Minneapolis just became the first major U.S. city to embrace a key Strong Towns principle: every neighborhood should be allowed to evolve to the next increment of development.
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In New Hampshire, the state charges local planning boards with looking at whether the zoning they have created is going to make a town prosperous. This implies a clear obligation to do the math on costs and benefits of new development.
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Most cities’ zoning and development regulations obsess over things that are easy to measure, like building height and density, at the expense of the things that actually determine whether we’re building quality places.
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Following a recent fatal crash, the University of Kentucky is taking a hard look at campus drinking culture. But the city of Lexington needs to pick up the slack on the reasons students feel compelled to drive.
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High home prices near many of Portland, Oregon’s rail stations are essentially mandatory. On most nearby lots, dividing the land into so much as a duplex would be illegal. If that’s not a recipe for luxury housing, what is?
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Austin needs a new Grand Bargain, one that includes everyone and exempts no one.
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Let’s walk through what it actually takes to build a small rental apartment on your property in Austin, Texas. It’s a lesson in how the city’s existing code stymies gentle, incremental, small-scale development.
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Austin’s CodeNEXT process, a dramatic overhaul of the city’s zoning code, tried to placate multiple constituencies with a “grand bargain.” The result was a draft code that satisified almost no one and failed to solve the city’s housing and growth challenges.
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Where is Austin supposed to put 135,000 new homes in ten years? The city posed the question. Diametrically opposed groups of residents could not come close to agreeing on the answer.
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This week we are examining what went wrong with Austin’s CodeNEXT process and what should be done now.
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A look at how regulations shape land use in Marietta, Georgia illustrates a vicious cycle: when your zoning code is premised on car-dependency, car-dependency becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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A Strong Towns member shared with us a success story from the city of College Station, Texas, which recently revised its zoning code to make it easier to do incremental development by rehabilitating or expanding older structures.
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Now, the story of a wealthy family who sold their farm and the developer who exploited an agricultural tax subsidy to keep it all together.
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When large storefronts sit empty for years, holding out for the perfect big tenant, while small businesses can’t find space to rent, we’ve got a serious problem.
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Why is your city dotted with vacant lots? Probably because it’s functionally illegal to build on them.
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Most of the land in our cities sits vacant for large parts of the day. Is this the best use of our resources?
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A small change to zoning codes could help overcome some of the forces stifling growth in American cities and avoid displacement of long-term residents at the same time.
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Land use planning should be a means to an end — not an end in itself.
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By making it more expensive to build market-rate housing, inclusionary zoning has the potential to actually reduce access to housing.
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These 5 steps will help you test the development potential in your town.
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