Quotes About Zoning

When we see some of these pieces of legislation that want to eliminate single-family zoning in California, that's wrong.

I think it's evident that expensive neighborhoods in Seattle are surrounded by natural beauty. That elevates city life. So if we can make cities more attractive in the long run, we can be smarter about issues like development, zoning and economics.

As a former nine-year member of the Board of Supervisors and nine-year mayor, I know firsthand the merits of strong zoning laws. They protect residential areas so they can support families and be free of commercial activities that are not related to neighborhood needs.

The argument about zoning and the presidency of Nigeria is like the philosophical argument of the egg or the hen. Who is older through the evolutionary process, who came first?

From zoning to labor to food safety to insurance, local food systems daily face a phalanx of regulatory hurdles designed and implemented to police industrial food models but which prejudicially wipe out the antidote: appropriate scaled local food systems.

The impact of our warming planet will likely lead to even stricter zoning and building codes to account for the rising sea levels visible in places like South Beach - even on days without a cloud in sky.

Development in this county is always going to be an issue. Until development and zoning are handled on a regional basis, rather than each municipality left to its own devices, we will suffer from developers having the upper hand in suits and in front of zoning boards.

We can attract new businesses and jobs in fast-growing industries through tax incentives, incubators, zoning tools and CUNY partnerships.

land zoning that excludes apartments and affordable housing from neighborhoods also constitutes a form of segregation.

In 2010 Miami, Florida, became the first major city to toss out its entire zoning book in favor of a homegrown form-based code.

What's amazing is how, despite their love of liberty, Americans have embraced the massive restriction of private property rights that the separated city demands. Once a neighborhood is zoned and built, it gets frozen like a Polaroid from the day everyone moves in.

First, as I will explore in this book, our preferences—the things we buy, the places we choose to live—do not always maximize our happiness in the long run. Second, sprawl, as an urban form, was laid out, massively subsidized, and legally mandated long before anyone actually decided to buy a house there. It is as much the result of zoning, legislation, and lobbying as a crowded city block. It did not occur naturally. It was designed.

Suburban zoning and development codes grew so powerful and so entrenched by the end of the twentieth century that the people who financed and built most of suburbia had all but forgotten how to make anything but car-dependent sprawl.

We have not had a free market in real estate for eighty years," Ellen Dunham-Jones, Georgia Tech professor of architecture and coauthor of Retrofitting Suburbia, told me. "And because it is illegal to build in a different way, it takes an immense amount of time for anyone who wants to do it to get changes in zoning and variance. Time is money for developers, so it rarely happens.

Zoning for diversity must be thought of differently from the usual zoning for conformity, but like all zoning it is suppressive. One form of zoning for diversity is already familiar in certain city districts: controls against demolition of historically valuable buildings.

A park being surrounded by intensive duplications of tall offices or apartments might well be zoned for lower buildings along its south side in particular, thus accomplishing two useful purposes at one stroke: protecting the park's supply of winter sun, and protecting indirectly, to some extent at least, its diversity of surrounding uses.

Considering the hazard of monotony…the most serious fault in our zoning laws lies in the fact that they permit an entire area to be devoted to a single use.

But we also need, among other things, to abandon conventional planning ideas about city neighborhoods. The 'ideal' neighborhood of planning and zoning theory, too large in scale to possess any competence or meaning as a street neighborhood, is at the same time too small in scale to operate as a district. It is unfit for anything. It will not serve as even a point of departure. Like the belief in medical bloodletting, it was a wrong turn in the search for understanding.

Zoners, highway planners, legislators, land-use planners, and parks and playground planners—none of whom live in an ideological vacuum—constantly use, as fixed points of reference, these two powerful visions and the more sophisticated merged vision.

Such streets need controls to defend them from the ruin that completely permissive diversity might indeed bring them. But the controls needed are not controls on kinds of uses. The controls needed are controls on the scale of street frontage permitted to a use. This is so obvious and so ubiquitous a city problem that one would think its solution must be among the concerns of zoning theory. Yet the very existence of the problem is not even recognized in zoning theory.

Many would have resented the arrogance and disdain, the double standards and the lifestyle of their rich neighbours; lack of zoning in Roman cities may have had its equitable side, but it also meant that the poor constantly had their noses rubbed in the privilege of others. What

The challenges communes faced were generally internal, not external. As one study concluded, "Many more communes went under because the dishes never got washed than were ever forced out of town by hostile neighbors or zoning boards.

In many ways, racial segregation in America has worsened since King's death. National progress has been stalled, indeed reversed, by local, state, and federal policies—from gentrification and zoning laws to tax codes