En ocasiones, se considera que la zonificación es un elemento atemporal de las políticas de suelo y la planificación. Y lo es. La zonificación se originó en Asia hace más de tres milenios. En aquella época, se usaba para designar los usos del suelo más allá de las murallas de las ciudades o para separar a las personas por castas. La práctica se adoptó más recientemente en los Estados Unidos con fines similares. En el s. XXI, es uno de los mayores impedimentos para la sostenibilidad de las ciudades estadounidenses.

Hace varios años que expreso mi opinión sobre el control hiperlocal del suelo. Hace una década, en un panel con Nic Retsinas, entonces director del Joint Center for Housing Studies de Harvard, opiné que el gobierno local y los controles del uso del suelo eran “dinosaurios” que hacían casi imposible coordinar la planificación del transporte regional y los esfuerzos en materia de vivienda asequible. Nic nos recordó a mí y a los asistentes que había fuerzas políticas y económicas poderosas que se interponían con firmeza en el camino hacia la reforma de las políticas de suelo. También señaló que los dinosaurios vivieron millones de años antes de extinguirse, y que se extinguieron debido a la colisión de un asteroide con la Tierra, no a causa de la selección natural.

Pero ahora, el mundo de las políticas de suelo presenta algo casi tan raro como un asteroide que cambiará el planeta: el acuerdo bipartidista. Numerosos estados azules, rojos y púrpuras aprobaron leyes para impedir la zonificación local y así avanzar en objetivos políticos esenciales, o están contemplando la posibilidad de hacerlo. ¿Por qué se dio este cambio repentino? Porque muchos gestores de políticas ahora entienden que la crisis nacional de la vivienda asequible no puede abordarse sin cambios estructurales en las reglas. Otros gestores de políticas saben que no podemos abordar una de las manifestaciones más negativas de la zonificación (la segregación espacial por raza y clase) sin una acción afirmativa agresiva.

Si bien hay un acuerdo bipartidista sobre la necesidad de una reforma, las motivaciones de los gestores de políticas son muy diferentes. Los partidarios de la derecha argumentan que la crisis de la vivienda es producto del exceso de regulaciones que ahogan la producción de viviendas. Estos críticos creen que la reforma de la zonificación desatará fuerzas del mercado que harán frente a la crisis de la vivienda y acelerarán la producción de unidades nuevas. Los partidarios de la izquierda argumentan que no podemos construir viviendas asequibles en los lugares que más lo necesitan, debido a las políticas de suelo que excluyeron a las personas por motivos de raza e ingresos durante generaciones, como el tamaño mínimo de las parcelas y la prohibición de las viviendas multifamiliares. Según ellos, la reforma de la zonificación posibilitará la construcción de viviendas asequibles en lugares que presentan “grandes oportunidades”, con buenas escuelas y trabajos decentes.

El poder del Estado para impedir la zonificación local no es nuevo. En 1969, Massachusetts aprobó el Capítulo 40B, una medida que le permite al Estado anular la zonificación local y aprobar desarrollos multifamiliares de ingresos mixtos en jurisdicciones con pocas viviendas asequibles. Aunque contribuyó a fomentar el desarrollo de viviendas asequibles en algunos suburbios adinerados, no supuso un cambio significativo y pocos estados se plantearon seguir su ejemplo, hasta hace muy poco.

Ahora, unos diez estados están dispuestos a impedir la zonificación local a fin de permitir el desarrollo de múltiples unidades de vivienda en lotes que actualmente están zonificados para casas unifamiliares. Por ejemplo, en Connecticut, Nebraska, Utah, Oregón, Maryland, California y Washington, se permite añadir unidades accesorias (ADU, por su sigla en inglés) a los lotes unifamiliares; en Virginia, Utah, Nebraska, Washington y Maryland, se permite la construcción de “viviendas intermedias”, es decir, casas adosadas para entre dos y cuatro familias, en lotes destinados a viviendas unifamiliares; y en Oregón, California, Virginia, Maine y Washington, se impide por completo que los gobiernos locales prohíban la construcción de viviendas multifamiliares en parcelas unifamiliares. Recientemente, Massachusetts y California también ordenaron la recalificación en comunidades con mayor acceso a servicios de transporte. Está claro que el control local sobre el uso del suelo ya no es algo sacrosanto.

Si bien la zonificación es una práctica milenaria, tiene menos de un siglo en la mayor parte de los Estados Unidos. Los estados comenzaron a otorgarles a los municipios el poder de definir el uso del suelo en la década de 1920, en función de la Ley de Habilitación de Zonificación Estatal Estándar dictada por el Departamento de Comercio en 1923. Pero los estados también pueden dar marcha atrás una vez que otorgan derechos. A veces, resulta necesario que los niveles más altos de gobierno pasen por alto las decisiones de los niveles más bajos, a fin de fomentar el bienestar general o abordar cuestiones externas negativas que son producto de acciones no coordinadas de estos niveles más bajos de gobierno. Muchas veces, los esfuerzos estatales para desestimar a los gobiernos locales no son bienintencionados; por ejemplo, cuando los gestores de políticas estatales restringen los impuestos a la propiedad inmobiliaria para congraciarse con los votantes. En el caso de la zonificación, la necesidad de que el estado actúe está claramente justificada.

Deberíamos celebrar el hecho de que estamos yendo en la dirección correcta y que se está generando la voluntad política para abordar un desafío que, hasta hace poco, se consideraba imposible. Pero aún nos queda mucho por aprender sobre la zonificación. Cada estado, y en muchos casos cada jurisdicción dentro de él, desarrolló sus propias convenciones de zonificación, lo que hace que sea muy difícil comparar las prácticas. También hace que sea casi imposible comprender las implicaciones de las decisiones de zonificación sobre el valor del suelo y los patrones de desarrollo, o cómo la reforma de la zonificación podría abordar desafíos grandes, como la crisis de la vivienda, la desigualdad espacial o la expansión urbana descontrolada. Esto también está cambiando.

El año pasado, un pequeño equipo de visionarios en la Universidad Cornell, liderados por la profesora Sara Bronin, crearon un mapa de zonificación para el estado de Connecticut. Mediante hojas de cálculo, mapas y sistemas de información geográfica, el equipo documentó de manera increíblemente detallada las prácticas de zonificación de 180 jurisdicciones con 2.622 distritos de zonificación. Asombrosamente, esto requirió la revisión de más de 30.000 páginas de texto en las que se describían las prácticas de zonificación de un solo estado.

Esta tarea hercúlea aparentemente no fue un desafío lo suficientemente grande para este intrépido grupo de investigadores. Recientemente, el equipo de Cornell emprendió un esfuerzo para crear un Mapa de zonificación nacional. Ahora, con una metodología probada en el campo tras la creación del Mapa de zonificación de Connecticut, se propusieron recopilar, con ayuda del público, datos de zonificación del resto de país mediante los mismos métodos. Hasta ahora, participan equipos autoorganizados de 12 estados. Cuando logren crear el mapa nacional (y el Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo hará todo lo posible para que esto suceda), comenzará una nueva era para los académicos de políticas de suelo. Los debates sobre los costos, los beneficios y las consecuencias de la reforma de la zonificación tendrán sustento en datos reales.

La reforma de la zonificación por sí sola no es suficiente para resolver la crisis nacional de la vivienda, pero es necesaria. Es importante que contemos con más información sobre las prácticas de zonificación actuales y los posibles beneficios de las prácticas de zonificación mejoradas para abordar los problemas generados durante décadas de malas prácticas. Un siglo de control local, descentralizado y aislado del suelo produjo niveles inaceptables de segregación racial y económica, una expansión urbana descontrolada que contribuyó a la crisis climática y una crisis de vivienda asequible casi inexpugnable. Mediante la alineación sin precedentes de la voluntad política con las herramientas y conocimientos nuevos, las soluciones posibles a esta triple amenaza están más cerca que nunca. 

Crédito de la imagen: Mapa de Zonificación Nacional

Assessing all the climate threats that rain down on West Africa, the mayor of Freetown, Sierra Leone, Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, was convinced that extreme heat needed to be a top priority.

“There are more deaths from extreme heat than there are from the more visible and tangible disasters,” she said on the latest episode of the Land Matters podcast. “In our case, the vulnerable are mainly those living in informal settlements. That’s 35 percent of our city’s population, and in those informal settlements, the housing structures are typically made from corrugated iron. With increased temperatures, you’re effectively living in an oven.”

The concern led Aki-Sawyerr to appoint Africa’s first chief heat officer, with the support of the Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center. One of the first practical interventions was to provide shade covers at the city’s open-air markets, where primarily women sit in the sun for long hours.

In a wide-ranging interview, also available at Land Lines magazine as the latest installment of the Mayor’s Desk feature, Aki-Sawyerr said the aim is to build resilience for impacts being felt now, but also plan for long-range sustainability. She detailed the promise to plant a million trees and the planning initiative she launched after being elected in 2018, Transform Freetown.

Aki-Sawyerr, who previously served as head of the Freetown City Council, built her career as a finance professional. She was part of the campaign against blood diamonds and was instrumental in the response to the Ebola crisis in 2014. She has delivered two TED talks, including one about turning dissatisfaction into action. Named to the Time100 Next list of emerging leaders, she has been active in the C40 Cities global network.

As part of an effort to maintain not only environmental but fiscal sustainability, she also explained how the city overhauled its property tax assessment and collection practices.

The Lincoln Institute has been active in Africa, working with governments, scholars, and practitioners on issues like climate change, the property tax, and the fiscal health of local governments, and on using value capture to fund affordable housing and many other priorities.

You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Further Reading

Africa’s first “chief heat officer” says Freetown could be a data-driven climate model (Quartz)

Meet the 7 chief heat officers who are making their cities more resilient (Fast Company)

Collaborating to reform Freetown’s property tax system (Institute of Development Studies)

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.

Image: Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, center, celebrates the installation of marketplace shades designed to combat extreme heat. Credit: City of Freetown.

Where should new multifamily housing go? This is a fundamental question facing 175 communities across eastern Massachusetts as they work to implement a new law intended to address the region’s housing shortage. The law requires cities and towns served by Greater Boston’s public transit agency, the MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority), to enact zoning that allows multifamily housing near transit.  

If history is any indication, communities will seek to locate new housing away from existing residential neighborhoods. In recent decades, the largest portion of new housing in Greater Boston has been built in isolated areas on municipal and metropolitan peripheries. As an example, the town of Wellesley approved the construction of a 262-unit complex called The Nines—separated from almost all of the town by Interstate 95 and located on a spit of land tucked between the highway, state Route 9, and the Charles River. The towns of Needham and Stoneham permitted similar “across the interstate” developments, and other examples abound. 

The next largest portion of residential permitting has come in commercial areas.  As “smart growth” caught on in the new millennium, many cities and towns added one or two small- or medium-sized multifamily buildings to their downtowns. These properties are very close to residential neighborhoods, but not right in them. Zoning for mixed-use developments along decaying strip mall corridors has also been gaining support. Thus, we see projects on Newton’s Needham Street, Bedford’s Great Road, Salem’s Highland Avenue, Swampscott’s Vinnin Square, and many other less-than-loved “stroads.”  

For many communities, preserving the status quo of existing neighborhoods has been an explicit priority, even as the housing crunch has intensified. A few years ago, the city of Weymouth rezoned a commercial corridor for mixed-use multifamily housing, drawing the zoning district surgically to avoid development near existing residential neighborhoods. Wellesley’s 2018 Draft Unified Plan explains that participants in public meetings saw commercial, office, and industrial areas as the most acceptable locations for multifamily housing; not residential districts. In fact, my review of local master plans across 100 cities and towns showed no movement to upzone residential neighborhoods, other than by allowing accessory dwelling units (ADUs), which appear to have relatively popular support.  

Given the political resistance to changing residential neighborhoods, developing housing in other areas is not without merit. The Metropolitan Area Planning Council, the regional planning agency, recently analyzed more than 3,000 strip malls and shopping centers across Greater Boston, and estimated that such sites could accommodate 124,000 new homes. Between those areas and various office parks and industrial lands, Greater Boston could raise enough residential towers and townhouses to end bidding wars, giving renters and buyers the upper hand, without changing existing residential neighborhoods.   

However, the strategy of rezoning exclusively commercial and industrial areas assumes that the only goal is housing production. Metropolitan growth policy also needs to consider transportation, the environment, local economies, quality of life, and equity.  

The transit-oriented development (TOD) paradigm at the heart of Massachusetts’s new MBTA Communities Zoning Law imagines a region defined by a network of walkable, dense hubs that are well-connected by roads, walkways, bike lanes, bus lanes, train lines, and ferry routes. Under this scenario, people will spend less time in traffic; convenient region-wide mobility will be accessible to all residents, including those without cars; carbon emissions will go down; more people will have access to the region’s best opportunities; and our collective well-being and resilience will improve.  

One of Greater Boston’s most prominent strengths is that it was built as a network of urban villages well connected by trains and streetcars before automobiles began dominating urban design. The framework for the vision of well-connected “great neighborhoods” is already on the ground. The metropolitan area is crisscrossed with village centers and downtowns that contain pharmacies, libraries, restaurants, cafes, civic institutions, schools, playgrounds, public greens, quirky shops, and transit stops.  

If we write off as unchangeable all residential neighborhoods adjacent to these great hubs, then we make it harder to achieve the combined goals of an abundance of housing and sustainable, equitable settlement patterns. There is great demand in Greater Boston for “missing middle” housing that fits between single family-houses-with-yards and bigger apartment/condo complexes. For development of smaller scale multifamily housing to serve many people and make a difference in the market, it has to be allowed in more places.  

The project to create more housing in the Boston area will involve a combination of strategies, including significantly more building on main streets and the currently car-oriented corridors that radiate out from them; continued building on some isolated parcels on municipal edges; and incremental increases in density near connected, walkable hubs—i.e., in existing residential neighborhoods. Significant development on isolated parcels and strip mall corridors should be accompanied by infrastructure redesign to create connected, walkable hubs.   

As they consider different development scenarios that meet the requirements of the MBTA Communities zoning law, leaders and residents will need to weigh the politics and pros and cons of dense zoning in commercial and industrial areas, against zoning for small-scale multifamily housing in neighborhoods. Their deliberations will be part of a larger national debate about how regions should grow. 

Many people will be anxious about the possibility of multifamily development next to their homes. They’ll worry about traffic and parking, property values, architecture, noise, privacy, and all sorts of things. But we could just as well associate new housing with the chocolate chip cookies the future residents might bake for block parties, the leadership they might take on local issues, and the purple pansies they might plant out front in big happy planters. We could think of the joy, stability, and safety that new neighbors will gain in, and contribute to, our neighborhoods.  

Humans are perhaps wired to protect against threats more than to revel in visions of possibility, but we are also well equipped to plan ahead, together. We should plan for a just and sustainable future with abundant housing in wonderful, connected neighborhoods—and reform local zoning accordingly. 

Amy Dain is an independent consultant in public policy research and writing. Her focus is on urban and suburban planning and housing policy. She has conducted research for the Lincoln Institute on zoning and approval processes for multifamily housing in the Greater Boston area. 

Image: Construction in downtown Lynn, Massachusetts. Credit: Amy Dain.

Mayor Yvonne Denise Aki-Sawyerr took office in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in May 2018, after serving as head of the Freetown City Council. A finance professional with over 25 years of experience in the public and private sectors, she had previously been involved with the campaign against blood diamonds and was instrumental in the response to the Ebola crisis in 2014. She has delivered two TED talks, about turning dissatisfaction into action and the capital city’s initiative to plant a million trees, and was named to the Time 100 Next list of emerging leaders and the BBC’s 100 Women list.

A leader in the C40 Cities global network, Aki-Sawyerr launched the Transform Freetown planning initiative and appointed Africa’s first chief heat officer, to confront the impacts of climate change. She holds degrees from the London School of Economics and Freetown’s Fourah Bay College, and is married with two children. She spoke with Senior Fellow Anthony Flint in the fall. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Anthony Flint: Could you talk about the Transform Freetown initiative as a planning and action framework, and your assessment of its progress?

Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: I ran for office in 2018, motivated by concerns around the environment and sanitation. My campaign message, “for community, for progress, for Freetown,” translated into Transform Freetown. It focuses on four categories: resilience, human development, healthy city, and urban mobility.

Resilience includes environmental management; it also includes urban planning, because you cannot separate the two, and revenue organization, because sustainability will only come from the city’s ability to sustain and generate revenue itself. The healthy city cluster includes sanitation, which goes very closely with environmental management for Freetown and many African cities. If you think about climate change, our teeny-weeny contribution to climate change, a lot of it actually comes from methane, from open dumping, but it also has huge health implications. So in the healthy city category was sanitation, health, and water.

What we did was, having come into office with those high-level areas of concern, we had 322 focus groups with about 15,000 residents to get their views on affordability, accessibility, and availability of services across those sectors. We invited the public sector, private sector, and the international community via development partners and NGOs to participate in roundtable discussions.

Out of that process came 19 specific, measurable targets that we’re working toward under Transform Freetown. We report against them every year back to the city, back to our residents. It really has been a way of introducing greater accountability, of holding our own feet to the fire, and it’s very much community owned and community driven.

AF: Among all the climate threats the city faces, you appointed a chief heat officer. Why was a chief heat officer necessary and what have been the results thus far?

YA: I’m asked often, how do you get ordinary people interested in climate change? In our case it’s not hard, because the consequences of climate change are intensely felt in our parts of the world. We suffer greatly from flooding and landslides, hence my concern with the environment and being able to mitigate those impacts.

The [Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center] really got us thinking about the fact that there are more deaths from extreme heat than there are from the more visible and tangible disasters like the floods and landslides. Extreme heat, particularly where water is in short supply, is a major impact of the warming climate.

In our case, the vulnerable are mainly those living in informal settlements. That’s 35 percent of our city’s population, and in those informal settlements, the housing structures are typically made from corrugated iron. With increased temperatures, you’re effectively living in an oven. The other aspect of that is we have an informal economy. Around 60 percent of women in our city are involved in trading. Most of our markets are outdoors, so you’re sitting in the sun all day long. Doing that under the intense heat means that [other] negative health consequences are exacerbated.

With the chief heat officer, we now are going to be able to embark on some research, collecting data to identify the heat islands; anecdotally, we have a sense of where those are, mainly in the informal settlements, but potentially also in the middle of the city. We need to be able to make arguments to challenge what’s going on with the lack of building permits, and land use planning being devolved to the city, and the massive deforestation that continues unabated.

The chief heat officer has worked with market women and gotten funding from Arsht-Rock to install market shade covers in three of our open markets. It’s great to see the enthusiasm of the women and them saying, “Are we going to get this all the way along the market? We can see where it’s starting, where it stops, but we need it too.”

AF: What are your hopes for other climate mitigation projects, including the initiative to plant a million trees? How did that come about, and how is it going?

YA: Well, it came about because there’s an appreciation that we were losing our vegetation and that [worsens] the effect of extreme weather events, [as when heavy rains led to massive mudslides in 2017]. The lack of forestation is a major part of that. The goal is to increase vegetation cover by 50 percent.

Planting the million trees is the long-term plan, but in the meantime, you still have the runoff from the mountains filling the drains with silt. Our annual flood mitigation work identifies the worst of these areas and clears the silt so that when the rains come, the water can still flow. On a smaller scale, we’ve also been able to build something like 2,000 meters of drainage in smaller communities. Beyond that, we’ve invested heavily in disaster management training and capacity building.

The thing about climate change impacts is they are really pervasive. If people are experiencing crop failure outside of Freetown, it will eventually drive a rural-urban migration because they’re unable to sustain their livelihoods and they’re going to come to the city looking for some means of making a living.

That pressure of population growth in the city is something else that we have to deal with—whether it’s introducing the cable car to improve transportation and reduce greenhouse gas emissions [or encouraging] the government to devolve land use planning and building permit functions so that we can actually introduce land management actions, which save life and save property but also protect the environment and prevent people from building properties in waterways and streams and canals, which currently happens. All of this is made worse by not using legislation and urban management tools such as land use planning and building permitting in a constructive manner.

AF: Could you describe Freetown’s property tax reform efforts, and the outcomes you’ve seen, in the overall context of municipal fiscal health?

YA: We worked on this property tax reform moving from 37,000 properties in the database of a city that’s a capital city with at least 1.2 to 1.5 million people—37,000 properties. When I came in, it was clear that that was not reflective of reality, but also the manual system that they operated, literally with a ledger book, was not really fit for purpose in the 21st century.

One of our 19 targets is to increase property tax income fivefold. To go about doing that, we secured funding and partnerships to digitize. We changed from an area-based system to a point-based system. We worked on that by taking a satellite image of the entire city and building an algorithm to give weightings to features [like roofs, windows, and location], then comparing that against a database of 3,000 properties whose values were determined by real charter surveyors. We got the old-type assessment done. We were able to identify outliers and refine the model and eventually build a model which we now use as our property base.

Through that process, we moved from 37,000 properties to over 120,000 properties. That meant we were able to meet our target of increasing our property tax revenue from [$425,000 to over $2 million]. That in itself is the pathway to sustainability and being able to invest.

A big part of fiscal health is that sustainability, but . . . unfortunately, the Ministry of Local Government [halted collections while developing national tax reform guidelines]. We were without revenue for about a year. We have started re-collecting, but as you can imagine, compliance levels will take a long time to recover.

AF: Where do you find inspiration in the face of so many challenges?

YA: From the fact that we have been able to make a difference in the lives of Freetonians. We’ve been able to test and to see how much can be achieved if one is given the space to do so. We know that so much is possible and so we keep going.

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor to Land Lines.

Lead image: Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr. Credit: Courtesy photo.

Columbus, Ohio, invented the first known off-street parking requirement for an apartment building in 1923. After nearly a hundred years, the results are in, and they’re not good. 

Last year, an assessment of the local zoning code—commissioned by the city as part of a comprehensive code revision process—concluded that off-street parking requirements were “not effective” and “often poorly matched to true parking demand.” 

That mismatch has gotten worse over time. Today’s parking requirements in Columbus are far higher than their cousins from the city’s midcentury zoning code. In 1954, an apartment building with 100 one-bedroom units was required to have 100 parking spaces; today it has to have 150. For a 2,500-square-foot restaurant, nine required parking spaces became 34, in the 90 percent of the city not covered by special overlay districts. These ratios are out of step with the local market, leading builders to request parking reductions more than any other type of zoning variance. City and regional plans have recommended reducing parking requirements and making them more consistent. 

Columbus is not alone. Across the United States, decades of similar parking requirements have led to a glut: researchers estimate that for every car in the country, there are at least three parking spaces—and some have suggested the number is closer to eight spaces.  

This oversupply has created a host of problems: parking requirements can inflate housing costs, block buildings from being adapted to new uses, and contribute to sprawl, making additional driving (and parking) necessary. They create an administrative burden. And the impervious surfaces of parking lots increase the risk of flooding and contribute to the urban heat island effect. 

But there is good news: of all the harms traditional zoning has inflicted on communities, parking requirements are the easiest to fix, said Sara Bronin, former chair of the Hartford, Connecticut, Planning and Zoning Commission. Bronin was at the helm in 2017, when Hartford became one of the first cities in the United States to eliminate residential and commercial parking mandates. The year before, city leaders had tested the waters by eliminating requirements in the downtown area, a move that yielded new development projects and new proposals for reuse. “Every community should be eliminating their parking requirements,” Bronin said.  

Each year, more cities are eliminating or reducing such mandates. In 2021, cities from Minneapolis to Jackson, Tennessee, eliminated minimum parking requirements from their zoning codes. In the week that this article was drafted alone, cities from Spokane to Chicago to Burlington, Vermont, rolled back parking mandates. 

Communities might reduce their parking requirements because they are trying to reinvent themselves by attracting new businesses and development, accommodate population growth with space-efficient infill, or focus more on transit and walkability. Regardless of the reason, parking reform advocates say this land use regulation could finally be on its way out. 

“We’re going to look back at this as just this weird, late-20th century aberration,” predicts Patrick Siegman, an economist and planner who has been studying parking since 1992, including as a partner at the national transportation planning firm Nelson Nygaard. “We created something wildly inefficient.” 

Hartford Leads the Way 

Like many industrial cities in the United States, Hartford saw dramatic population decline during the second half of the 20th century. In 1960, half of the people working in Hartford lived there, many walking or taking transit to jobs downtown; by 1980, less than a quarter of its workforce called the city home. Many white residents had fled for the suburbs and the overall population was declining. The repercussions of this demographic and economic shift are visible in the city’s bounty of parking lots: to accommodate the increase in car commuters, the city essentially paved over swaths of its downtown. 

As historian Daniel Sterner put it, “Hartford is famous for having so much torn down.” Not even the city’s first skyscraper, built in 1912, survived the demolition boom. It was razed to make way for a taller office tower, but those plans were abandoned in 1990 as the country entered a recession. The prominent corner lot became, and remains, surface parking. 

University of Connecticut professor Norman Garrick and his team found that from 1960 to 2000, the amount of land dedicated to parking lots in the downtown business district tripled, nearly equaling the amount of land underneath all the adjacent buildings. “The increase in parking was part of the collapse of the city,” Garrick said. “It’s typical of a lot of American cities.” 

Even without the research, there was little debate that Hartford had an oversupply of parking. “I don’t think every city needs a full-on parking history, or parking analysis,” said Bronin. “Most people should be able to just look around and say, ‘there’s a lot of parking in this city.’” 

The overabundance of parking came at a great cost for the city, Garrick’s team found in a report released in 2014. They estimated that the city was missing out on property tax revenue to the tune of $1,200 per downtown parking space, or about $50 million a year. That was a significant amount for a city whose downtown buildings were generating $75 million in annual tax revenue. 

Attracting investment is critically important for Connecticut’s capital city—and particularly challenging. More than half of the city’s real estate is nontaxable, because the land is owned by the government or nonprofit institutions. The rest is subject to the highest property tax rate in the state. Eliminating parking requirements citywide is one way to create a more flexible, inviting environment for development. 

“It’s easy to say we have no parking minimums, as opposed to ‘what zone?’,” said Aaron Gill, current vice chair of Hartford’s Planning and Zoning Commission. The biggest hurdle now is convincing developers they have new options, Gill said. He encourages developers to revisit parcels they might have discounted in the past, and to review how much parking is actually being used in previous developments.  

The strategy seems to be working. The quasi-public Capital Region Development Authority (CRDA) has funded more than 2,800 new homes downtown since 2012, aiming to build a critical mass of residents to support retail and other services. Mike Freimuth, executive director of the CRDA, said the new zoning code has helped reduce costs and increased the use of existing parking garages. 

One of the CRDA projects, Teachers Village, involved converting an office building that had been vacant for 20 years into housing for area educators. Thirty percent of the apartments were designated as affordable. Prior to the code change, more than one parking space would have been required for each unit, but the renovated building has only 18 underground parking spaces for 60 households. The spaces are leased separately from the apartments, saving money for those who don’t need a parking spot. According to estimates based on 2016 Census data, more than 30 percent of Hartford households don’t even own a car. 

Other redevelopment projects have cut deals with adjacent parking garages, which are also adapting to the new world of remote work, to provide an off-street parking option for residents for an additional fee. Two derelict commercial buildings on Pearl Street, which Freimuth used to joke were the largest pigeon coops in the state, went that route when the buildings were renovated into 258 new homes. A few blocks away, a former Steiger’s department store is being converted into 97 new apartments with commercial space below. 

The CRDA is also involved in an ambitious project known as Bushnell South, which aims to convert a 20-acre area dominated by surface parking into a vibrant, walkable, mixed-use neighborhood with up to 1,200 apartments and townhouses, restaurants and retail, green space, and cultural attractions. The city was reviewing proposals from developers this summer with the goal of moving forward this fall. Although some developers have expressed concern that the city is building more residential space than the market can support, Freimuth is eager to proceed. “This land has been laying fallow for 50 years,” he told the Hartford Courant. “Why do we have to keep on waiting?” 

The Benefits of a Citywide Shift 

On the edge of downtown Fayetteville, Arkansas, a building that had stood vacant for nearly 40 years now houses a local restaurant with a rooftop patio. Down the road, a formerly abandoned gas station is back in use as retail space. The reuse of these once-forgotten properties was made possible several years ago, when Fayetteville’s city council voted to remove commercial parking requirements citywide. 

While most cities start with reducing parking mandates in a central business district, like Hartford did, planners in Fayetteville were fielding requests about properties throughout the city, and opted against defining a smaller boundary. At 44 square miles, Fayetteville is nearly 2.5 times larger than Hartford, with 70 percent of the population. 

“As a city planner, you receive phone calls about what’s possible with this property,” Fayetteville planner Quin Thompson explained. “What I began to see was the same properties over and over again. Some of those properties were downtown, but a lot weren’t.” None of the parcels had enough space to meet the parking requirements in place at the time. 

The planning staff approached the city council with the idea of eliminating commercial requirements citywide. Some of these properties were so constrained, they explained, it was impossible to imagine how they could be redeveloped under the current rules. They also said investors taking on the financial risk of a project were best suited to determine their own parking needs, and would act as a backstop even when the city was no longer regulating off-street parking spaces. In October 2015, Fayetteville’s city council agreed. 

What happened next? “The buildings that I had identified as being perpetually and perhaps permanently unusable were very quickly purchased, redeveloped, and are in use right now,” said Thompson. “I can’t think of any that are still out there that I had used as case studies that haven’t been redeveloped.” 

Thompson and his colleagues were right that the distinction between parking needs in a central city versus outlying neighborhoods can be arbitrary. In the lead-up to the removal of parking requirements in Edmonton in 2020, a citywide study of 277 sites found no clear geographic trend that related to how full parking lots were, even after factoring in variables like population density, walkability as measured by Walk Score, or drive-alone rate. Of all the sites surveyed, only 7 percent neared capacity at the busiest times of day. It was far more common for parking lots to remain half empty, as was the case for 47 percent of observed sites. 

In Fayetteville and other cities, eliminating parking minimums citywide has had another benefit: reducing administrative work and freeing up city staff to work on other things. “One of the things you find in American cities is that they’ve got all of these college-educated planners, many of whom actually have graduate degrees, and what they’re doing is spending hour after hour processing parking variances,” explained Siegman. 

Kevin Robinson was one of those planners, until he was hired as director of Planning and Development Services for Albemarle, North Carolina. To his surprise, the city had almost no parking requirements, having eliminated virtually all of them two decades prior. “However you came about it,” he recalls telling city officials, “I think you’re on the right track.” 

Towns where he had worked previously had only reduced parking requirements in central business districts, not citywide. “From an administrative standpoint, it’s a heck of a lot easier to deal with,” said Robinson. “Quite honestly, a lot of times [parking minimums] are very arbitrary numbers,” Robinson said. Now that he no longer has to enforce them, he has more time to spend on other aspects of development—including a downtown parking plan. He has plenty of data to rebut complaints that there isn’t enough parking. Even at peak hours, public parking never gets more than half full, his heatmaps indicate. 

Robinson acknowledges that eliminating parking minimums wasn’t a cure-all: “We are still seeing far more parking being built than is absolutely necessary.” (See sidebar to learn how the shift has played out in other cities.) Construction in Albemarle is picking up as people get priced out of nearby cities like Charlotte. In the last two years, this small city of 16,000 has approved permits for 3,000 new housing units, with another 1,000 in the works, including middle housing like duplexes and townhouses. 

Robinson is nervous that the parking requirements, which were discarded at a time when the city wasn’t growing, might return as development accelerates. “I’m trying to keep them from going in that direction,” he said. His concerns aren’t unfounded. 

When Mandates Make a U-Turn 

It took almost a decade for a new apartment building with no parking to arrive in Portland after the city waived requirements near transit in 2002. The political backlash came more swiftly. As Portland’s rental market tightened, the city found itself with the second-lowest vacancy rate in the country in 2012. Apartment construction was booming, and buildings without off-street parking were becoming increasingly common. 

Then controversy erupted. The epicenter was a 13-block section of Division Street, a car-oriented commercial corridor experiencing a building boom. By the time the issue made it to the front pages of Willamette Week, the local weekly paper, 11 new multifamily buildings were under development, seven with no parking at all.  

A city-commissioned survey of 115 residents of new apartment buildings would show that 72 percent of the respondents owned cars, with the majority parking on neighborhood streets. Even though the same survey showed that the areas around the buildings had plenty of available parking, neighbors didn’t perceive it that way.  

Mayor Charlie Hales, who had championed the removal of parking mandates as a council member in 2002, even floated the idea of instituting a building moratorium until the zoning code could be sorted out. Hales told Willamette Week that he had anticipated developers might build one parking spot instead of two, but hadn’t imagined banks would finance housing with no parking at all. 

In response to the outcry, Portland’s city council reinstituted a parking requirement for multifamily developments with more than 30 units. Those larger buildings would need to provide one parking space for every three or four units, depending on the building size. “That was the strategic retreat,” Hales explained. “We decided to adjust our ideal slightly to a watered-down version in order to reduce the controversy.” 

Hales, who is no longer mayor, still believes strongly in eliminating parking requirements. “There’s some things we really don’t need to regulate,” he said recently. “Minimum number of parking spaces is one of them.” Given the political pressure of the time, he has a hard time imagining how things could have worked out differently. 

While supporters of parking mandates prevailed in that case, the matter was far from settled. Several years after the 2013 brouhaha, regulated affordable housing near transit regained its exemption from parking requirements, after rising rents and economic displacement prompted Portland to declare a housing state of emergency and elect a tenant advocate to city council. Portland adopted an inclusionary zoning policy that same year, requiring multifamily buildings to set aside units for affordable housing—and waiving residential parking requirements for those buildings. 

Looking back, Portland activist Tony Jordan, who went on to launch the national Parking Reform Network, thinks the city was foolish to derail the housing construction wave. “Why would you do anything” to make developers think twice about investing in larger buildings, he asked. The way the code was written, adding one more unit to a 30-unit building came with “a penalty of six parking spaces, incentivizing builders to stay under the limit. “Even if we only lost 60 apartments,” he said, “that’s a housing subsidy that we just threw away—and for what?” 

Communities with No Parking Minimums 

According to the Parking Reform Network, the following communities do not have citywide minimum parking requirements (dates of implementation indicated when known). Learn more about these and other changes to U.S. parking mandates at www.parkingreform.org. 

• California: Alameda (2021), San Francisco (2018), Emeryville (2019) 

• Connecticut: Bridgeport (2022), Hartford (2017) 

• Georgia: Dunwoody (2019) 

• Indiana: South Bend (2021) 

• Michigan: Ann Arbor (2022), Mancelona, Ecorse (2020), River Rouge (2021) 

• Minnesota: Minneapolis (2021), St. Paul (2021) 

• Missouri: Branson 

• New Hampshire: Seabrook (2019), Dover (2015) 

• New York: Buffalo (2017), Canandaigua, Hudson (2019), Saranac Lake (2016) 

• North Carolina: Raleigh (2022) 

• Tennessee: Jackson (2021) 

• Texas: Bandera, Bastrop (2019) 

• Alberta: Edmonton (2020), High River (2021) 

Stopping Parking Spillover 

When parking complaints bubbled up in Portland’s Northwest neighborhood in 2016, the city was ready to try a different strategy: directly managing on-street parking. A local parking advisory committee had petitioned Portland’s city council to apply the citywide parking requirements to the growing district, which had historically been exempted. But when a study showed that those regulations would have made 23 percent of newly constructed homes in the neighborhood illegal, the council opted to improve the district’s fledgling parking permit program instead. 

“When city staff manage on-street parking properly, they can prevent that on-street parking from getting overcrowded with a 99 percent success rate,” said Siegman, who has spent much of his career studying spillover parking concerns. The problem, he said, is that almost no one has training in how to manage street parking in a way that is both effective and politically popular. On-street parking management is not part of the core curriculum for planners or transportation engineers. 

“What you’re essentially doing with on-street parking spaces is taking a valuable resource that belongs to the public and setting up rights to determine who gets to use it,” said Siegman. Any hotel manager knows that once the keys are gone, there is no vacancy. Yet cities often hand out multiple residential permits for every street space, and wait until the problem is so bad that neighbors have to petition for curbside management. When a neighborhood has more drivers seeking permits than there are on-street spaces, there are a number of ways to ensure balance. Boundaries for a parking district could exclude new buildings or households with driveways, or restrict the number of permits to the street frontage of the lot—forcing developers and incoming residents to make a plan for storing cars off-site.

Left to the Market, How Much Parking Gets Built? 

In Buffalo, New York, which struck down parking requirements in April 2017, a review of 36 major developments showed that 53 percent of projects still opted to include at least as many parking spaces as the previous code had required. The developers who did propose building less parking averaged 60 fewer parking spaces than the old minimum required, avoiding over eight acres of unnecessary asphalt and saving up to $30 million in construction costs. 

Seattle saw similar results after eliminating parking requirements near transit in 2012. A study of 868 residential developments permitted in the following five years found that 70 percent of new buildings in areas not subject to parking requirements still chose to have on-site parking. Collectively, the new buildings included 40 percent fewer parking spaces than would have previously been required, saving an estimated $537 million in construction costs and freeing up 144 acres of land. 

Siegman estimates the costs of setting up an effective parking permit program could be somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000—a bargain compared to the cost of building parking, which can run as much as $50,000 per space. “There are all kinds of different feelings about what’s fair,” Siegman said, “but you can often come to a solution that has durable majority political support.” 

That’s what officials in Vancouver, British Columbia, did in 2017 to resolve crowded curbs in the West End. Despite 94 percent of residents having access to an off-street parking space, many still preferred to park on the street. Over 6,000 drivers had opted for the $6 a month permit for the chance to park in one of the 2,747 on-street spaces. When the city raised permit prices to $30 per month—more in line with what private garages charged—and installed more parking meters, curb congestion cleared up. Before that change, only one out of five blocks met the city’s standards of being less than 85 percent full at the busiest time of day. Within two years of the pricing adjustments, all of the blocks measured below that threshold, making it far easier to find a parking space. 

The Next Wave of Parking Reform 

More and more, champions of eliminating parking mandates are getting elected to offices and planning commissions, according to Jordan, of the Parking Reform Network. “One person can really get the idea and push it through,” he said. The growing number of cities that have taken this deregulatory action provides political cover for policy makers who have been hesitant to go first. 

But parking reform advocates say change should and will happen beyond the local level. Since “the perceived benefits of instituting parking regulations [have been] almost entirely local,” Siegman said, he thinks almost all of the productive reform to get rid of minimum parking laws is going to come from regional, state, or national governments. 

A wave of legislation against parking mandates has been gathering momentum on the West Coast. In 2020, Washington State quietly capped excessive parking requirements near transit for market-rate and affordable housing. California’s third attempt to limit local parking requirements near public transit succeeded in September with the signing of AB 2097. That came on the heels of another statewide rollback in Oregon, where a state land use commission struck down parking mandates for projects near transit, affordable housing, and small homes across the state’s eight largest metro regions, which house 60 percent of Oregon’s population.  

By July 2023, nearly 50 cities in Oregon will need to choose between wholly eliminating minimum parking requirements or implementing a suite of other tools to manage parking and comply with the new administrative rule. They are sure to have lots of company, as municipalities and states across the nation weigh the harm these regulations have caused against the 20th century dream of free and easy parking. 

Aaron Gill, of the Hartford Planning and Zoning Commission, has some simple advice for jurisdictions considering removing parking minimums: “I would say just do it. Don’t waste time having a discussion as to if it’s going to work or not. The reality is we have way too much parking in this country.” 

Catie Gould is a transportation researcher with the Seattle-based nonprofit think tank Sightline Institute. 

Lead image: Fordham Heights, New York. Credit: krblokhin via iStock/Getty Images Plus. 

Zoning is often considered a timeless element of land policy and planning. And it is. Zoning originated in Asia more than three millennia ago. In those days, it was used to designate land uses behind city walls or to separate people by caste. The practice was adopted more recently in the United States to pursue similar ends. It is now one of the biggest impediments to sustainability in U.S. cities in the 21st century. 

I’ve made my feelings about hyperlocal land control known for many years. A decade ago, on a panel with Nic Retsinas, then director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard, I opined that home rule and local land use controls were “dinosaurs” that made it almost impossible to coordinate regional transportation planning and affordable housing efforts. Nic reminded me and the audience that powerful political and economic forces stood firmly in the way of land policy reform. And he noted that dinosaurs lasted for millions of years before becoming extinct—because of a random asteroid colliding with Earth, not natural selection. 

But now, something almost as rare as a planet-changing asteroid is afoot in the world of land policy—bipartisan agreement. Numerous blue, red, and purple states have passed or are contemplating efforts to preempt local zoning so they can advance critical policy objectives. Why the sudden shift? Because many policy makers now understand that the national affordable housing crisis cannot be addressed without structural changes to the rules of the game. Other policy makers know that we cannot address one of the ugliest manifestations of zoning—spatial segregation by race and class—without aggressive affirmative action. 

Although we are seeing bipartisan agreement on the need for reform, the motivations of policy makers are quite different. Advocates from the right argue that the housing crisis is an artifact of overregulation that stifles housing production. These critics believe zoning reform will unleash market forces that will confront the housing crisis by accelerating new production. Advocates from the left argue that we cannot build affordable housing in places we need it most because of land policies that have effectively excluded people based on race and income for generations, such as minimum lot sizes and bans on multifamily housing. Zoning reform will make it possible, they say, to build affordable housing in “high opportunity” places with good schools and decent jobs. 

State preemption of local zoning is not new. In 1969, Massachusetts passed Chapter 40B, a measure that allows the state to override local zoning and approve mixed-income, multifamily developments in jurisdictions with little affordable housing. Although it has helped to promote some affordable housing development in some affluent suburbs, it was not a game changer, and few other states considered following suit, until very recently. 

Now, some 10 states are ready to preempt local zoning to permit development of multiple housing units on lots that are currently zoned for single-family homes. These include the right to add accessory dwelling units (ADUs) to single-family lots in Connecticut, Nebraska, Utah, Oregon, Maryland, California, and Washington; approving “middle housing,” two- to four-family townhomes, on lots zoned for single families in Virginia, Utah, Nebraska, Washington, and Maryland; or complete preemption of local government efforts to prohibit multifamily housing development on single-family lots in Oregon, California, Virginia, Maine, and Washington. Massachusetts and California also recently mandated upzoning in “transit-rich” communities. Clearly, local control over land use is no longer sacrosanct.  

Although zoning practice is thousands of years old, in the United States it is less than a century old, with a few exceptions. States began granting municipalities the power to dictate land uses in the 1920s, based on the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act drafted by the Department of Commerce in 1923. But what states giveth, states can taketh away. It is sometimes necessary for higher levels of government to supersede the decisions of lower levels of government to promote general welfare or address negative externalities that are artifacts of uncoordinated actions at lower levels. Too often, state efforts to override local governments are misguided; for example, when state policy makers curry favor from voters by imposing property tax limits. In the case of zoning, the need for state action is clearly defensible. 

We should celebrate the fact that we are moving in the right direction—mustering the political will to take on a challenge that was, until very recently, considered impossible. But we still know less about zoning than we should. Each state, and often individual jurisdictions in a state, developed its own zoning conventions, which makes it extremely difficult to compare zoning practices among them. It also makes it almost impossible to understand the implications of zoning decisions on land values, development patterns, or how zoning reform might address big challenges like the housing crisis, spatial inequality, or urban sprawl. This too is changing. 

Last year, a small team of visionaries at Cornell Law School, led by Professor Sara Bronin, produced the first Zoning Atlas for the State of Connecticut. Using spreadsheets, maps, and geographic information systems, the team documented, with impressive granularity, residential zoning practices in 180 jurisdictions with 2,622 zoning districts. Incredibly, this required reviewing more than 30,000 pages of text describing zoning practices—in one state!  

This herculean task apparently was not a big enough challenge for this plucky band of researchers. The Cornell team recently launched an effort to build a National Zoning Atlas. Now, with a field-tested methodology for creating the Zoning Atlas in Connecticut, they have set out to crowdsource zoning data from the rest of the country using the same methods. So far, self-organized teams in 11 states are participating. When they succeed at building the national atlas—and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy will do all it can to make sure that happens—a new era of land policy scholarship will arrive. Debates about the costs, benefits, and consequences of zoning reform will be informed by real data. 

Zoning reform alone is not sufficient to solve the national housing crisis. But it is necessary. And we need to know a lot more about current zoning practices, and the potential benefits of improved zoning practice, to address the ills generated by decades of bad practice. A century of decentralized and isolated local control of land produced unacceptable levels of racial and economic segregation, urban sprawl that contributed to the climate crisis, and an almost unassailable affordable housing crisis. With the unprecedented alignment of political will with new tools and knowledge, possible solutions to this triple threat are closer than they have ever been. 

George W. McCarthy is president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 

Image: The interactive Connecticut Zoning Atlas is the first stage of a national effort to document zoning across the United States. Credit: National Zoning Atlas.