Kingston Welcomes New Zoning Code. It Has Advocates To Thank For That.
Kingston’s historic Stockade District. (Source: Wikimedia Commons/Daniel Case.)
Until recently, all projects in Kingston, New York—a city of approximately 24,000 hugging the Hudson River—were subject to decisions made in 1961. That was the last time a comprehensive plan for the city came into effect. In 2016, however, Kingston was ready to adopt a new vision, and in it revisit the zoning regime that for nearly 60 years constrained how homeowners, developers, and ambitious city leaders could adapt to 21st-century needs.
While the comprehensive plan, termed Kingston 2025, was passed that year, tackling the zoning code would take another seven. Finally, on August 2, 2023, Kingston adopted a form-based code, which in contrast to conventional (or Euclidean) zoning, uses physical form as the guiding principle rather than separation of uses.
While not a panacea for the challenges that decades of restrictive zoning and now-denounced planning fertilized, form-based codes are considered by many a step in the right direction. Kingston took that step, but it wouldn’t have been possible without the persistence of a handful of local advocates eager to see their city thrive.
Zoning Is Your City’s DNA
“Your city's zoning code is like the DNA of your community,” Strong Towns Editor-In-Chief Daniel Herriges wrote in 2020. “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.”
Despite how deterministic zoning is, advocates in Kingston realized early on that not much about their own city’s code is understood. “It’s an abstract concept to most people, even those on the common council, and as a result it was hard to get buy-in when we started proposing something else,” Anthony Tampone, who sits on the Zoning Board of Appeals, explained. “Ironically, there was a complaint about zoning at nearly every common council meeting.”
Many of those complaints were requests for zoning variances while others expressed confusion over what was even permitted in the first place. Conflicting interpretations were routine in the Zoning Board of Appeals, and consequently so were delays.
For many, like Tampone and Tanya Garment, a Kingstonian animated to action by the works of Jane Jacobs and her peers, a form-based code would be the most appropriate solution for a place protective of what makes it unique yet yearning for more adaptability. As a document, it tends to be simpler, too. “In an ideal world, there are no more [Zoning Board of Appeals] meetings,” Tampone laughed.
While the 2016 Comprehensive Plan necessitated reworking the city’s zoning code, Garment noted the committee assembled to do so involved many of the same consultants responsible for the 1961 plan, “steeped in the values of urban renewal.” She kept a close eye on the progress and observed that, despite many updates, the drafts emerging from Shuster-Turner associates were still rooted in Euclidean zoning, something she felt would ultimately result in more of the same for Kingston.
A year later, however, their contract ended before the job was done and the city was on the lookout for a new task force. In 2019, then Mayor Steve Noble appointed nine Kingston residents—among them Anthony Tampone—to explore overhauling the city’s current code. The Zoning Task Force, as it was known, in conjunction with the city put out another Request For Proposals later that same year, seeking a new consultant to realize the changes.
Kingston had another shot, but considering it had been three years since the Comprehensive Plan was adopted, the pace of the process was discouraging. To make matters worse, before the winning proposal could be voted on, the pandemic shut the city down in 2020 and all progress paused with it.
For nearly a year, it seemed that Kingston had forgotten about its plans to overhaul the zoning code, and so, amidst the “bidding wars, rising rents, and strained supply,” Kingston remained governed by ideas codified in 1961.
Yet, while it stalled on zoning reform, the city wasn’t inert. In response to rising costs, the mayor proposed a 10% affordable housing requirement on any new development, enacted by executive order, the Kingston Special Housing Committee deliberated tightening regulations for short-term rentals, the Zoning Board of Appeals was sifting through a backlog of zoning variance requests, and the city even adopted an amendment to the 2016 comprehensive plan.
“However, we still had a zoning code that inhibited incremental growth, and encouraged sprawl,” Garment wrote in an email. The pandemic exacerbated the exact issues reforming zoning could’ve addressed. “It felt like a missed opportunity.”
Where The City Stopped Short, Advocates Stepped In
If the city wasn’t going to restart the conversation, Garment figured she and likeminded residents could. By late 2020, united through their shared vision for a better Kingston as much as they were by their frustrations with where the city was falling short, the Kingston Code Reform Advocates was formed.
Composed of elected leaders like Alderman Jeffrey Ventura Morell and Common Council President Andrea Shaut, land-use professionals, and incensed locals (like Garment, Tampone, and colleagues from the Kingston Land Trust), the grassroots group first tackled public education. Even though nearly four years had elapsed since the city first deliberated reforming the zoning code, a curious public had no way to engage with potential alternatives or develop an understanding of what zoning even meant. Advocates would later learn that city staff needed the education just as much.
“Outside of maybe updating the charter, this was the biggest change to hit Kingston in a while,” Tampone noted, to which Garment added: “So, you want as much of the community to understand what’s going on as possible.”
They built coalitions across local organizations with kindred missions: ”If you care about affordability, safe routes to school, and walkable neighborhoods: you should care about zoning!” In February 2021, they invited Strong Towns for a virtual “curbside chat” wherein Founder and President Chuck Marohn demonstrated “in plain language, how so many American cities have found themselves in decline after decades of ‘growth.’” Hundreds of locals tuned in. The webinar snowballed into several local radio appearances and two months later, the Kingston Common Council approved Dover, Kohl and Partners—the consultant chosen just before the pandemic—to draft a new zoning code.
An explanation of different types of zoning. (Click to enlarge. Source: Form-Based Code Institute.)
Zoning was back on the table, but the Code Reform Advocates remained vigilant. “With a big project, there’s always a ‘public engagement box’ for the consultant to check,” Tampone explained. “And while in our case, they were responsive and their presentations good, that alone wasn’t filling seats, and so the box was checked but was the public engaged?”
If the routinely poorly attended city hall meetings would be any indication, announcements alone wouldn’t suffice, and so on their own time and dime, the Kingston Code Reform Advocates pioneered a public engagement campaign to ensure their community felt both informed and empowered.
“If we want to have a city built by many hands, for strength and resiliency, equitably as we grow, we need to replace our overly complicated zoning code with one that allows all neighborhoods to grow incrementally from the bottom up,” they wrote on a website Tampone created to centralize all the material related to the zoning overhaul. “This process is how we are doing that.”
Kingston Took A Necessary First Step. Now We Wait.
Two years later (albeit seven years after the process first began) Kingston finally welcomed a new zoning code. Adopting the new form-based code came with a plan to revisit it in six months, in early 2024, eliciting mixed feelings from advocates. On the one hand, reflection is welcome in principle. “Yet, six months is a short amount of time, especially after so much delay, to determine whether something is successful,” Tampone noted.
The reform advocates are marginally anxious that the buy-in and understanding they cultivated through their comprehensive public outreach may be short-lived because it often takes more than a new policy to catalyze change.
Across the country, zoning overhauls are credited with stabilizing housing costs and increasing housing production, yet the results still vary. Legalizing ADUs in California notably snowballed their construction in Los Angeles while the elimination of single-family zoning in Minneapolis took a while to catch on. Nevertheless, this was a crucial first step for Kingston and hopefully it’s not too early to appreciate what it can do for the city.
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Asia (pronounced “ah-sha”) Mieleszko serves as a Staff Writer for Strong Towns. A dilettante urbanist since adolescence, she's excited to convert a lifetime of ad-hoc volunteerism into a career. Her unconventional background includes directing a Ukrainian folk choir, pioneering synaesthetic performances, photographing festivals, designing websites, teaching, and ghostwriting. She can be found wherever Wi-Fi is reliable, typically along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.