City Zoning circa 1979

City Zoning: The Once and Future Frontier
Clifford L. Weaver and Richard F. Babcock
Planners Press, Chicago IL 1979

I was pleasantly surprised by this book on city zoning policies and trends in the 1970s. I had believed it was going to be a very dull read. What soon became evident is that planners in the 1970s were the beneficiaries of the environmental movement of that same decade, who looked at the urban landscape as deserving of the same conservation efforts as the natural landscape.

Chapter 1 was of the most interest to me because it gave the clearest understanding of planning and zoning efforts of the period. It begins by asking the question: “For the last few decades, zoning has been the suburban toy, not a city tool. But is that state of affairs permanent?”(3). It discusses how the twin concerns of “degradation of the natural environment” and “affordable housing… have propelled the topic of public regulation of private land from a matter of limited interest to an issue of hot debate” (3). The authors suggest that zoning could become “a positive tool for change”, even though the trend in the recent past has been that “With rare exceptions, zoning has been neither a guiding, a controlling, nor an inhibiting factor in the development of the business and commercial centers of our major cities” (5).

The book goes into great detail regarding the effectiveness of neighborhood organizations. In this first chapter, and later in Chapter 14, the authors describe zoning as “accessible to the common folk; it is the one aspect of municipal government where citizen participation has long been mandatory”. The authors give two examples of this. The first details how the residents of a neighborhood in Chicago, after having developed a community land use master plan two years earlier, found themselves fighting McDonalds for the rights to a particularly desirable street corner. The alderman who represented the neighborhood and supported the residents, publicly thanked McDonalds for its local Ronald McDonald house which provided parents with a place to stay when their children were in the hospital. However, he goes on to say that the residents stand firmly against the fast food restaurant coming into their neighborhood. When all who agreed were asked to stand, the witnesses rose unanimously, and won the day.

The next example was of a Planned Parenthood which had received a permit to move into a neighborhood in St. Paul. The residents were so firmly against it that the city council “declared a moratorium on building permits for all abortion clinics” (183). This moratorium was eventually overturned “as that way lies the extinction of many liberties, which are, indeed, constitutionally guaranteed against invasion by a majority” (183).

Quite rightly, the authors point out that many land use problems “cannot be solved by the mere application of a new set of land use regulations… Reform of major federal programs, reform of local property tax laws, significant public expenditures on both social and physical infrastructures, fundamental redirection of transportation concepts, and… new approaches to the relationship between the public and private sectors” would help remedy the problems faced by the cities and suburbs of those times (14), but zoning remained a useful tool to protect historically, environmentally and aesthetically relevant areas.

Although this book is almost 30 years old, the language and concerns it discusses translate to today. In my work with city planners, placemakers and community builders I hear discussions about the same issues. I am beginning to believe that these issues and concerns will be with us for some time to come, unless we begin to find solutions to housing and environmental issues that incorporates all aspects of daily life into the design. I am very eager to begin reading books from the more recent past to see if we have begun to solve this puzzle.