On March 25, the city council of Burlington, VT, voted to pass a major zoning reform that one observer of Vermont politics (X.com’s pseudonymous @NotaBot) compared to the celebrated overhaul of Minneapolis’s zoning code.
Burlington – the largest city in Vermont, at 45,000 inhabitants – has not escaped the housing crisis affecting the country. Burlington was an attractive destination for new residents during the pandemic and the rise of remote work; severe flooding last year put additional pressure on the housing supply. Policymakers statewide were well aware of the challenge and last year passed S.100, a sweeping package of housing reforms. Now Burlington, led by a pro-housing mayor, Miro Weinberger, has taken action at the local level.
Burlington’s reform, known as the Neighborhood Code, is a welcome simplification of the city’s zoning. The Neighborhood Code eliminates the city’s ‘waterfront’ zoning districts and a ‘dense housing overlay’, adding a higher-density ‘residential corridor’ district, for a total of four residential zones.
Photo by Shawn ? on Unsplash
There are also significant increases in allowed density across the city. The Neighborhood Code allows up to fourplexes in all residential districts, allows townhouses everywhere but the low-density residential zone, and expands the option to create a cottage court or add a second freestanding unit on the same lot. The new code also limits requirements for minimum lot size, lot coverage, and setbacks. The reforms took some haircuts before final passage in response to pushback from organized groups of residents, but remain a meaningful change.
In their report presenting the Neighborhood Code, Burlington’s city planning department reviews the city’s history. Planners explain that much of Burlington’s housing stock predates its zoning code, and in particular many existing lots are smaller than the official minimum lot size. Also, in Burlington’s first era of zoning, the city had a single residential district which permitted a variety of uses including apartments, but in 1973 the city partitioned the residential district into five and added many of the current restrictions, further downzoning the city in 1994. Despite reforms in the 2008 ordinance which recognized the need to accommodate growth, the city was still less permissive than it was in 1947. One of the priorities of the new code is to legalize construction similar to what’s already in place – a philosophy more places should emulate. It’s hard to argue that new construction is out of scale with the neighborhood if buildings on the same scale have been standing in the neighborhood for decades.
Perhaps as significant as the upzoning itself is the city’s motivation to pare down what things it regulates. The report frames the Neighborhood Code as a shift away from regulating residential density qua density; in the higher-density districts, the Neighborhood Code does away with statutory density limits altogether, regulating density only by building dimensions.
If this heralds a shift in local politics away from baroque housing regulations that clutter municipal codes, that in itself is a positive sign. Local legislators throughout America’s calamitous century-long experiment with zoning have been diabolically thorough in closing any loophole that might allow someone to put up an apartment building. You don’t have to be a radical like me, who wants zoning to be small enough to drown in the proverbial bathtub, to see the value of clear and easy-to-understand rules, applied consistently. We need to see more legislators limit themselves to only a few regulations on building scale; hopefully Burlington’s reforms are a sign of more to come nationwide.
