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The Charlotte
Observer
newspaper, during the 2002 election cycle,
political action committees representing real estate
agents and homebuilders in North Carolina gave
$255 450 and $223 159, respectively to legislative
candidates, making these two organizations the
largest sources of campaign funds in the state, ahead
of lobbyists for health-care groups, bankers and
lawyers (Hall, R., 2003). The homebuilders and real
estate organizations in North Carolina are known as
‘the sprawl lobby,’ and the reader can safely presume
they were not asking lawmakers to tighten up plan-
ning controls or seeking Smart Growth legislation!
Beyond these legal and legislative concerns, zoning
in America today is often vilified by progressive plan-
ners and urban designers for a more technical reason:
it is concerned almost solely with land use rather
than environmental or physical design. Zoning (as
we note in more detail in the next section) was cre-
ated in the early years of the twentieth century as a
means of segregating uses perceived as incompatible,
and protecting private residential property by exclud-
ing new uses that could encroach on and reduce the
value of existing developments. However, by the
latter half of the century it had morphed into the pri-
mary bargaining chip in the legal and financial game
of property development: rezoning land to facilitate a
more profitable use remains one of the main objec-
tives of any developer, while neighborhood groups
line up to oppose such changes.
All too often this conflict devolves into merely a
squabble over numbers. Say, for example, the devel-
oper wants to raise the density on a site from four
dwellings per acre to eight (10–20 units per hectare).
Neighborhood activists automatically oppose the
new number, suspicious from the outset that if the
developer wants that density it must constitute
overdevelopment of the site from the community
perspective. Maybe some compromise is reached at a
density of six dwellings per acre (15 per hectare).
Nowhere in this process have concepts of design been
introduced. Rarely does the conventional zoning
process provide for a discussion about how develop-
ments at a low density might be designed well or
poorly; nor how good designs of higher density
development might actually be better from an urban
design perspective than the low-density option.
Because design is not an integral element of zoning
categories, it is not something that has any legal
standing. The only variables under discussion are the
numbers, dwellings per acre or areas of commercial
uses. This is one of the crucial problems that we try
to solve with the kind of design-based zoning codes
we espouse and illustrate in the case studies. Design
criteria for building form, massing and public space
design are embedded diagrammatically in the zoning
codes (see Chapters 9 and 10).
Conventional zoning is site specific and rarely con-
siders any criteria beyond the boundary of a specific
site or project. Planning, on the other hand, concerns
itself with large-scale issues and future possibilities
over larger areas, and one clear illustration of the
crucial American divorce of planning from zoning is
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that once a plan is adopted by a city, little or no
action is taken to change existing zoning to conform
to the new plan. Such ‘corrective rezonings’ are often
very controversial for the reasons discussed earlier
(the city ‘taking’ value from private property owners).
Accordingly, unless there is some overriding necessity
or dominant public interest, planners and elected
officials usually hope (optimistically and unreali-
stically) that property owners will adjust their
ambitions to fit with the plan without further action
from the city.
Two contrasting Charlotte examples will illustrate
the American planner’s dilemma in these circum-
stances. As part of a city and countywide transporta-
tion plan, Charlotte is planning a new light rail
corridor that follows a defunct railway line through
old industrial and commercial areas. Train service is
expected to start in 2006. Essential elements in the
plans for this corridor are new urban villages clus-
tered around the train stations along the line, but
most of the land where these new communities
would be constructed is zoned industrial. To assist
developers create the new development on these
brownfield sites, the city plans to rezone large tracts
to allow the range of mixed urban uses required for a
urban village – high-density housing, shops and
offices. The city investment is too large, and the plans
too vital to the city’s future, to leave this new urban
development to chance, or to require developers to
bear the economic cost and political burden of major
rezonings, often in the face of local opposition (see
Plate 8). There has even been discussion among city
officials about the city buying key parcels of land,
rezoning them, and then selling them onto develop-
ers in order to stimulate the desired development.
In this instance, American planners are operating
much like their British and European colleagues; the
city is leading development, identifying sites, produc-
ing master plans, density requirements and urban
design guidelines for private developers to follow. It is
a good and professionally well-managed process that
reflects credit on our city, but it is not the norm.
More typical is another Charlotte example from
2002, concerning a proposed new asphalt factory in a
low-income black neighborhood.
For several months, city planners worked with
local residents to develop a new master plan for the
small community close to the city center. The plan
was a worthy effort and outlined a range of modest
improvements and new opportunities for housing
and small businesses. However, a lot of land in the
community was zoned industrial, a relic of old
zoning concepts from previous decades. These
outdated ideas imagined that nobody would want to
live near the city center in the future, and that the
industrial classification was the highest and best use
for such sites that were near major highways and con-
tained mostly black residents. (The residents were
expected eventually to move elsewhere.) In this case,
having created the new plan, city planners and
elected officials saw no significant public investment
to protect, nor any overriding public purpose suffi-
cient to initiate the corrective rezonings that would
update the zoning plan and make sure new housing
was built where the plan suggested. This was a tricky
topic as the corrective rezonings would constitute a
downzoning of the land from ‘industrial’ to ‘neigh-
borhood mixed-use,’ effectively reducing the paper
value of the property. Accordingly, the plan was
approved with no correlation between its future pro-
posals and the existing zoning categories. Planning
staff and local residents hoped that property owners
in the area would follow the plan, but they were soon
disabused of that prospect.
Within only a few months of the plan being
finalized, a property owner declared his intention of
building a new manufacturing plant that would
produce asphalt for construction projects. The resi-
dents complained angrily, concerned about fumes,
noise, heavy trucks passing their houses, and above
all, that this proposal was in flagrant contradiction to
the plan they had worked so hard to produce and
which the city council had so recently adopted.
Embarrassed city planners explained that they were
powerless to intervene: based on the industrial zoning
of his land, the property owner was perfectly within
his rights to build the factory. In effect, the plan
wasn’t worth the paper it was drawn and written on.
Development control was, and is, a function of
zoning, not planning.
In the early summer of 2003, this situation was