Zoning remapping reality check

The Nutter Administration sees the planning and zoning reforms accomplished on its watch as a legacy achievement – from the citywide comprehensive plan and progress on individual district plans that chart out new futures for all neighborhoods, to a complete overhaul of the 50-year-old zoning code.

But if you listen through the backslapping and applause, there’s a lament. If we’ve come so far, how come it still feels like we are stuck struggling with many of the same challenges and dysfunctions these reforms were intended to alleviate?

Many neighborhoods are still banging their heads on familiar issues – oversaturation of student housing, overbuilt residential projects, sputtering commercial corridors. Developers are still exploiting obsolete zoning to get what they want at the Zoning Board of Adjustment, which is a morass of piecemeal thinking that has yet to embrace our era of reform.

While it’s tempting to think the hard work is behind us, we’re really only halfway done. Eight out of 18 district plans are finished, two more are just getting under way. Meantime, the planning commission has spent recent years working with neighborhoods and district council members to update the city’s zoning map – the color-coded, parcel-by-parcel guide for what’s permitted, where – to get rid of outdated zoning and help advance goals articulated in each district plan. I tend think of zoning remapping as the love child of district plans and the new zoning code.

We’ve heard for years that if the city’s zoning better reflected reality there wouldn’t be so many protracted neighborhood zoning battles. Developers would have greater certainty about their projects. Homeowners wouldn’t get tangled up in unnecessary bureaucracy. The process of remapping is painstaking and plodding. 

But even intelligent zoning isn’t a silver bullet. So it’s important to be clear about what constrains the remapping process, and to be realistic about what we can reasonably expect updated zoning to resolve and what it can’t change.

REMAPPING PACE & POLITICS

REMAPPING RELIEF

The vast majority of remapping recommendations are to get rid of outdated zoning. Parks should be zoned as parks. Long-time single-family residential buildings should no longer be zoned as multi-family. These changes are the remedial meat and potatoes of remapping.

“That’s where relief will come from,” Sharpe said. Corrections will simplify permitting and plan examination at Licenses and Inspections and save owners of incorrectly zoned properties unnecessary trips to the Zoning Board of Adjustment.

One of the biggest corrections the city can pursue is to relieve many neighborhoods of outdated industrial zoning to make way for different sorts of development.

Come January, the district planning process will begin for the River Wards, but Fishtowners have already been working with the planning commission to recommend new base zoning for the neighborhood.

“We just wanted to simply correct base zoning to prevent surprise by-right development that did not fit in with the neighborhood,” explained Matt Karp, chair of Fishtown Neighbors Association’s zoning committee.

They want to get out of this pattern: Developers continue to propose residential projects on old industrial sites. To do that they need a use variance, but can still take advantage of the more favorable conditions that come with industrial zoning, including taller heights and reduced setbacks. That, Karp said, was effectively letting developers have their cake and eat it, too.

As ex-industrial sites are remapped “to a more appropriate zoning given neighborhoods’ desire and the current state of the market, there is a good chance that the developer who wants to do some kind of mixed-used development on an industrial parcel won’t need to appeal. They will be able to do it by right or they will be able to do it with just minor variances that are not going to require a major effort by the neighborhood or developer to have that site developed. That’s the goal,” explained Jastrzab.

WHAT REMAPPING WON’T RESOLVE 

Even with smartly tailored zoning citywide, there’s still plenty of room in our development process to account for evolving market conditions, political intervention, creative zoning interpretations by L&I, and a Zoning Board of Adjustment (ZBA) that remains happy to oblige developers. And in a sense, that’s just messy old democracy.

That’s also why zoning variance requests will always be part of the process, although remapping will theoretically reduce the volume of variances that require resolution at the Zoning Board of Adjustment (ZBA). The theory is that if zoning is clearer and more accurate, there will be fewer permit refusals at L&I that result in variance requests. It should make the development process more predictable and fair.

Strictly speaking, variances should only be granted to alleviate some kind of hardship. But the Zoning Board of Adjustment (ZBA) is still in the habit of handing out variances like candy on Halloween, in part because outdated zoning is so prevalent. Developers are willing to push projects toward a hearing before the ZBA because some 90% of the time they win approval.

Remapping should shrink the volume of cases that go before ZBA but it won’t give ZBA a spine. We need that board to be guardians of reform as zoning changes.

While it’s tempting to think updated zoning will lead to ironclad clarity, Jastrzab offers me this reality check: “Zoning is not a surgical tool, it’s a blunt instrument.” It sets the table, but it doesn’t cook supper.