Is It Time for a National Zoning Atlas?
Sara Bronin, a zoning reform advocate. (Source: DesegregateCT.)
Zoning is the often-invisible DNA that patterns our world. By controlling the form and arrangement of our cities, these local regulations end up influencing how we travel, what we consume, what adults’ work lives and children’s friendships are like. Most crucially, through its influence on housing options and prices, zoning constrains where we may choose to live, and where we may find ourselves priced out—or, for all practical purposes—excluded.
Because zoning is considered an arcane, technical subject and is often given only a superficial treatment even when discussed in the news media, many people have no idea how significant it actually is—or how extremely artificial our patterns of land use really are. Whatever kinds of places you grew up in and around, you probably got used to thinking of them as products of the free market, or simply the natural order of a modern city. In truth, nothing about the North American landscape is either of those things. It’s the result of policy choices, and if we see those choices doing harm, we can choose differently.
Sara Bronin wants to help make those invisible choices visible. Bronin is, among many things, the driving force behind the successful recent effort to create the Connecticut Zoning Atlas. A project of the advocacy coalition DesegregateCT, which Bronin founded in 2020, the interactive atlas is the first online map to show how an entire state zones for housing. Bronin wants to take the effort nationwide, something she made the case for in a recent Bloomberg op-ed. Bronin believes it would pay dividends for advocates working to undo residential segregation, ease affordability problems, or otherwise reform the way communities are built.
It’s an ambitious project, but Bronin is ambitious. Her website bio describes her as “a Mexican-American architect, attorney, professor, and policymaker whose interdisciplinary work focuses on how law and policy can foster more equitable, sustainable, well-designed, and connected places.” This background makes Bronin ideally positioned to recognize the ways in which regulation patterns our communities and our lives, and to want to make those patterns more legible.
The Connecticut Zoning Atlas. (Click to enlarge. Source: DesegregateCT.)
Creating the Connecticut Zoning Atlas was not a small feat. After all, zoning is local law, administered at the city level, and these codes can vary widely from one community to the next, not just in their content but in their basic structure. They regulate different things, using different categories with different names. The research team of a few dozen people that assembled the Connecticut atlas painstakingly created a detailed coding system that would allow them to log the features of 180 different local zoning codes according to a uniform list of dozens of criteria. The researchers then pored over 30,000 pages of local codes, ultimately assigning each unique combination of rules and requirements to the area on the map in which those rules apply.
Doing this nationwide would be an even more complex feat, but Bronin says it is achievable. In a course she teaches at Cornell University, seven students are currently replicating the Connecticut effort across 65 jurisdictions in five upstate New York counties.
The groundwork already laid by DesegregateCT means this can be done more efficiently. Bronin has written an exhaustive, 56-page how-to manual, “How to Make a Zoning Atlas.” It is available for free download.
Why do this work nationally? Because the problems facing our communities, from housing costs to struggling transportation systems and failing infrastructure, are national in scope, many of the causes are similar, and the effects spill over across local and even state lines. (Just look at how out-migration from hyper-expensive California has driven up housing costs in surrounding states, for example.)
Bronin told me, “This is a powerful advocacy tool because it documents the way every jurisdiction treats housing. For the first time, we can compare one town to another to understand how patterns of neighborhood growth have been different in different communities.” Connecticut has long been deeply segregated along racial and socioeconomic lines, and now we can better see the contours of the regulatory walls that maintain this status quo.
Connecticut isn’t the only place that’s suffering from “zoning by a thousand cuts.”
Read more of our top case studies on zoning over at the Strong Towns Action Lab. Chances are, your place is going through similar problems.
Connecticut’s overall housing shortage, as well, Bronin says, is the result of “zoning by 1,000 cuts”: different obstacles in different towns, but adding up to a systematic, statewide problem.
The Connecticut Zoning Atlas identifies many of these thousand cuts. Not only does it categorize areas by the basic number of homes (one, two, three, four, or more) allowed in a structure, but it also addresses restrictions such as minimum lot sizes, parking minimums, and density or lot coverage caps that can profoundly restrict what is actually viable to build on a site. Bronin’s methodology also allows for zoning districts to be coded by whether a certain land use—say, an Accessory Dwelling Unit—is allowed as of right or must go through a public hearing.
After the atlas was complete, Bronin’s team identified trends. Eighty percent of Connecticut has large minimum lot sizes of an acre or more, and numerous areas around passenger train stations are still zoned for single-family housing—a lost opportunity to capitalize on massive transit investments, as well as to allow people who could benefit from rapid transit to live within accessible distance of it. Overall, 91% of Connecticut permits single-family housing, while only 2% of the state allows four-or-more-family housing without a public hearing.
These findings have allowed DesegregateCT to tailor its legislative proposals to the actual conditions on the ground in Connecticut, with empirical backing. In 2021, the group claimed a major victory as Connecticut’s state legislature passed the first statewide zoning reforms in 30 years. Among other things, these changes legalized ADUs statewide, put a lid on local parking requirements for residential uses (they now may not exceed one space per bedroom), and required the state to draft a model form-based code that cities can adapt.
In 2022, this legislative momentum has stalled a bit. DesegregateCT backed House Bill 5429, which focused on legalizing incremental housing density in communities near mass transit. The bill would have required towns to allow housing of at least 15 units per acre within a half mile of a rail or bus rapid transit (BRT) station. (This density threshold would include missing-middle types, including triple-deckers and row houses.)
HB 5429 failed to make it out of committee on March 25th. DesegregateCT and other groups have promised to continue their advocacy. But in the meantime, thanks to the insight offered by the Zoning Atlas, local opponents of housing are not able to hide behind arguments like “There’s plenty of room to build elsewhere.” With a clear way of tracking the statewide extent of many of these restrictions, it’s no longer as easy to declare exclusionary zoning Someone Else’s Problem.
Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is also a founding member of the organization. His work at Strong Towns focuses on housing issues, small-scale and incremental development, urban design, and lowering the barriers to entry for people to participate in creating resilient and prosperous neighborhoods. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota, with a concentration in Housing and Community Development.
Daniel’s work with Strong Towns reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children.