The rebirth of the neighborhood.

AuthorByrne, J. Peter
PositionUrban renewal through land use changes - 40th Anniversary Symposium

Introduction I. Zoning for Urban Form II. Historic Preservation III. Environmental Law Conclusion INTRODUCTION

Since 1972, American cities have lost political power and federal support. Large scale federal programs to reverse urban decline, such as urban renewal, public housing, and the War on Poverty, had at best checkered outcomes and their vestiges were largely dismantled during the Reagan Administration. (1) Legal reforms proposed to strengthen the economic or political position of cities, through such approaches as regionalism and enhanced city authority, also have failed to remedy such decline. Nonetheless, many cities have experienced phenomenal population growth and economic development over the past decade. Washington, D.C. has reversed a population decline dating to 1950, (2) and many other cities, from Boston to San Diego, and from Seattle to Miami, have seen renewed investment in residential, retail, and business real estate, often in areas recently blighted with abandoned warehouses and decaying housing. (3) While such developments have not progressed evenly either within or among cities, they project a hopeful future for urban living and social justice. What has happened?

There is no adequate microeconomic explanation for this development. Decline in industrial economy first drained cities of capital, but then created opportunities for reinvention and redeployment of singular assets. Macroeconomic changes eliminated urban manufacturing and other blue-collar jobs but engendered new employment in service and information industries for educated brain workers. (4) Some of this enlarged class came to seek a new residential form. People began to seek older housing in inner city areas with easier access to work and within walking distance of shops, restaurants, and cultural amenities. Many early ventures into real estate by "pioneers" depended on low prices, small loans, and self- help. Professional workers from large organizations, such as government, corporations, and universities, took over housing built long ago for tradesmen, skilled laborers, and small scale entrepreneurs. (5) In time, developers, architects, and financiers renovated multi-family housing and erected new apartment buildings, including "luxury lofts" evoking manufacturing buildings once converted to artist studios. The demand for urban housing meeting these aesthetic and lifestyle standards now often exceeds supply, pushing prices higher. (6)

What are these new urban residents seeking? This Essay argues that new urban residents primarily seek a type of community properly called a neighborhood. "Neighborhood" refers to a legible, pedestrian-scale area that has an identity apart from the corporate and bureaucratic structures that dominate the larger society. Such a neighborhood fosters repeated, casual contacts with neighbors and merchants, such as while one pursues Saturday errands or takes children to activities. Dealing with independent local merchants and artisans face-to-face provides a sense of liberation from large power structures, where most such residents work. Having easy access to places of sociability like coffee shops and bars permits spontaneous "meet-ups," contrasting with the discipline of professional life. Such a neighborhood conveys an indigenous identity created by the efforts of diverse people over time, rather than marketing an image deliberatively contrived to control the perceptions of customers. At its best, a neighborhood provides a refuge from the ennui of the workplace and the idiocy of consumer culture, substituting for churches (or synagogues), labor unions, and ethnic clubs that structured earlier urban social life.

What changes in land use law have contributed to or supported this transformation to neighborhood-based living? Several legal developments outside land use seem very important. Perhaps the most central legal development has been local government legal protections for gays, who often have been in the vanguard of the revival of urban neighborhoods. (7) Crime reduction has significantly enhanced urban living since the 1970s, but which laws have contributed what to that reduction is a matter of intense debate. (8) Civil rights laws and immigration reform have arguably nurtured a comfort with multi-ethnic urban neighborhoods that has turned discrimination and resentment to a comfort with and even celebration of diversity.

But changes in land use law, broadly understood, also helped provide the context for the revival of neighborhoods. This brief Essay highlights those aspects of land use law that have supported this new urbanization since the founding of the Fordham Urban Law Journal. The claim is not that legal reforms caused the revival, but that they contributed to a broader social trend. These reforms have supported neighborhood revival primarily by securing the physical environments people want to live in. The three chief legal tools for neighborhoods have been zoning for urban form, historic district preservation, and environmental protection. (9)

  1. ZONING FOR URBAN FORM

    Zoning constituted the first comprehensive land use regulatory system. (10) Whatever its origins, zoning has been problematic for cities. (11) Its core principle has been separation of uses, which primarily keeps commercial and industrial activities away from residences, and low cost and multi-family residences away from single-family homes. Such zoning, along with front and side setbacks, enshrines the single-family house in a garden as the most protected physical form. (12) Zoning thus played a crucial role in creating Suburbia, with its iconic forms of subdivisions of single-family homes surrounded by lawns, curvilinear lanes off arterial roadways, strip development, shopping centers, and office parks. (13) Suburban zoning discouraged density and created communities dependent on automobiles to move among dispersed homes, stores, and workplaces. (14) It also enabled various degrees of exclusionary practices, keeping lower income citizens, especially those with children, out of affluent, low tax rate suburban jurisdictions. (15) Urban renewal in the 1950s and 60s brought suburban forms into declining cities, which is illustrated by Southwest Washington, D.C. and its rigid separation of uses, anomalous shopping mall, isolated public housing, and an interstate highway. (16)

    During the past forty years, the lessons taught by Jane Jacobs about urban form have largely been incorporated into land-use regulation. (17) Zoning continues to perform a central role in such regulation but now most often in the service of promoting walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods connected by transit. Zoning has changed in three distinct ways to play this role. First, cites have sought to deregulate certain uses, simply allowing greater owner initiative to accomplish public planning goals while building for a profit. Significant examples include permitting greater mixing of uses on a single site and reducing off-street parking requirements. (18) This trend now culminates in form-based coding or transect zoning, an approach to land use regulation that substantially relaxes use restrictions in favor of regulating the external form of a building and its relation to public space, with a goal of promoting visual coherence and pedestrian amenity. (19)

    Second, traditional zoning with its constraints on urban form has been bargained away to developers eager for greater density through various forms of negotiated development agreements. (20) Savvy jurisdictions have allowed developers to propose alternatives to restrictive as of right zoning that meet revised planning objectives, often exacting significant public amenities in the result. (21) Arlington, Virginia, presents a remarkable example. After persuading the regional Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority to construct a subway under a declining suburban main street (instead of in the middle of a nearby interstate highway), Arlington planned for creating an urban corridor and successfully bargained with developers eager to escape restrictive 1950s zoning restrictions, creating a thriving mixed use...

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