American (and European) YIMBYs point to Tokyo as an icon and model – proof that nationalized zoning and a laissez faire building culture can protect affordability even when demand is very strong. But this body of work is over-reliant on a classic 2014 Urban Kchoze blog post. As the YIMBY movement matures, it’s time to go deep – books deep – into the fascinating details of Japan’s land use institutions.

Essentials

As with any complex social phenomenon, we are tempted to essentialize Japanese zoning. It works because it’s top-down. It works because Douglas MacArthur imposed strong property rights. It works because of Japanese traditions of impermanence. (If you’re a planner rather than a YIMBY, replace “it works” with “it’s broken”).

Sometimes – often – essential simplifications are useful. And there’s no type of book more boring than the one that promises to tell you how “everything you know about X is wrong,” and then proceeds to offer a bunch of minor caveats to the basically-correct narrative you already knew. Thankfully, this isn’t that kind of book.

Instead, what you come away with is an appreciation for how wrong each of these narratives is: Japanese land use is a delicately-balanced synthesis of centralized and scattered power. If you take away an essential story or lesson, it should be the contingency of outcomes. It works because the central planners were powerful enough to preempt local government but not powerful enough to sideline landowners. It works because local governments encouraged modernization but never had enough funding to execute urban renewal. It works because otherwise strong property rights coexisted along with Land Readjustment. It works because the postwar US and Japanese authorities did not fully enforce their own edicts. It works because of the mini-kaihatsu loophole.

It works because a very specific sequence of institutions rose and declined over a very eventful century, and none of them had the time, power, or money to fully execute its vision.

In the next sections I will draw four notable episodes or themes from the text. This is not a synoptic review – the closest you’ll get to a full narrative is the “it works” section above.

The MacArthur Myth

First off, let’s go all Harry Truman on Douglas MacArthur. One of those essential stories is that the postwar U.S.-written constitution imposed strong property rights. This isn’t just incomplete-wrong, it’s wrong-wrong.

As Tsuru (1993) carefully explains…the American draft of the article on land rights was strongly resisted by the Japanese government. The original Article 28 in MacArthur’s draft read, “The ultimate fee to the land and to all natural resources reposes in the State as the collective representative of the people.”

Wait, what? “Reposes in the state”? Did the Soviets get there first?

This approach of the MacArthur draft was eventually replaced by the following wording suggested by the Japanese side which is now Article 29 of the Japanese constitution: “The right to own or to hold property is inviolable. Property rights shall be defined by law, in conformity with the public welfare…” Tsuru (1993:27) suggests that this wording is basically identical to the old Article 27 of the Meiji constitution, and is much more conservative in its protection of the rights of landowners and its weak conception of the public interest than the initial American draft.

Sorensen, p. 156.

Inviolable!

Land Readjustment

A country with inviolable property rights wouldn’t let a two-thirds majority of landowners force the minority to give up their land for a joint development scheme, would it?

¯\_(?)_/¯

I told you it was a delicately balanced synthesis.

The basic structure of LR is that two-thirds of owners representing two-thirds of land can vote to pool a specified area of land, overriding holdouts. Public ways and land are then laid out and the remaining land is redivided among the original property owners.

Planned growth in Japan has relied on Land Readjustment (LR) to an extraordinary degree. With no need for up-front funding and landowner votes as a check on bad ideas, LR may well be superior to eminent domain or land assembly for laying out new neighborhoods.

Sorensen characterizes suburban Japan as a patchwork of planned spaces, where LR succeeded, and “sprawl”, where uncoordinated rural development preceded planning via loopholes and political meddling.

Mini-kaihatsu, here and there

One American myth of Japanese land use is that national bureaucrats keep local planners on a leash, preventing them from zoning more strictly. Where that’s correct, it’s almost accidentally so. National bureaucrats, in Sorensen’s telling, have consistently pushed for greater regulation. But when prefectures had the choice of setting a key regulatory threshold at 500 or 1,000 square meters, “only a few” took the stricter option (p. 236).

That 1,000 square meter threshold became the “mini-kaihatsu loophole”. In rural fringe areas, a development below 1,000 square meters did not need development permission.

A typical mini-kaihatsu development consists of 12 houses fronting on a narrow 4 metre lane running at right angles from an existing road.

Sorensen, p. 238

A common size for rice paddies was, “conveniently”, one tan, or 992 square meters.

Here’s a picture of a typical mini-kaihatsu:

Oops, wrong photo. That’s Houston. Here are some Japanese examples from Google:

The concept is the same, and it’s no coincidence that both arise in places with light regulation, strong demand, and little public streets funding. As I wrote about Houston:

Houstonians achieve privacy by orienting many new townhouses onto a share courtyard-driveway, sometimes gated, which creates an intermediate space between the private home and the public street…
The courtyard-driveways also provide a shared play space, as evidenced by frequent basketball hoops. Despite what Jane Jacobs may have told you, city streets are not viable play spaces for 21st-century children. But cul-de-sacs can be. Houston’s courtyard-and-grid model may be the ideal blend, unlocking the connectivity of a city while delivering the secure sociability of a cul-de-sac to a large share of homes.

Ancient alleys

Cul-de-sac alleyways played an important role in pre-modern urban Japan. Sorensen calls them “back-alley nagaya” (shacks or tenements) and notes that the “landowner would often manage and live above a shop fronting the street,” while their employees, or poor artisans lived in the rear areas accessed by a narrow covered lane.”

Other authors have put a more romantic gloss on the alleys. Jinnai Hidenobu says that “designs displayed a sensitivity to what Maki Fumihiko has called ‘hidden depth'”.

[New] groups of urban dwellers, such as factory workers and low-wage white-collar workers, also made their homes in the backstreets. At the entrance to the alley, a wooden wicket was placed, clearly demarcating the main street (public) from the backstreet (semi-public) spaces… In such backstreets, not only could landlords and tenants form a trusting relationship, but tenants themselves lived with one another on the most neighborly terms.

…In Edo, it was in such micro-spaces that a certain degree of self-government took shape; it was in these same back alleys that the foundation of stable society was laid.

Jinnai, Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology, pp. 124-125.

Jordan Sand’s Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects includes a chapter on how alley exploration and appreciation helped form one neighborhood’s identity in 1980s Tokyo.

Most recently, Almazan and Studiolab’s Emergent Tokyo profiles Tsukishima, a modern neighborhood “famous for its narrow roji alleyways.”

[Roji] are often used almost as an extension of the domestic space. As in so many Tokyo neighborhoods, in Tsukishima one sees subtle transitions along the spectrum of public to private space rather than a hard division between the two.

Almazan & Studiolab, p. 172

American urbanists generally hate cul-de-sacs, which prevent connectivity. But residents, especially those with children, love them. And even New Urbanists have re-invented them, calling them “cottage courts.” The “Houston mini-kaihatsu” is a proven economic model for an urban form too universal to be dismissed.

The planner’s gaze

It isn’t just alleys that Sorensen judges more harshly than other writers do. In fact, he has a hard time finding anything good to say about Japan’s land use.

Sorensen’s virtue is his stolid Canadian insistence on presenting facts clearly and with a minimum of emotion. As a reader, one senses that Sorensen’s prejudices seep into the text against his will. (And one trembles to think what unreadable diatribes would have been produced by someone with his sensibilities but not his restraint).

A key example comes on pp. 222-223, where Sorensen nets up the effects of Japan’s zoning code, which allows very mixed uses. He has a long paragraph noting the positive effects – but the words are all in others’ mouths. He cites Jane Jacobs, Jinnai, and six others who point out “very positive consequences of Japan’s radically inclusive approach to land use zoning.” In the next two paragraphs, however, he provides the counterpoint – in his own voice, with only one citation.

It is hard not to feel that Sorensen is favorably disposed toward anything planned and skeptical, if not hostile, to anything unplanned. To Sorensen, “sprawl” denotes unplanned, “haphazard” growth (p. 326). Planned growth, at the same densities, in the same areas, is not sprawl. The same bias pervades his (otherwise excellent!) 2001 article, Building Suburbs in Japan.

He rarely defends his planner’s-eye view. He doesn’t holistically compare planned to unplanned areas and find the latter lacking. Nor does he define key metrics of urban success (e.g. pollution levels, commute times, and housing costs). Instead, he seems to have an intuitive desire to see plans made and brought to fruition, regardless of the merits.

In an era when Tokyo stands as “humanity’s greatest urban achievement,” the institutions that created it deserve a little more credit. But even if Sorensen doesn’t like them, he reports their workings faithfully – and that makes his book a must-read for Tokyophile market urbanists.

The post Book Review: The Making of Urban Japan appeared first on Market Urbanism.

A major barrier to the market urbanist’s ability to make the case for building more housing is the question of aesthetics. When you refer to density in cities, it’s easy to picture large brutalist towers and the slum-like conditions that can be seen in much of the developing world. Of course, this isn’t what we advocate, but it is a problem we have to repeatedly address. Homeowners, whether we like it or not, are a powerful voter group and they want to live in areas that look nice. 

Fortunately, the British Government has found the golden mean of housing plans by accepting the results of the Building Better, Building Beautifully Commission.. The key takeaway of this report is street-voting. This represents an excellent middle ground between the seemingly opposite need for housing to be popular, and the need for housing to be plentiful. 

The current system used in England fails to provide a fair way of measuring public views on plans. This works by assessing the views of nearby residents through a consultation. This allows any resident to attend, or write in, laying out their views on the plan. It may sound democratic, but local consultations are notoriously unrepresentative of a community. Those who take part are overwhelmingly middle-class, property-owning white people who stand to benefit from a housing shortage. Rather than taking into account the views of the local area, this method merely measures the views of those who would be economically burdened by addressing the crisis. 

The city as a commons

What we’re left with is what social scientists would call the tragedy of the commons. This is where you have a common-pool resource where individual use of that resource depletes the stock for other parties. Cities can also be understood to be “the commons” in that they are non-excludable and are subtractable (easy to manipulate). The traditional response to this argues that the only feasible solution is government intervention to prevent overuse of the resource. 

However, Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom famously showed that the commons do not have to be tragic. Ostrom devised a framework of how common pool resources can be managed—one that applies perfectly to housing. The most important of these is her argument that rules and decisions must be made democratically, and that these decisions must be adaptable to local conditions. 

The Solution

So, how does one create a system of regulating house building that empowers local interests, and is readily adaptable to them? Street voting— a policy that empowers each individual street, or commons, to vote on a design code. Once this is voted upon, then any new housing proposed to be built that complies with this code is automatically permitted. 

It was this policy that became a key feature of the recommendations of the Building Better, Building Beautifully commission. Their report fulfils the “traditional urbanism” vision of Sir Roger Scruton in a way that also addresses the urgent need for more houses to be built. Indeed, the clearest examples of this vision are in the terraced townhouses of Bloomsbury and Bath: both significantly denser than modern suburbia. 

The Government response to the street voting proposal was remarkably positive. Whilst they have yet to reach a definitive answer, they have explained that they’re supportive of changing “the nature of permitted development to enable popular and replicable forms of development”. This may not be a full endorsement but this, combined with the new proposals in the Planning for the Future White Paper to allow the construction of additional stories to houses without a full planning consultation, do indicate a desire from the Government to deliver meaningful housing reform along the lines of Elinor Ostrom. 

Although the Commission was led by a social conservative in Roger Scruton, its findings represent a coalition with the growing YIMBY community in the United Kingdom. In addition to conservatives, there’s been growing support for street voting amongst market urbanists like John Myers of London YIMBY and Sam Bowman formerly of the Adam Smith Institute. 

There’s a perfect marriage to be had between the need to build plentifully and the public demand to build beautifully. No, it’s not the ideal plan to develop cities (if it were politically feasible, Japanese style zoning would be the way to go), but it just might be popular enough to allow for meaningful long-term improvements in the housing sector. By using the principles of Ostrom, the tragedy of the commons can be overcome. Should Robert Jenrick, the Secretary of State for Housing, back street voting then it would be a big win for the Government in addressing the dire housing crisis Britain has suffered for too long. 

The post How YIMBYs used Ostrom to recruit conservatives appeared first on Market Urbanism.

Spoiler Warning: This post contains minor spoilers about Season Two of Parks and Recreation, which aired nearly 10 years ago. Why have you still not watched it?

Lately I have been rewatching Parks and Recreation, motivated in part by the shocking discovery that my girlfriend never made it past the first season. The show is perhaps the most sympathetic cultural representation of local public sector work ever produced in the United States. The show manages to balance an awareness of popular discontent with “government” in the abstract— explored through a myriad of ridiculous situations—with the more mild reality that most local government employees are well-meaning, normal, mostly harmless people who care about their communities. This makes the character of Mark Brendanawicz, Pawnee’s jaded planner, all the more interesting.

It’s conspicuous that even in a show so sympathetic to local government, the city planner remains a cynical, somewhat unlikable character. Unlike Ron Swanson, Brendanawicz at one point meant well and has no ideological issues with government; he regularly suggests that he was once a true believer in his work, if only for “two months.” Yet unlike Leslie Knope, he didn’t choose government. In his efforts to win back Anne, Andy chides Brendanawicz as a “failed architect,” an insult which seems to stick. Brendanawicz ultimately leaves the show as an unredeemed loser: after taming his apparent self-absorption and promiscuity, he prepares to propose to Anne, only to have her preemptively break up with him. When the government shutdown occurs at the end of Season Two, Brendanawicz takes a buyout offer, and resolves to go into private-sector construction. Leslie, who had once adored him, dubs him “Brendanaquits,” and we never hear from Pawnee’s city planner again.

It isn’t hard to see why Brendanawicz was unceremoniously scrapped: he was ultimately a call-back to the harsher world of the first season, a world in which Leslie has deep character flaws that chart her on a course for regular disappointment (see also: early Michael Scott). In the brighter, friendlier world that began with Season Two, Brendanawicz had to go. But what does this say about city planning? Why is it that the only representation of city planning in popular culture over the past 25 years was such a sad, cynical man?

There are really two questions here: First, are planners in fact jaded? And second, why would the show’s audience be so comfortable with having planners presented this way? To dig into the first question, it’s useful to recognize upfront that most planners are smart, thoughtful, and well-meaning people. They have generally good ideas about how to improve their city and understand the deep flaws in the zoning ordinances they inherited. But there’s no point in denying that an existential cynicism hangs over the profession. Now more than ever, city planners are constrained by the whims of an angry public and politicians who want to avoid boat rocking at all costs. This cynicism-breeding disempowerment likely flows from the historically low view the general public has of city planners.

This turns us toward the second question: why is the TV viewing public comfortable with Pawnee’s city planner being so disillusioned? Note at this point that none of Pawnee’s other departments—sewage, police, libraries—are depicted in this way. As Tom Campbell points out in the Guardian, the cultural representation of planners as dotards and misanthropes is also a phenomenon across the pond as well. This is particularly odd, he adds, as it’s a far cry from the heroic image of the planner that prevailed during the pinnacle of high modernism in the 1950s and 60s. Campbell and the esteemed British historian of urban planning Peter Hall call for the return of this heroic image of planners as a way to attract the best and brightest to the field. Indeed, the current public view of city planners is perhaps unfair. Yet both Campbell and Hall fail to explore is precisely why the public image of planners collapsed so dramatically.

The trouble is that planning at its peak was a mixed bag at best. Early planning in the style of right-of-way procurement for roads, utilities, and sanitation as well as the construction of parks and public spaces was, for the most part, an unmitigated benefit to the public. Much of this work-a-day planning happened for centuries and often looked like a benign mixture of civil engineering and urban design. As planning expanded in the mid-twentieth century, it took on powers where success was hardly a guarantee and failure was a substantial risk. While early planning generally worked alongside markets and distributed decision making, high modernist planning necessarily involved privileging the plans of a special caste of technocrats. The profession at this stage situated itself in opposition to everything from markets, to apartments, to the poor and marginalized. While planning might have been sexy in this period of megaprojects and comprehensive land-use planning, as is any position with considerable power and a preference for strong egos (see also: architecture), it also inflicted incredible harm on our cities. That our profession is no longer able to attract those seduced by power, whatever their level of competence, does not strike me as obviously bad.

With public discontent already brewing, critics of urban planning such as Jane Jacobs rapidly gained support in channelling opposition to the field. This almost certainly wasn’t helped by the anti-democratic, top-down nature of much city planning activity. As conservative governments formed in the United States and the United Kingdom, political backing for centralized planning evaporated without any bottom-up support to fill the gap. In repentance and rest, city planners retreated, handing over much of their power to elected officials and angry members of the public. Most of us enter planning school and the profession with the goal of helping to build great cities. Yet today, much of planning is simply administering the land-use regulatory regime inherited from our high modernist predecessors. Most practicing planners I know will freely acknowledge that this system is deeply flawed. Is it any wonder that so many us turn into Brendanawiczs?

It’s time for a reckoning in planning. The public doesn’t like us and evidently we don’t like us either. None of this is going to change unless we have a frank discussion about the direction of the profession. Planning, and planners, have much to offer. The first step is to liberate ourselves from the arrogant and damaging excesses of planning at its “peak.” Megaprojects and root-and-branch revitalization have wreaked havoc on our cities; and attempts at comprehensive zoning and land planning and have devolved into a faustian bargain of more employment for planners in exchange for a life of fighting with members of the public, managing process, and filing paperwork. We are forcing ourselves to do work that we aren’t very good at, dictated by special interests, and against the wishes of the general public. Recall one of Brendanawicz’ final, miserable scenes on the show: Ron Swanson asks for a permit to build a shed, and Brendanawicz proceeds to pick apart his code violations.

In place of this tattered, cynicism-breeding planning we need a new liberal conception of the planner. Planning must be reframed as an intellectual adventure, a field in which the great planner accepts her epistemological limitations in the realm of land uses and densities and instead aims to understand, monitor, and report on the natural and unpredictable change underway in her city. Such a planner studies first real estate markets, environmental science, and urban design. This new planner, humbled but not incapacitated, should enjoy broad latitude to boldly plan out a flexible framework for infrastructure growth; she empowers, rather than resists, the organic development of cities, emphasizing the creation of beautiful and useful public spaces along the way. Above all, such a planner might emerge as a public intellectual; unafraid to take a stance, to explain her decisions on blogs and podcasts, and to educate (and learn from) the public about cities. The planning profession is about to enter Season Three. Will we adapt or be cut?

For future content and discussion, follow me on Twitter at @mnolangray.

The post The Disillusionment of the American Planner, or How We Became Mark Brendanawicz appeared first on Market Urbanism.

In my regular discussions of U.S. zoning, I often hear a defense that goes something like this: “You may have concerns about zoning, but it sure is popular with the American people. After all, every state has approved of zoning and virtually every city in the country has implemented zoning.”

One of two implications might be drawn from this defense of Euclidean zoning: First, perhaps conventional zoning critics are missing some redeeming benefit that obviates its many costs. Second, like it or not, we live in a democratic country and zoning as it exists today is evidently the will of the people and thus deserves your respect. The first possible interpretation is vague and unsatisfying. The second possible interpretation, however, is what I take to really be at the heart of this defense. After all, Americans love to make “love it or leave it” arguments when they’re in the temporary majority on a policy.

But is Euclidean zoning actually popular? The evidence for any kind of mass support for zoning in the early days is surprisingly weak. Despite the revolutionary impact that zoning would have on how cities operate, many cities quietly adopted zoning through administrative means. Occasionally city councils would design and adopt zoning regimes on their own, but often they would simply authorize the local executive to establish and staff a zoning commission.

Houston was among the only major U.S. city to put zoning to a public vote—a surefire way to gauge popularity, if it were there—and it was rejected in all five referendums. In the most recent referendum in 1995, low-income and minority residents voted overwhelmingly against zoning. Houston  lacks zoning to this day. Meanwhile, the major proponents of early zoning programs in cities like New York and Chicago were business groups and elite philanthropists. Where votes were held, as in cities like St. Louis, support for zoning was often openly predicated on the idea that zoning would implement and preserve racial segregation. Needless to say, the poor, immigrants, and African Americans were often prevented from voicing their opposition to zoning and other racial segregation programs at the ballot box.

Yet the puzzle remains: if zoning was never popular, why did nearly every state and adopt it? Here it might help to clear up the actual origins of US zoning policy. Contrary to the popular view of zoning as a ground-up phenomenon, zoning was in fact developed, promoted, and heavily incentivized by the federal government.

Zoning as it exists today was developed by the federal Department of Commerce under future president Herbert Hoover. In 1924 and 1928, the department published the Standard Zoning Enabling Act and Standard City Planning Enabling Act, respectively, and distributed copies of each to every state legislature in the country. These acts aimed to accomplish three goals: First, to popularize the policies among legislators and provide a clear federal seal of approval. Second, to provide a model for zoning enabling legislation—legislation whereby the state allows municipalities to undertake certain police powers—and make it easy for state legislatures to quickly pass it. Finally, to secure court approval of zoning. At the time, the constitutionality of zoning was very much in doubt. Many zoning advocates both feared that poorly drafted zoning would prompt the courts to declare the policy unconstitutional nationwide and hoped that the widespread adoption of zoning would leave the courts hesitant to overturn it. Their strategy clearly worked: before 1920, just over a third of states had adopted any kind of zoning enabling legislation. By 1930, nearly three quarters of states had adopted the legislation. In 1926, a divided Supreme Court ruled in favor of zoning.

Over the next 90 years, the federal government would continue to promote and in many cases require zoning, particularly during the New Deal. In 1936, the USDA published rural zoning enabling legislation, designed to push zoning into small towns and rural hamlets. Whether or not towns and cities needed or even wanted zoning, waves of grants and technical experts were forthcoming to nudge municipalities to draft zoning ordinances.

Often, these zoning ordinances were shoddily crafted by non-locals to help municipalities meet federal mandates. After all, as the federal government played a larger role in financing state and local infrastructure projects, zoning came to be expected. Likewise, as the government entered into housing finance in 1934, low-density, racially segregated residential zoning became a necessary prerequisite to secure funding for residential projects or mortgages. Today, the expectation that towns and cities have zoning continues to show up in applications for everything from infrastructure funding to emergency relief. Under such a regime, regardless of popular support, it would be downright weird if most towns and cities didn’t adopt zoning.

None of this is to say that there were never popular constituencies for zoning. A handful of states and cities had clearly adopted zoning by their own volition, as unsavory though their motives often were. But even if we were agree that the popularity of zoning in any way excuses the program—an argument which I am highly skeptical of, see postscript—the purported popularity of early zoning remains far from settled.  

On the one hand, we have strikingly little evidence from democratic public referenda for the popularity of US zoning. On the other hand, we have a century of the federal government drafting, promoting, incentivizing and mandating zoning. Where mass movements in favor of zoning are missing, we find only xenophobic business groups and progressive technocrats in favor. All of this casts serious doubt over the idea that zoning is in the result of popular movements or enjoys mass support today. Meanwhile, Eucludean zoning’s incredible costs become clearer every day.

Postscript: Let’s take the defense that Euclidean zoning is popular on its own terms, contrary to the historical evidence. It’s not obvious that popularity qualifies as an overriding merit in all or even most cases. Sure, we live in a republic, where policy is meant to operate with the consent of the public. But we also live in a liberal republic, where all citizens enjoy certain basic rights regardless of the whims of majorities. Until quite recently, nearly every city in the country enforced some form of school segregation. When unelected judges, after much hemming and hawing, finally cracked down on school segregation—against the wishes of majorities—they did the right thing. A policy that violates basic rights, or arbitrarily expropriates property, or abuses vulnerable populations isn’t made right for being popular in this country. Even if zoning were popular, its tendency to do all of these things should make us deeply skeptical of the policy.

The post Is Zoning Popular? Reevaluating the Evidence appeared first on Market Urbanism.

Edward Bassett, writer of NYC’s 1916 zoning code

by Samuel R Staley

Before the twentieth century land-use and housing disputes were largely dealt with through courts using the common-law principle of nuisance. In essence if your neighbor put a building, factory, or house on his property in a way that created a measurable and tangible harm, courts could intervene on behalf of a complainant to force compensation or stop the action. This pro-property rights approach maximized liberty and minimized the ability of citizens and elected officials to politicize the development process.

This changed with the Progressive movement. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Progressives argued that government should become more professional. Rather than being limited, government should use its resources to pursue the “public interest,” loosely defined as whatever the general public decided through democratic processes was the proper scope of government. Legislatures and, by extension, city commissions made up of elected citizens would set policy and goals while a cadre of trained professionals would use the techniques of scientific management to implement policies. One of the leading Progressives of the day, Woodrow Wilson, was skeptical of the value of elected bodies such as Congress because they interfered with scientific management of government.

While many in the twenty-first century might be tempted to dismiss this public-interest view of government—indeed an entire academic subdiscipline, Public Choice, has emerged to demonstrate the foibles of governments and explore “government failure”—Progressive ideas held a lot of appeal at the turn of the twentieth century. In addition to national concerns over industries such as oil, steel, and railroads, local governments were rife with corruption, waste, and inefficiency. Reforms, such as the city-manager form of government, civil-service exams, and in some cases even municipal ownership of utilities, were thought to provide more transparency and accountability than the patronage-laden times of political bosses. (Today municipal ownership is associated with higher costs, less transparency, and little accountability.)

The Progressive movement, however, had another, darker side that would end up being much more important to understanding the widespread acceptance and persistence of government land-use regulation: social control. Jonah Goldberg notes in his contemporary political history, Liberal Fascism, that the Progressive movement was also a social movement. The emergence of Prohibition and immigration restrictions at the same time (during the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Wilson) was not a coincidence. Not only could government professionalize public service, Progressives believed it also should mold the community along “progressive” social norms and goals (collectively decided).

This political climate provided the context for zoning and helps explain the rapid increase of zoning and urban planning more generally throughout the United States. Conventional planning history tends to minimize the political reasons why zoning was broadly accepted, seeing urban planning instead as an application of a more scientific and rational approach to land development. Rather than letting private markets decide what housing should be built, at what heights, at what densities, and where, the “community” would decide through a combination of democratic choice (elected officials developing and approving a zoning plan and code) with professional planning and code enforcement. Ideally the zoning code would be tied to a central comprehensive plan, which would establish the “vision” for the community. Zoning would be used to implement the plan.

Importantly, zoning was a Progressive alternative to the more traditional (and conventional) nuisance-based approach. The first zoning code, for example, attempted to address spillover impacts of property development—externalities—by segregating land uses. The proverbial slaughterhouse in the residential district wasn’t a myth; these juxtapositions of “noxious” uses were common in low-wealth, low-mobility societies and communities. As incomes increased, wealthier households tended to move to neighborhoods that were healthier and safer; incomes afforded greater mobility—first with horses and buggies, then horse-drawn and electric trollies, and ultimately with the automobile. Those left behind were forced to use the courts—which required money, time, and expertise—to marshal arguments and win cases. Zoning was an alternative that promised lower costs and consistency with social goals established at the municipal level through scientific land management.

But the acceptance of zoning wasn’t all about scientific management and the implementation of the public interest. Zoning, in effect, collectivized property rights. The zone established in the code determined what kinds of homes could be built, their size, sometimes even their outward appearance, and the density of neighborhoods. Similarly, zones determined where businesses could locate. Proposals to develop property for uses not designated by the zoning code required an amendment to the zoning map or plan. The amendment process was intended to be cumbersome and laborious because the presumption was always in favor of the publicly approved plan and against spontaneous modifications based on individual initiative.

Overestimating the detail of a zoning code is difficult. Even cities of 10,000 or fewer can have dozens of zones, often a half-dozen or more devoted just to housing types. Separate zones may exist for neighborhood business, commercial office space, neighborhood retail, or regional shopping malls. While some cities and towns have adopted a “pyramid approach,” where the base of acceptable uses is broadened as land is “upzoned” (with commercial and industrial development representing “higher” zones to reflect higher densities), many have adopted “exclusive use” zones that specify in detail what uses are permitted. If your proposed use (say, a home-based doctor’s office or tax preparation service) is not listed as a permissible use, it’s illegal.

One of the consequences of adopting a zoning code is the implicit politicization of all land use by making it a community decision. The decision to “grandfather” a use (such as your home) is a political decision, not one based on private property rights. In fact there is no enforceable individual property or civil right to land use under zoning; courts have routinely upheld the legal right of cities to rezone properties regardless of the wishes of individual property owners. Citizens can object as a matter of due process but cannot challenge the substance of the regulation itself, which is presumed to serve the general welfare of the community. Zoning establishes a legal entitlement granted by government to use property in designated ways.

Thus two forces led to the rapid adoption of zoning throughout the United States in the twentieth century: concerns about the nuisance effect of incompatible land uses and the political desire to control property development. Research by political scientist David Clingermayer, published in the academic journal Public Choice in 1993, found evidence that both the market-failure and political-interest justifications were important to understanding the spread of zoning. The conventional history focuses on nuisances and the “failure” of common law. Edward Bassett, an attorney and reformer in New York City, advocated the nation’s first citywide zoning ordinance when the iconic Equitable Building was erected in Manhattan. The building was tall enough to block sunlight into neighboring buildings and properties, prompting calls to restrict the size and height of buildings. A zoning ordinance would do the trick, Bassett said, taking inspiration from European style “districting.”

The second force, however, may have been equally important, according to Clingermayer. Externalities may have prompted some actions, but the economic interests of the politically powerful were also at play. The skyscrapers popping up along Manhattan’s toney Fifth Avenue troubled upscale clothiers, who were not excited about their wealthy clients mixing it up with the immigrant sweatshop workers toiling away in the high-rises. So Fifth Avenue property owners used the political device of zoning to prevent encroachment by uses they thought were “undesirable” or could lower their property values.

The same scene played out later near industrial Cleveland, Ohio. The suburban village of Euclid was concerned that industrial development radiating outward from Cleveland would encroach on the primarily residential character of its community. So it enacted a zoning ordinance to prevent industrial development. In a landmark 1926 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Corp., the zoning ordinance was upheld as a proper exercise of the police powers of local government to protect the general health and welfare of the community. Ironically, in the wake of the zoning ordinance, Ambler Realty’s property lay vacant until World War II, when an aircraft factory was built by General Motors to support the war effort.

Even before the Supreme Court blessed zoning, the federal government was busy encouraging it as part of a general effort to professionalize development control. Bassett helped the U.S. Department of Commerce (under Herbert Hoover) draft a model zoning ordinance called the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act, which provided a blueprint for cities across the nation. Clingermayer notes that 55,000 copies of the report were printed and distributed during the 1920s. By 1930 800 cities, towns, and villages—covering three-fifths of the nation’s urban population—were governed by a zoning ordinance of some kind.

Regardless of the initial intent, however, the effect of zoning was to fully politicize land-use decisions, as economist William Fischel puts it in the classic, Economics of Zoning and Land Use. This was not surprising: Since zoning hinges on the control over land uses rather than free use of property, the complexity of the zoning maps and the development-approval process has increased exponentially.

Euclid’s first zoning ordinance had six districts based on classes of uses. By 2011 the village had become a city of nearly 50,000 residents with 12 zoning districts, including six residential, three commercial, two industrial, and a campus-institutional district. The initial modest control of land use quickly proved ineffective because democracies are not particularly good at predicting the future. As land uses became more complex and the impacts themselves became more diffuse and hard to categorize, zoning became more layered and sophisticated, with cities and planners attempting to anticipate and accommodate more uses. Euclid’s zoning is relatively modest by national and midwestern standards. San Antonio’s zoning districts have grown from 22 in 1938 to 30 in 1958 to 53 in 2009. New York City has adopted hundreds of zoning districts, including ten residential, eight commercial (plus overlays), three manufacturing, dozens of special districts such as street-specific designations for mixed land uses, and environmental districts such as scenic view districts.

For many cities, zoning has become a never-ending cycle of adding complexity to already complex planning procedures as existing zones fail to accommodate innovations in land use and economic development.

Is there an alternative?

While most American cities, towns, and villages have adopted some form of zoning and comprehensive planning, several counties and municipalities have resisted the Progressive call to centrally plan their cities. Chief among these is Houston, Texas, a city of 2.1 million people in the nation’s sixth-largest metropolitan area of six million. Zoning has gone to popular referendum three times (1948, 1962, and 1993) and failed. Most recently a pro-planning city councilman lost his bid to become mayor, in part because of citizen skepticism of zoning.

Despite the lack of zoning, Houston is hardly a land-development free for all. Development is regulated through three different processes. The city regulates development through an approval process that focuses mainly on the impact of land development on public services. New developments, for example, must conform to performance criteria for public services such as sewer and road capacity. The second regulatory mechanism is private restrictions on land use adopted through legally enforceable land covenants, or voluntary restrictions on future land uses by current property owners. Covenants can (and often do) exclude specific uses, such as commercial enterprises or businesses. Yet a surprising number of parcels are “unrestricted,” particularly in the older neighborhoods and sections of the city, effectively allowing informal market forces, the third mechanism, to regulate the timing, intensity, and place of development.

By avoiding zoning, Houston is able to dramatically speed up the approval process while ensuring the land market responds effectively to economic trends. Under conventional zoning securing a rezoning for a major project can take years. In Houston substantial developments such as multifamily housing can be approved through the performance-approval system and be fully constructed within a year.

All three mechanisms have effectively combined to encourage and manage the growth of one of the nation’s most dynamic cities. Houston, for example, builds housing at higher densities and closer to the traditional urban core than competing cities such as Dallas and Phoenix. Its market-oriented approach to land use has also allowed it to adapt, building multiple employment centers to accommodate new economic challenges and opportunities. While Houston was not immune to the housing market collapse, its housing market has tended to be more resilient and adaptable to changing circumstances.

In sum, many citizens of contemporary U.S. cities take the Progressive foundations of zoning and land-use planning for granted. Yet these Progressive principles on which modern-day zoning rests, and its broad cultural acceptance at the grassroots level, have helped undermine alternative ways of regulating development more consistent with individual liberty and markets. Many of those seeking to roll back federal government encroachment should also be casting a skeptical eye into their own political backyards.

Samuel R. Staley

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The post The Progressive Roots of Zoning appeared first on Market Urbanism.

This week’s column is drawn from a lecture I gave at the University of Southern California on the occasion of the retirement of urban economist Peter Gordon.

One of my heroes is the urbanist Jane Jacobs, who taught me to appreciate the importance for entrepreneurial development of how public spaces—places where you expect to encounter strangers—are designed. And I learned from her that the more precise and comprehensive your image of a city is, the less likely that the place you’re imagining really is a city.

Jacobs grasped as well as any Austrian economist that complex social orders such as cities aren’t deliberately created and that they can’t be. They arise largely unplanned from the interaction of many people and many minds. In much the same way that Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek understood the limits of government planning and design in the macroeconomy, Jacobs understood the limits of government planning and the design of public spaces for a living city, and that if governments ignore those limits, bad consequences will follow.

Planning as taxidermy

Austrians use the term “spontaneous order” to describe the complex patterns of social interaction that arise unplanned when many minds interact. Examples of spontaneous order include markets, money, language, culture, and living cities great and small. In her The Economy of Cities, Jacobs defines a living city as “a settlement that generates its economic growth from its own local economy.” Living cities are hotbeds of creativity and they drive economic development.

There is a phrase she uses in her great work, The Life and Death of Great American Cities, that captures her attitude: “A city cannot be a work of art.” As she goes on to explain:

Artists, whatever their medium, make selections from the abounding materials of life, and organize these selections into works that are under the control of the artist . . . the essence of the process is disciplined, highly discriminatory selectivity from life. In relation to the inclusiveness and the literally endless intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic and abstracted. . . . To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life. The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither art nor life. They are taxidermy.

So the problem confronting an urban planner, and indeed government planning of any sort, is how to avoid draining the life out of the thing you’re trying to control.

The trade-off between planning and complexity

Viewing cities as spontaneous orders and not as works of art helps to explain the trade-off between scale and order. In general, I believe the larger the scale of a project, the fewer the discoveries and subtle connections the people who use that space will be able to make.

Placing an apartment building in a commercial block will change the character of that block in unpredictable ways, but the surrounding urban environment can usually absorb the repercussions and the problems are relatively small. A block-sized mall, however, constrains much further how people can use that space and has a disproportionately larger impact on the neighborhood. And a mega-project that takes up many blocks severely limits the diversity and range of the social connections, as it challenges the planner to substitute her genius for the genius of many ordinary people using their own local knowledge to solve problems only they may be aware of. Making something bigger increasingly limits what people can do and whom they can bump into in the space that it occupies. Scaling up narrows the range of the informal contacts that drive creativity and discovery.

And for a given size or scale of a project, the more the planner tries to predetermine the kind of activities the people who use it can do in it, the less likely that her design will complement the spontaneous contact that generates and diffuses new ideas. That’s what made a lot of traditional downtowns so important. Over time the combination of diverse uses of public space (in the sense I mean here) brought people with different skills and tastes together in large numbers. Design can of course complement that informal contact to a point, but beyond a fairly low level, human design begins to substitute for it.

Of course, small is not always beautiful, and big is sometimes unavoidable. But that makes it even more important that planners appreciate how ramping up scale and intensifying design influences a complex social order.

Private planning is much more limited in scale

And I’m not just talking about government projects. Private projects could, in principle, have the same “taxidermic” impact on urban vitality. But as long as a planner’s design is small compared to the surrounding space, the loss of complexity and intricacy isn’t severe. It’s usually when government somehow subsidizes private projects, softening up the budget constraint, that the scale becomes massive and the downside very steep. An example of this can be found about a mile from where I live in New York. Barclays Center, the new home of the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets, grew to an enormous size once the local and state governments offered eminent domain and other large subsidies. Building on a massive scale in an already dense urban environment is typically too expensive, even for a wealthy private developer, without such legal privileges.

A planner can’t build an entire city (or neighborhood even) because she can’t begin to design and construct the necessary diversity and social intricacy that happens spontaneously in a living city. And I don’t think she should even try to because it can irreparably damage, even kill, the living flesh of a city. What can government do? In the ordinary course of its activities a government can perhaps at best refrain from doing the things that would thwart the emergence of the invisible social infrastructure that gives rise to that diversity, development, and genuine liveliness.

The rest is mostly taxidermy.

Sandy Ikeda

Sandy Ikeda is a professor of economics at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of The Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism. He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The post Urban Design and Social Complexity appeared first on Market Urbanism.

Boy, has that changed.

Earlier this year I wrote a sprawling defense of Houston. Scott Beyer spent the summer writing a series of articles for Forbes profiling the cool things happening in cities across the state. John Ricco recently launched the “Densifying Houston” Twitter feed and discussed the phenomenon on Greater Greater Washington. Just this past weekend, City Journal released an entire special issue dedicated to Texas.

Through all this, many have been surprised to learn that a city like Houston could serve as a model for land-use policy and economic growth for struggling coastal cities. Yet two criticisms regularly seem to come up, at least related to Houston:

1. “Houston is an unplanned hell-hole! It’s proof that land-use liberalization would be a disaster.”
2. “Houston isn’t unplanned! It’s as heavily planned as any other city, just look at the covenants.”

Since there seems to be a lot of confusion about land-use regulation and planning in Houston, here’s a quick explainer on what Houston does regulate, doesn’t regulate, and how private covenants shape the city.

1. What Houston Doesn’t Do

Houston doesn’t mandate single-use zoning. Unlike every other major U.S. city, Houston doesn’t mandate the separation of residential, commercial, and industrial developments. This means that restaurants, homes, warehouses, and offices are free to mix as the market allows. As many have pointed out, however, market-driven separation of incompatible uses—think strip clubs and preschools—is common in Houston.

Commercial clusters along major thoroughfares. Residential dominates the interior streets. Heavy industrial clusters mostly out of the way. Cities do this kind of thing naturally—no need for single-use zoning. (Nolan Gray/Google Maps)

Houston doesn’t segregate residential developments. Unlike every other major U.S. city, Houston doesn’t mandate the separation of different housing types. This means that single-family homes, townhouses, and apartments are free to mix. As desirability increases and land values rise, it’s common for single-family homes to be converted into higher density multifamily developments in order to accommodate demand.

This was a nice neighborhood before all the apartments and retail came in. Just kidding. It’s one of Houston’s nicest neighborhoods—Midtown—gradually growing denser. (Nolan Gray/Google Maps)

Houston doesn’t regulate density. Many U.S. cities tightly restrict the number of units a developer can build per acre. These regulations do not exist in Houston. Outside of complying with space-consuming regulations and certain special urban bonuses related to lot size, Houston doesn’t regulate density.

A high-density area far outside of downtown—Uptown. As long a you have the required parking, go crazy. (Nolan Gray/Google Maps)

Houston doesn’t mandate large minimum lot sizes for single-family housing. Houston does enforce a minimum lot size for single-family homes. Unlike Dallas and other Sun Belt cities, however, Houston does not mandate higher minimum lot sizes (e.g. one unit per 10,000 square feet, or one unit per acre).

This isn’t Houston! It’s Dallas. Specifically, it’s Old Preston Hollow and it’s illegal to have a density higher than one unit per acre. Something, something, health, safety, and morals? Hah, no. It’s to keep poor people out. (Nolan Gray/Google Maps)

Houston doesn’t prohibit tiny living. Attracted to the idea of a small living space? Accessory dwelling units are completely legal and common across the city. Micro apartments are also legal—no Seattle-style shenanigans here—and a few micro unit developments are underway. Those tiny homes that D.C. and L.A. are losing their minds over? They’re also permitted and are quickly spreading around the city.

The scourge of D.C. Not that big of a deal in Houston. (Inhabitat/Flickr)

2. What Houston Does Do

Houston does mandate minimum lot sizes for single-family housing. Houston does mandate that lots subdivided for single-family homes be at least 5,000 square feet. Lots must be at least 50 feet wide and 100 feet deep. Minimum lot size restrictions do not apply to multifamily housing, commercial developments, or industrial developments.

These regulations were significantly reduced for urban neighborhoods following reform in 1999, dropping the minimum lot size down to 1,400 square feet and making townhouses feasible. There’s a big catch though: policymakers recently opened up a process whereby neighborhoods can petition for larger minimum lot sizes. It’s worth watching, since this could stymie recent densification and pave the way for tighter development restrictions.

Single-family housing on at least 5,000 square foot lots. Not having a minimum lot requirement is best, but this isn’t the end of the world. (Nolan Gray/Market Urbanism)

Houston does mandate front setbacks. For single-family homes, the maximum required setback is 25 feet. In many cases— including multifamily housing, commercial and industrial developments, and single-family homes under special circumstances—this required setback falls substantially and in many cases may be zero. Thanks to the city’s small and often non-existent side and rear required setbacks, many single-family homes in Houston lack a backyard—an indication that Americans aren’t so crazy about their beloved yards if given a choice.

Americans suffering the indignity of not being forced to have a yard. (Nolan Gray/Google Maps)

Houston does mandate off-street parking. Here’s the doozy: Houston mandates off-street parking for just about every form of development. This is probably the number one regulation holding back the city’s rapid densification and a major reason that car-dependence remains the norm. By requiring developers to build either parking deserts and garages, this policy encourages developers to bypass exciting infill and downtown opportunities in favor of developing in the suburbs where land is cheap.

As someone who likes Houston, it’s hard to look at this photo. Kill the parking mandates! (Nolan Gray/Google Maps)

Houston does mandate wide roads and long blocks. When developers subdivide a greenfield lot, they have to comply with Houston’s street design regulations. Unfortunately for pedestrians, the city regularly requires 50 to 60 feet right-of-ways and 600 feet blocks in neighborhoods. Besides undermining walkability, this also saddles the city with unnecessary infrastructure maintenance costs.

A four-lane freeway cutting through a densifying urban neighborhood. Where do the cyclist go? (Nolan Gray/Google Earth)

3. What About Private Restrictive Covenants?

Private restrictive covenants are common in Houston. A restrictive covenant is an agreement among property owners regulating how they can and cannot use their property. It might be helpful to think of this as a kind of decentralized zoning: a developer sets up a collection of rules on everything from architecture and design standards, use restrictions, and maintenance requirements. Residents then sign a contract agreeing to abide by these private regulations and contribute to a fund for their enforcement. Many people know about restrictive covenants in residential neighborhoods, but they are also common in industrial parks. In the case of commercial developments, typically a lessor acts as a kind of private regulator.

Is this bad? Private restrictive covenants can certainly be bad. Early covenants typically upheld racial, ethnic, and income segregation before Euclidian zoning came along and effectively did that for residents. But by no means are all private covenants bad. Most covenants today are designed to make sure that communities stay the way residents would like them to stay. In a typical residential neighborhood, this might mean keeping out unwanted businesses or cleaning up litter. In an industrial park, this might mean upholding additional fire and safety standards. In many cases, private covenants also help provide club goods like parks, security guards, and roads.

Houston does enforce private restrictive covenants. Since 1965, the city of Houston has played a role in enforcing these private restrictive covenants. In most cities, if a resident would like to force another resident to end a perceived rule violation, they have to take them to court and foot the bill themselves. Usually covenants set up a fund that would cover this cost, but legal fees can rapidly deplete these funds and the process can be a headache to manage. In Houston, the city comes in and foots the bill for the litigation upon receiving a complaint.

Is this bad? Almost certainly, yes. In a normal city, a neighborhood association or resident would have to pay the full cost of enforcing the covenant. This forces residents to seriously consider whether the rule violation is egregious enough to be worth the cost of a lawsuit. A common result is that over the course of 25 to 50 years, small, unpunished rule violations slowly add up and the covenant withers away. Alternatively, the cost of maintaining the covenant may motivate property owners to explicitly liberalize the restrictions when the renewal vote comes around, permitting new uses like multifamily housing and commercial developments.

The trouble with Houston’s system is that it subsidizes the cost from trivial rule enforcement and incentivizes property owners to report each and every violation to the city. That has two important results: First, since residents don’t have to foot the bill of enforcing minor rules, they’re more likely to implement highly restrictive covenants. Second, since the covenant costs and pain of enforcement are low, property owners will keep restrictive covenants alive well past what might have been their natural expiration date. Make no mistake: private restrictive covenants still phase out all the time. Houston’s subsidies just make that process less common.

4. Key Takeaways

When it comes to land-use regulation, Houston’s greatest sin may be that it’s alone in the middle. At the same time Houston is criticized for not planning enough and planning too much. It won’t surprise Market Urbanism readers to know that I am inclined toward the latter opinion. Houston needlessly forces sprawl with giant “free” roads, mandated parking, and subsidized private restrictive covenants. But that shouldn’t distract us from what Houston gets right. Houston was the only major city to hold a public vote on comprehensive zoning and it was the only major city to turn it down. For decades, folks scoffed at Houston for refusing to implement residential segregation, mixed-use prohibitions, and density restrictions. It turns out that Houston was right all along, and that’s worth talking about.

The post How Houston Regulates Land Use appeared first on Market Urbanism.

We can imagine affordable market-rate housing in Chicago, but zoning prohibits it

Several cities have jumped on the bandwagon of building Micro-apartments, a hot trend in apartment development.  San Francisco and Seattle already have them. New York outlawed them, but is testing them on one project, and may legalize them again. Even developers in smaller cities like Denver and Grand Rapids are taking a shot at micro-apartments.

At the same time, Chicago is building lots of apartments, and is known for having low barriers to entry for downtown development.  Yet we aren’t hearing of much new construction of micro-apartments here.  Premier studios are fetching as much as $2,000 a month.  Certainly there must be demand for something more approachable to young professionals.  In theory, we should expect to see Chicago leading the way in innovative small spaces.

Chicago doesn’t have an outright ban on small apartments like New York, but there are four regulatory obstacles in the Chicago zoning code.  These are outdated remnants from eras where excluding undesirable people were main objectives of zoning, and combined to effectively prohibit small apartments:

1. Minimum Average Size:  Interestingly, there is no explicit prohibition of small units.  This is unlike New York City’s zoning, which prohibits units smaller than 400sf. There is, however, a stipulation that the average gross size of apartments constructed within a development be greater that 500sf.  Assuming 15% of your floor-plate is taken by hallways, lobbies, stairs, etc; this means for every 300sf unit, you need one 550sf unit to balance it out.

Source:  17-2-0312 for residential; 17-4-0408 for downtown

2. Limits on “Efficiency Units”: Zoning stipulates a minimum percentage of “efficiency units” within a development. The highest density areas downtown allow as much as 50%, but these are the most expensive areas where land is most expensive. In areas traditionally more affordable, the ratio is as low as 20% to discourage studios, and encourage homes for families.

Source:  17-2-0313-A for residential (20% for RT-4 to 40% for RM6.5); 17-4-0409-A for downtown (20% for D-3 to 50% for D-10+)

3. Minimum lot area: (MLA) Like most features of zoning codes, MLA serves to encourage large units for wealthy families, and discourage more affordable small-sized units. During the condo boom, when 2-bedroom condos were the most in-demand kind, MLA was less important, and floor area ratio (FAR) dictated the scale of projects in Chicago. However, when desiring to build smaller units, MLA dictates the scale instead of FAR. Basically, there is a maximum number of units permitted on a site, based on the size of the site. ULTIMATELY this prevents micro-apartments more than the other 3 factors. Limiting the number of units on a site prevents a developer from building micro-apartments at a reasonable density economically; and a developer building larger, more luxurious units will be able to pay more for the land.

4. Parking minimums: The typical person who rents a micro-apartment in a big city does not own a car, and would not need a parking space. Nonetheless, zoning dictates that a developer provide between .5 and 1 parking space for every unit. Structured parking spaces are not cheap to build, complicate design and management, hamper aesthetics, and crowd out open space. Thus, being forced to build significantly more spaces than will be used by the tenants puts a lot of economic pressure on the micro-apartment developer (not to mention the environmental consequences of building unused and underused spaces).

Furthermore, a micro-apartment developer with a high number of units would be required to provide on-site parking for all the units.  On a constrained site, this means a developer would need to provide several levels of structured parking, which is expensive to build, especially considering the tenants are unlikely to use the spaces.

Source:  downtown: 17-10-0208

What about SRO?:
There are provisions that allow Single Room Occupancy (SRO) buildings in Chicago, unlike New York ,which banned them outright.  It seems reasonable to conclude that a micro-apartment could be considered an SRO under the zoning code. SRO enjoys a unique categorization, which is exempt from limits on the percent of efficiency units, and is subject to very liberal parking minimums (one space per 10 units). SROs still are subject to the 500sf average and Minimum Lot Area per unit, but SRO units are held to a lower Minimum Lot Area requirement than conventional units or efficiencies.

As a developer, I personally have attempted to build micro-apartments using SRO zoning.  Unfortunately, Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development has arbitrarily decided to redefine SRO as housing “serving a specific lower income population and include a social service component”, and is not allowing market-rate development of SROs.  This is terribly unfortunate, since when the zoning codes were first drafted, SROs were a form of market-rate affordable housing.  The definitions in the zoning code are clear, but it is unclear to me, my architects, or my zoning attorneys how the Department of Planning and Development can defend this stance.

Existing SROs:

A small number of Chicago developers, such as Flats Chicago, had been rehabbing older SROs in uptown.  Redeveloping existing SROs was the only surefire approach to providing micro-apartments in Chicago.  On the downside, redeveloping existing SRO eliminates rare stock of very cheap housing much needed by the city’s poorest residents.  For this reason, the rehabilitation of dilapidated SROs as market-rate micro-apartments has come under fire from housing advocates and politicians, who successfully lobbied for the passage of the SRO Preservation Ordinance in late 2014.  This ordinance slows down the process of rehabilitating or selling any SRO building in Chicago.

Some relief: Transit-Oriented Development Ordinances

Over the past few years, Chicago has taken very positive steps in one regard: transit-oriented development.  These amendments to the zoning code have loosened–and in many cases eliminated–parking requirements for residential developments within close proximity to transit.

In the end, some major changes still need to be made to Chicago’s zoning code to make apartment living more affordable.  To start, my suggestion is to significantly lower or eliminate MLA requirements from the code, and continue the process of liberalizing the parking requirements in all parts of the city.  Fortunately, despite the Department of Planning and Development’s bizarre interpretation of the definition of SRO, they have been known to be cooperative in granting adjustments to the limits on the percent of efficiency units in certain cases.  However, a significant lowering of the Minimum Lot Area requirements throughout the city is still needed to allow development of more affordable market-rate apartments in Chicago.  Let’s hope Chicago continues changing it’s ways, and takes steps towards making city life more affordable.

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