6 Reasons Your City Needs a Form-Based Code
Your city's zoning code is like the DNA of your community. It provides the rules that govern where buildings can be built, how tall they can be, how far from the street and neighboring properties, and so on. Closely related codes (we'll group them all under "zoning" here, though this includes things like subdivision rules) govern how wide streets are, where they do or don't have sidewalks and bike lanes: essentially everything that determines the limits of what's permissible in the built environment you see every day.
If your city is like most North American cities, its DNA is broken. Zoning practices adopted nearly everywhere over the course of the 20th century—a giant, unprecedented, and untested revolution in city planning we’ve dubbed the Suburban Experiment—have enshrined a set of destructive planning practices that lead to spread-out, unwalkable, and financially insolvent communities; to housing shortages and onerous restrictions on local businesses.
One of the tools that planners have devised that promises to lead us back to a better way of building our places is a Form-Based Code. And if you're unfamiliar with these alternative zoning codes, now is the time to learn, and to find out if your city has considered one or would.
The Form-Based Codes Institute, a program of Smart Growth America, defines a form-based code as the following:
A form-based code is a land development regulation that fosters predictable built results and a high-quality public realm by using physical form (rather than separation of uses) as the organizing principle for the code…. Form-based codes address the relationship between building facades and the public realm, the form and mass of buildings in relation to one another, and the scale and types of streets and blocks.
In short, a form-based code puts the emphasis on making sure the buildings in a neighborhood are compatible with their surroundings, while letting the mix of actual activities in them be more eclectic. In contrast, conventional, or Euclidean, zoning code works like the game SimCity—the primary thing it regulates is allowable use, as well as the density or level of activity.
Our friends at Smart Growth America are presenting a webinar on Form-Based Codes at 2:00 pm ET on Tuesday, June 23. They will be showcasing this year’s winners of the 2020 Richard H. Driehaus Form-Based Codes Award: Hartford, CT and Rancho Cucamonga, CA. Click here for more information on the winners and the webinar.
Historic buildings in Hartford. Image: Bill Onasill via Flickr.
Hartford's case is especially compelling because it was a long time coming, and because the new code covers the entire city, not just one neighborhood. We wrote about one aspect of the code back in 2018: the decision to eliminate mandatory parking minimums citywide. This is only one feature of Hartford’s FBC, but it made the city one of the national leaders in parking reform.
Here are 6 reasons your community might want to pursue a form-based code, if it isn’t already:
1. Encourage Revitalization
There's a reason some of the biggest Form-Based Code success stories have come out of the Rust Belt. Cities that have shrunk in population and experienced blight don't attract big development projects in the same way that a tech boomtown on the West Coast might. The kind of developer who does great work in a place like Buffalo, Akron, Hartford, or South Bend needs to be more nimble and creative. A form-based code opens up opportunities for them to rehabilitate and reuse historic properties in novel ways, without worrying so much about parking or use restrictions.
Smart Growth America explains why Hartford’s code will make it easier for small-scale developers, who often deal with thin profit margins and can’t afford drawn-out regulatory hurdles, to operate:
The comprehensive code will make future development more predictable and streamline the project approval process. Whereas the old code had 63 pages of complex “use tables” that made development costly and time consuming, the new form-based code has just 3 pages of use tables with much more general categories. And easy-to-read graphics guide the reader through the standards that apply to their project, helping to facilitate, rather than hinder development.
2. Promote Affordable Housing
Zoning codes can be a drag on housing affordability. Because standard Euclidean zoning often over-regulates things like density, lot sizes and setbacks, it ends up prohibiting small and versatile forms of missing middle housing that would actually fit very well within the fabric of a historic neighborhood. A form-based code can satisfy neighbors' desire that new housing match the look and feel of a place, but create more room to allow things like cottage courts, ADUs, pocket neighborhoods, and other various flexible forms of housing that meet important needs.
3. Help Small Businesses
This one is more important than ever in the wake of COVID-19. Historically, businesses such as corner stores were embedded in neighborhoods all over America's cities, but one legacy of the suburban experiment has been strictly residential zoning where no business uses whatsoever are allowed. Because a form-based code de-emphasizes the use of a building in favor of how it fits in—that gracious historic Victorian can now easily house a hair salon, law office, or coffee shop, while the proprietor lives upstairs—it offers entrepreneurs badly-needed flexibility in where you can locate and what kind of space you can occupy.
Hartford’s new code goes further by also addressing outdoor temporary business uses:
Combined with new flexibility to set up “outdoor shop displays (with four feet of sidewalk clearance), farmer’s markets, and outdoor cafes,” Hartford’s new zoning code will help the city’s businesses rebound in the open air.
4. Promote Walkability
Walkable neighborhoods have a tremendous array of benefits. They are more financially productive for cities' tax bases, and they are more accessible for those who cannot or do not wish to drive cars.
A walkable neighborhood requires destinations to walk to, not just sidewalks and shade trees. A walkable neighborhood is a 15-minute neighborhood: one where you can meet your needs on foot within a close distance of home. A form-based code makes it much, much easier to achieve such a neighborhood, because it allows a diversity of services and businesses to coexist.
A pocket neighborhood in Langley, WA. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
5. Preserve or Recapture a Sense of Place
The concept of “neighborhood compatibility” is often misused in planning discussions to mean “sameness” rather than actual “compatibility.” But the slightest bit of actual scrutiny of historic places that Americans cherish—think of old New England towns, or New Orleans’s French Quarter— reveals that they’re not characterized by sameness at all, but by an eclectic variety of buildings and activities within a unifying look and feel. This variety, sadly, is typically illegal to achieve under a Euclidean zoning code. There are whole towns that could not legally be rebuilt under their current zoning if they were destroyed tomorrow.
A form-based code is part of the solution to this loss of place. It focuses on a harmonious, cohesive look to a neighborhood even as its buildings and their uses are eclectic—rather than an overly cookie-cutter, micromanaged sameness.
6. Stop Regulating the Wrong Things
Ultimately, the problem with Euclidean zoning is that the things it regulates most heavily aren’t actually the things that result in a successful, lovable, resilient or financially stable place. We regulate all the wrong things. We obsess over height, even though it often has little bearing on how a place looks and feels—for example, a 4-story building and a 10-story building are roughly the same if you’re a pedestrian standing at the foot of them. We obsess over density, even though it’s not the same thing as crowding or any actual measure of quality of life. We obsess over parking, even though all evidence suggests we have far too much of it.
A form-based code is not a panacea for everything wrong with American planning. But it’s a model that lets us open up discussion about correcting a lot of the mistakes of the past 70 or so years.
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