 1, I think 1 of his arguments is that maybe we can just get by with the restrictive covenants for me. I don’t think they’ve been successful. And in fact, I have 2 stories. Me and the midtown veterinary clinic. This is 2 examples of why I think the zoning approach might actually be useful and worthwhile. [00:16:05] Jeff Wood: I’ve been asking this question a lot lately, but there’s a lot of places that use zoning to try to, get rid of things or to block things or to make sure that they don’t happen. And I’m wondering what you think a healthy urbanism would be because. It’s not just blocking different bad uses, for example, like a tannery or whatever from the past, if we’re thinking about like a Euclid zoning code, but I’m trying to think of what would be a good urbanism in a way that allows all of these things to flourish that you’re not trying to get rid of, like shops that maybe aren’t as desirable as others. [00:16:33] Sara Bronin: So I think good urbanism depends at its core on walkability and on proximity, because we’re talking about urbanism. So we’re talking about urban environments. And I talk a bit of my book about rural environments and large scale agriculture and things like that. But if we’re talking about good urbanism, it depends on having a walkable place where people can get things that are convenient to them, where they can access a variety of different services. [00:16:58] And where there’s a diversity of housing types that are available. That is the kind of mixing that I think people benefit a lot from a public health standpoint from a happiness standpoint, just in terms of, not living in an area where. You might be an acre apart from your next neighbor living in an area where you can build those bonds of neighborliness where you can see people where you can have a routine where you can grab your chocolate croissant and your coffee and carry on with your day. [00:17:29] I point in the book to a few examples of good urbanism and improving urbanism and my neighborhood in Washington, D. C. is 1 of them. [00:17:36] Jeff Wood: How much do you think streets should play a part in this? Because there’s the private realm, which is privately owned properties and those types of things that go into, zoning regulations and stuff like that. [00:17:44] But then there’s like streets and the public space, the public realm that in a lot of cities is like 30 percent or so of the land that’s being used in the city. [00:17:54] Sara Bronin: Chapter 6 of my book actually talks a lot about streets. I had to look that up chapter or actually that talks about movement in a later chapter talks about street design itself. [00:18:05] There are 2 chapters that really focus on transportation. 1 aspect of streets is. The way that buildings interact with streets and the opportunities that buildings and development provide to enhance the infrastructure and transportation patterns. For example, right now, most zoning codes around the country. [00:18:25] Have minimum parking requirements that say that for everything you want to build, you have to build parking on your lot and it gives a formula and then you have to go out and pave your lot. Or build a parking garage to satisfy the zoning codes parking requirements. In Hartford, we turned that around and said you don’t need any car parking, but you should have bike parking. [00:18:44] You should have showers for people who have come back from biking indoor bike lockers, and you should also shade your sidewalks with street trees for non residential users. That’s 1 aspect of it, but then there’s the design of the streets themselves, the cross section of the streets. And I make a case a bit of a legal case in the book that argues for zoning codes being 1 place. [00:19:08] Where people who care about street design and the cross section of the street, how wide lanes are, whether there’s bike lanes, whether there’s street trees where the street furniture goes. That people who are interested in that should look to zoning as a potential tool to get that done. And we also use that in Hartford chapter 9 of the zoning code of the city of Hartford talks only about street design and streetscapes. [00:19:31] And, in fact, was used to shape a new development that happened in the city that created new streets. Those streets were built to the standards set out in the zoning code. And I think more cities should consider that as. A potential power of zoning. [00:19:48] Jeff Wood: It’s so interesting because streets, like I said, there’s so much space and you can control some of the things that happen with them. [00:19:54] And so I think that’s just a fascinating piece of the story of the potential for what you can do with zoning. Streets are also somewhere where a lot of things happened, like rainwater, electricity, internet, transportation. There’s a lot of stuff going on right now with shipping and e commerce. It’s happening on the street. [00:20:11] And so thinking about the inside of buildings, the frontages of buildings, but also, how people access the buildings as well. And so I think that’s an interesting kind of connection between all this too, is because streets, there’s so much that goes on with them, but then there’s so much that takes you from the public realm. [00:20:24] That is the street to. The building itself, and then intermingling those, or at least making it so that there’s some legibility between what should happen between those 2 spaces is a really interesting kind of thought as well about, what should be regulated and how [00:20:38] Sara Bronin: that’s, I think, something that a form based code might help to address. [00:20:41] So thinking about the interaction between buildings and streets. Whether there is a rhythm of porches on a particular street or rhythm of stoops, whether the front door is visible from the street and on the front facade, as opposed to maybe tuck somewhere in the back or buried. Those are the kinds of things that a form based code in zoning has been used to shape. [00:21:03] Jeff Wood: What do [00:21:03] Sara Bronin: you [00:21:04] Jeff Wood: think of e commerce, [00:21:05] Sara Bronin: E commerce I see in my own neighborhood, delivery folks on motorcycles, doing their job of delivery of big Amazon trucks. And otherwise, coming into the neighborhood and tearing down these rather narrow streets. And I can’t help, but think that e commerce has created another mechanism by which motorized vehicles have. [00:21:33] Just, just the volume has increased. I’m not saying that I don’t order anything online. I certainly do, but I do try to patronize local shops and I have the luxury of. Being able to do that, because I’m in a neighborhood that has zoned for retail stores and service and corner stores and legacy stores in a fairly historic place. [00:21:53] But I think. E commerce has given rise to an increase in the number of cars that are zipping around. And in general, my, my basic thinking on cars is that we need to get out of our complete dependence on them. Maybe I should never order anything again from an online site, but I do think it has pretty significant impacts on our experience of our cities. [00:22:19] Now, you look at a place like Paris, where the mayor just banned most vehicular traffic in the city core. And you think, wow, could that happen here? Could that ever happen here? What has happened in Paris is that they’ve made the city. So walkable. So livable. They’ve even cleaned the send and maybe to some extent but much cleaner than it was before. [00:22:38] And I think that kind of directed approach at the local level is sadly missing in our cities. It would be wonderful if we could get to that point where we just had a leader who said, we’re going to make a city for people. We’re going to make streets for people. For people, we’re going to green our streets like Burlington did or is doing right now a city that I highlighted in the book. [00:23:01] And, that’s really my bias. That’s embedded probably in a lot of the critiques. I have of American cities today that are sprinkled throughout the city. [00:23:09] Jeff Wood: It’s interesting because I feel like it’s a double edged sword, right? Because if you like, I don’t have a car. And so if you need to go to a shop to get a larger item or something along those lines, you might have to take a zip car. [00:23:18] So sometimes actually delivery is like a better option that’s allowing you to go car free. Whereas on the other end of the story, they have all of these crazy fulfillment centers that are popping up in cities and taking up this industrial land that was starting to, In the nineties and two thousands going into housing, but then now it’s getting clawed back and it’s turning into the shipping centers and things like that, which I think is really fascinating to in terms of the timeline of how the city has evolved with the shipping and e commerce kind of movements over time. [00:23:45] Sara Bronin: That’s a great point. And when I wish I made in the book, instead, I focused on the thing that I hope to see, which is the 1st, part of the trend, which is these industrial buildings being converted to housing and other uses. And there, I turned to Baltimore, a post industrial city that has changed its zoning code to make. [00:24:04] Some of this industrial areas, more mixed use. So increasing that kind of really opportunity to reshape these buildings and bring them back to life and bring these neighborhoods back to life from just simply the concept that was previously enshrined in zoning that. These buildings would be industrial forever. [00:24:22] We know that industry is not coming back, but it’s a really great point. Not in core cities and historic core cities like Baltimore, but outside of those, you definitely see land. That was maybe an office park or a large scale industrial park and being converted to these huge warehouses. Shocking and also how quickly they’re built. [00:24:44] I do worry about, again this overall infrastructure, but, what’s the alternative people want their goods to their doorstep and inexpensive at that and, consumer culture sort of demands this and I don’t I did not address that in the book. I guess I’ll say. [00:25:01] Jeff Wood: Yeah, there’s only so much time and so many pages, right? [00:25:03] It’s just interesting watching what’s been going on, especially in places like the Inland Empire. We had folks on the show recently talking about growing up there and then seeing all those changes that are happening there in California where all these warehouses are popping up and it’s just the shipping and you know what that means for truck traffic and things like that. [00:25:17] It’s So fascinating. I want to go to the other side of the coin, though, which is like the natural aspect of places and the connection between nature and cities. And I think that, there’s some room and there’s discussion in your book about this, but there’s some room to chat about that as well, where we think about, how We have taken over the land, how we built cities, but also how we can increase the amount of ecosystem services that are happening from trees and other beneficial actors in the natural environment. [00:25:43] Sara Bronin: So ecosystem services, this term that refers to all of the. Productive uses of nature. It’s a, I think it’s a good one in some respects and I use it in the book and it helps us to see nature as being functionally useful for humans. But nature is also beautiful. It provides us with a rest. We have a neighborhood with trees. [00:26:05] Your eyes can rest. You’d have that sense of call. So I want to. Talk about both the large scale landscapes and the changes that we need to make in our land use patterns that would enable us to use nature again as that kind of infrastructure that is cleaning our air and supporting aquatic life and a habitat and pollinators. [00:26:30] As well as nature as something that is beautiful and actually contributes significantly to our visual experience in the city. So I think it’s both of those things and I try to cover both of them in the book. [00:26:43] Jeff Wood: I just saw an article in the Guardian talking about Hamburg and Hamburg. Basically, they’ve written into a contract with the residents to preserve like 30 percent of the land for natural enjoyment and services and things like that. [00:26:56] And I think that’s a really interesting way to go about it. And it could be enshrined that way in a zoning code, right? [00:27:00] Sara Bronin: That’s a really, what does it mean when you said the city has entered into a contract with its residents? What is that? [00:27:08] Jeff Wood: So here’s what I wrote in my, I write a column in greater Washington every week. [00:27:11] Basically there is a citizen’s initiative to protect 30 percent of the city’s land for natural preservation. And there’s a contract that was signed between the leadership and I guess the folks that had entered the petition. And basically they’d written this whole thing in order to, protect the property, but also there’s provisions where if you’re built on some of the property you could do, and you talk about transfer development rights. [00:27:32] I think that’s part of it as well. It’s just really fascinating to look at. It says, let’s see, what did I write? The contract that resulted from the initiative has provisions for offsetting damages from construction, making sure existing neighborhoods are built up instead of out and improving the ecology of the existing preserved areas. [00:27:47] Sara Bronin: Yeah, to transferable development rights, and this sort of idea that if you preserve something, whether it’s a building or landscape. You get something to sell to someone else, they can build on their land, but you don’t build on your land, but you still recoup that, at least in theory, the value of that is something that very few cities in the U. [00:28:06] S. have done. But it is something that was actually considered by the Supreme Court in a takings case called 1978 takings case, Penn Central transportation, and has been used in New York City on the building preservation side. Other places, counties in Virginia, for example, that have used transferable development rights on the conservation side, maybe like you just were describing in Homburg. [00:28:29] The TDR, transferable development rights scheme that I talk about in the book is for Nashville, and it’s a scheme that the city is considering to try to help preserve the ecosystem, not the buildings per se, but the ecosystem. Of producers, managers, musicians that together form the constellation, the community that’s known as music row, which is where all the major country music stars did their recordings, had their breaks, met with their record labels and so on. [00:29:02] So that is an example of a place that might benefit from a TDR, given the demands. Elsewhere in Nashville on potential receiving properties for development higher than the zoning code would allow. [00:29:16] Jeff Wood: I learned about TDR and planning school, and I thought it was just such an ingenious idea and then you get to the real world and you’re like, why is nobody using this? [00:29:23] It’s such an interesting way of using preservation, but also maybe not some of the drawbacks, which is you can’t do this here where you can’t do this anywhere. It’s more like transferring it, right? It was a transfer development rights. But I feel like we could use that in more places, but it seems to be something that. [00:29:37] It hasn’t been, used as much maybe as it should be. [00:29:40] Sara Bronin: Absolutely, and I think part of it is that transferable development rights are so hard to value. Let’s say you are, as a property owner has been in recent years, a property owner next to grand central terminal. Which has a landmark designation in the city of New York. [00:29:58] How do you value? How do the owners of grand central terminal value the airspace that they would otherwise be able to build? In New York City on 42nd street, how do they value that? And then. Is there a buyer in the catchment area that the city zoning code allows that would pay that amount? It’s a really complicated question from an evaluation standpoint, and in many cases, you might just have 1 or 2 buyers. [00:30:29] Over the course of several decades, and again, the owners of Grand Central Terminal had found themselves in the unenviable position of having a difficult time selling off all of their air rights. [00:30:40] Jeff Wood: The book is key to the city. You’ve been talking about the book for a while. I’m wondering, you’ve been asked lots of questions. [00:30:44] You’ve probably gone on a number of podcasts and talked to a number of folks. What’s the question that you wish you were asked that nobody’s asked you yet? [00:30:51] Sara Bronin: Why did you talk about food in this book? [00:30:54] Jeff Wood: There you go. Why did you talk about food in this book? [00:30:56] Sara Bronin: Oh, thank you for asking. So I have been really fascinated since my service in Hartford. [00:31:04] With the relationships between the zoning code and food production. And what got me very interested in that is that in Hartford, which is a fairly low income city, 85 percent black and Latino. We had all of these rules, essentially banning urban agriculture in the zoning codes of banning people from growing their own, maybe not vegetable gardens. [00:31:27] They could probably do that, but having a chicken or two, having a community garden or a farmer’s market. But yet we’d seen in the city, those kinds of things popping up, particularly community gardens. We had a few beekeepers in the city and in the absence of zoning rules, showing that there’s a demand, but also showing that our zoning regime really should have tried to address that when I met with our food policy commission in the city, they identified the exact same issue. [00:31:54] We together investigated different cities that had been pioneering in this area and found that actually Boston, despite it’s extremely complicated zoning code actually had a pretty good zoning provisions on urban agriculture, allowing lots of different types of urban agriculture city wide and we use their rules and rules of a couple other places as a model for ours. [00:32:15] The ability of people to generate their own food again, especially important in a city like Hartford, where it’s a low income city with a lot of food deserts and not a lot of grocery stores that are selling fresh food on the other end of the spectrum we see in rural areas. Large scale commercial agriculture feeding operations that have extremely detrimental land use effects, the smells, the gases, the runoff and pollution of waterways and of the land itself from these giant pig farms and chicken feeding operations. [00:32:53] And. You wonder why those things have been allowed, and many rural areas are either unzoned, or they might think that this is the way to get business and property taxes in their community. And I also found out in some states. Local zoning is overridden to allow these kinds of things. So in Iowa, for example, it’s overridden and you see these all over the place and they’ve been increased many times over in recent years. [00:33:22] To me, the links between zoning and the food supply are really fascinating. I think are really understudied and cut to the heart of what should be an essential question for us. As a very wealthy country with high rates of food insecurity, how are our land use rules making that worse? How could they make it better? [00:33:46] And so that’s a chapter that I don’t think I’ve seen a lot of conversations. I have been having and that I wish people really dug into because I think it’s a really important topic. [00:33:57] Jeff Wood: You said food and my heart sunk a little bit just because I just thinking about what we’re talking here just a couple of days after the election. [00:34:03] This show won’t come out for maybe a month or two, but we’re just talking right after the election. And I was immediately thinking about the conversation that I had with Earl Blumenauer about the farm bill. And I was just thinking Oh, no, the complete takeover of all the government agencies and stuff by the Republicans. [00:34:19] I’m wondering what’s going to happen to the farm bill now. And, that has some of the provisions that you’re talking about for farming locally and things like that. And I don’t mean to be a downer, but I just that’s what came to my mind. I was like, Oh my gosh, we just talked to Earl about this. [00:34:30] And we, a number of years ago, we also talked with folks about reforming the farm bill. And so it’s an interesting thought, what could you do with zoning in order to think about food production in the country, as well as you’re talking about like factory farms next to houses and things like that. [00:34:42] Sara Bronin: Zoning codes, because they are adopted at the local level, present a huge opportunity for people looking to improve their communities to continue the reforms or continue the ideas for food security, transportation, security, housing, security that many of us have been talking about, hoping that we might see leadership at the national scale. [00:35:07] In the absence of leadership at the national scale on some of these issues, zoning is the opportunity for people to reshape the community. They can the community they live and work in the community. They care about and amending zoning rules. It’s a lot easier than trying to get something through Congress, and I would encourage people who are despairing right now to say, okay what can I do? [00:35:32] And I hope that the book provides them with some ideas. About things that zoning can make possible if done, [00:35:40] Jeff Wood: I feel better now, at least a little, at least a little bit better. I’m wondering also about the places that want to wrap themselves in Amber, and I’m thinking about here in San Francisco and other places where it just feels like it’s really hard to make change and just build housing, not even like huge amounts, but just change your building, for example, or go through the development codes or, design review board or something along those lines where it’s just like impossible. It takes three years just to put an extra story on your house. And I’m wondering how does that fit into this idea of reforming through zoning? [00:36:13] Sara Bronin: So from a personal perspective, half of my career has been focused on land use and zoning. And the other half is focused on historic preservation. I consider myself a preservationist, but I want for preservationists, true preservationists to use their voices to support the things that I think preservationists have always done, which is to use buildings to create housing to create space for small businesses to revitalize communities. [00:36:48] And to be creative in doing all of that work, unfortunately, I see some people using preservation or community character as these tools to prevent in particular new housing from being created, but also to prevent. New buildings to infill and neighborhood. 1 of the things I’ve tried to do in roles that I’ve had in historic preservation, including in leading the Federal Historic Preservation Agency. [00:37:21] Is to be a very vocal yes, in my backyard voice from the preservation community and identify those things that preservationists must do in order to ensure that we are helping places move forward and not locking them in amber to use your phrase. Those things include zoning strategies, like allowing for accessory dwelling units in historic neighborhoods, like pushing to eliminate minimum parking requirements ensuring that some of these historic industrial or historic office buildings and neighborhoods are rezoned to allow for housing and complimentary uses, and really being advocates For low income housing tax credits, the historic preservation tax credits funding that is going towards social services in historic communities. [00:38:17] I also have been pushing throughout my career for better data on historic preservation, because I do think there’s a narrative that historic district designation. Leads to higher property values and leads to displacement leads to lack of affordability. But what I want to know is. Where might those conditions happen? [00:38:38] And how can strategies prevent that from happening? I want to know where historic properties are and how much housing and how dense those neighborhoods are. I just think that there’s a lot more that preservationists need to demand of themselves and of the field. If we want to be included in conversations about how communities grow. [00:38:58] So you touched a nerve there. [00:39:00] Jeff Wood: I could tell I think [00:39:02] Sara Bronin: that is a fundamental question for the preservation field. And it is fundamental for the SMI backyard crowd to get preservationists. To support what they’re doing. So it’s a two way street. I’m a Yimby and I’m a preservationist. So I’m trying to merge those groups. [00:39:18] I’ve done round tables in New York city and LA and in DC. And you do see that there’s common ground, but you’ve got to get the vocal advocates from within preservation to really say that again and again. [00:39:30] Jeff Wood: You’ve been on your fair share of commissions. I’m wondering what you’ve learned from all these processes. [00:39:35] Sara Bronin: The process can be a benefit and a problem. I’ll use the public hearing as something that, in theory, gives people a chance to opine on developments within zoning. But often, when people are showing up for a public hearing. In any number, in more than zero people, if you have, 10, 20 people showing up at a public hearing, it’s usually to protest a housing project. [00:40:02] That’s just my anecdotal observation. Of course, people show up for public hearings for a variety of reasons. But I am an advocate in zoning of actually reducing the number of project specific public hearings, and instead putting the public input at the beginning of the process through something like a form based code, which sets out the rules of the game says what kind of buildings you’re going to get at the end, and maybe is a little bit more flexible on what happens inside the buildings. [00:40:32] You can see my approach reflected in the city of Hartford zoning code, where every type of housing where it’s allowed. Apartment buildings, 3 family, 2 family, of course, single family is all as a right. There are no public hearings for housing developments in the city of Hartford because we’ve set out how we want. [00:40:50] A neighborhood to develop, and we set out the rules of the game in the form based code. Hartford is a central city has a lot of land within the city that is slated for multifamily development. So it’s doing its share for the region on that front. Other cities around are not doing as much, of course, and they have public hearings for new apartment buildings. [00:41:12] So they might say we actually allow it. But we allow it subject to a public hearing so the community can have their say, and then they wonder why there’s not new housing that’s located in the wealthy suburbs around Hartford. I think that is 1 example to your question about what kind of process works. [00:41:30] That’s an example of process that in theory is good, but actually backfires, especially in the context of housing. [00:41:37] Jeff Wood: The book is Key to the City, How Zoning Shapes Our World. Where can folks get a copy if they want to pick one up? [00:41:43] Sara Bronin: They can get a copy anywhere books are sold, or they can visit my website where there’s a one click link there at sarahbronnan. [00:41:51] Jeff Wood: com. And where can folks find more about the National Zoning Atlas and some of the stuff that you’re working on? [00:41:56] Sara Bronin: That’s also linked from my website, or you can go straight to zoningatlas. org and we’ve got about 5, 000 cities, towns and counties up on the National Zoning Atlas. Now, we have about 25, 000 more to go. [00:42:11] So please stay tuned. If you live in a place, or if you’re a planner out there that wants to help us identify those places that don’t have zoning, we are taking volunteers and would love your assistance. So be in touch. [00:42:24] Jeff Wood: Awesome. Sarah, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time. [00:42:26] Sara Bronin: Thank you so much for having me on and for talking about zoning. [00:42:32] Jeff Wood: We love to talk about zoning on this show.
