This video is sponsored by Henson Shaving.
Here in the United States,
it's no secret that zoning has created vast neighborhoods
of single family homes,
often quite separate from the places people shop,
work, and go to school.
This separation of uses leads to longer trips
to go to the store or go to work,
which can increase carbon emissions
and lead to more traffic crashes.
It also just increases traffic, period.
Separation of use is the cornerstone of suburban sprawl,
a wasteful and costly land use pattern.
But other countries in the world also regulate land use
and their outcomes are often quite different
than the ones found here.
I mean, this is pretty charming.
Is there something about how the countries of Germany,
England, and France zone that leads to, you know,
more charming cities?
It turns out the answer is yes.
Let's look at the policies Europe uses to plan cities better
and find out if they work in the United States,
after the bike bell.
(bike bell dinging)
Let's start our country-by-country comparison
right where I am here in the United States.
It's where zoning is the most infamous
and we should really understand why that is.
This is also a good time to nail down the absolute basics
of zoning.
Zoning is quite literally assigning parcels
within a jurisdiction, like a city or county,
into distinct zones.
Zoning began in the late 19th and early 20th century
back when cities were dense
and filled with factories and smokestacks.
It was not uncommon for negative external effects
of industrial uses, like terrible air pollution,
to spill out beyond the boundaries of the property line
and cause problems for neighbors.
Zoning prevented these nuisances
by requiring those factories to be built in places
that would limit their negative effects.
That's truly how simple
some of the early zoning ordinances were.
Keep smokestacks away from housing.
Here in the United States, we saw a good idea
and we ran with it.
And some would say we ran it into the ground.
Our first real innovation was assigning separate zones
for every single different kind of land use.
In comparison, in Europe,
the early zoning codes really only acknowledged
about three or four different land use types.
Instead of three or four, we expanded the number of zones
to include any land use type we can think of.
We now commonly have separate land uses
for residential, commercial, industrial, agriculture,
and public space,
with even more zones within those categories.
Just look at the zoning code from where I live.
There are several kinds of commercial zones, for example,
including zones for tourist serving commercial,
big box commercial and downtown commercial.
Early zoning codes also included an innovation
called hierarchical zoning,
sometimes called pyramid zoning.
This means that the uses at the top of the pyramid
could be located within all other uses below, but not above.
Here's a really basic example.
Residential uses are at the top of the pyramid.
They are generally very low impact
and can be located in all residential, commercial
and industrial zones.
Commercial zones can't be in residential zones
but can be in industrial.
And of course, industrial uses can be
in only industrial zones.
This system makes some sense
and many early zoning codes followed that pattern.
But another early zoning code,
one from Berkeley, California,
came up with a new innovation,
one that swept the nation and now most cities use,
non-hierarchical zoning.
That's right.
We invented one way of doing zoning
and then invented a completely opposite way of doing it.
In non-hierarchical zoning,
only uses specified in the name of the zone can go there.
Only residential uses in residential zones
and only commercial uses in commercial zones.
There is no hierarchy.
Every use goes into its own zone.
No mixing allowed.
One estimate has 80% of US cities
using non-hierarchical zoning.
When you combine this with our love for many separate zones,
you get a city with isolated uses.
Now that we understand US zoning,
we can begin to evaluate the alternatives.
Let's start at the beginning.
In 19th century Germany, during the Industrial Revolution,
cities in Europe began enacting policies
to prevent factories from locating near residential areas.
German reformers, however, took this idea
and made it a citywide plan.
Frankfurt zoning code adopted in 1891
is widely regarded as the first use-based zoning code
in a large city.
This coat only had six types of zones,
two residential, two mixed use, and two industrial.
Industrial uses were actually allowed in every zone,
even residential,
though the most noxious industries were not.
You may notice no commercial zones.
Businesses like shops and offices were allowed everywhere
and even encouraged to mix.
There were two residential zones,
but those two zones were not divided based on intensity
like in the United States
with one zone for single family homes
and the other for multi-family homes.
The Germans basically never even referred to them
as separate things.
This was the zoning code Americans used
as their baseline when they started coming up
with all their new innovations.
And while US zoning morphed and evolved
into something strange and different,
modern German zoning went in a different direction,
though on the surface, they actually look quite similar.
Cities in Germany can only use zones predefined
in federal statute, and they come in four basic flavors,
residential, mixed, commercial and special.
And just like in the United States,
there are subclasses for each,
like mixed use, town center, commercial, industrial
and several types of residential.
They even have zones called small-scale residential
and exclusively residential.
But within a small-scale residential zone,
cities still allow duplexes, small shops,
and even appropriately scaled industry.
Exclusively residential zones are straight up misnomers,
because they allow housing at all densities,
small shops, hotels, and civic buildings.
In the United States, separation is the name of the game.
In Germany, it's all about finding the right balance
in each zone.
In a German residential zone, for example,
the goal is to get about half the land used
for residential purposes.
In the United States, that goal is much closer to 100%.
Germans just assume that you'll need a corner store,
daycare, school, and doctor's office near your house.
Having a neighborhood without these things
makes the area worse,
and it also just makes no sense to them.
So why not allow them, even in residential zones?
This flexibility makes German neighborhoods more resilient
and allows residents to be more entrepreneurial.
Neighborhood change can be accommodated
without requiring a rezoning,
like it would in the United States.
If a family in the United States
wanted to convert their house into a beauty parlor
on the ground floor and live above it,
they would need to file for a rezone
with the city government,
as this arrangement would not be allowed
in basically any residential zone.
It would also almost certainly fail.
In Germany, the default assumption is
that a small retail business is a good fit
and nothing would need to change to allow it to happen.
There is one area of agreement between the United States
and German zoning codes that sets it apart
from other European countries like the United Kingdom.
It's the idea that within each zone
there are certain land uses that can be built by-right,
meaning that so long as the developer follows the code,
they can assume that they can build whatever they like.
In the United Kingdom,
no such by-right development code exists.
Every building is a negotiation
between the developer and the local authorities,
though the authorities certainly consult
local land use plans and other relevant contextual issues.
This means the UK essentially manages land use planning
on a case-by-case basis.
It's so different, you probably can't even call it zoning.
This system began
with the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947
and continues to this day basically.
So how does UK's non-zoning work?
How do they regulate land use?
Well each community must prepare
a local development framework,
which is a collection of planning documents,
including a core strategy
that outlines the development vision for the community.
The Site Specific Allocations document
outlines the area community identified
as right for development.
Then there are more specific proposals maps
and only areas designated for development
are assigned proposed land uses.
Uses are divided
according to four state-defined land use classes,
shops and services, business and industrial,
residential, and social.
There are subclasses, but like in Germany,
they are much less strict about which uses
are in which classification.
There is no clear dividing line
between single family houses
and multi-family houses, for example.
Hotels are considered residential,
and home-based businesses are generally allowed.
UK planners, feel free to correct what I just said
in the comments.
Your system's really foreign to me as a US planner,
and I'm sure I messed something up,
so let me know.
France brings us a little closer
to US and German style planning, but only just a little.
In France, property owners do have a right to develop,
but only if they follow very strict rules and regulations.
Those rules and regulations
are less concerned about land use
and more concerned about the design of buildings,
things like heights, setbacks, floor-to-area ratios,
and even the number of windows.
If you look at a zoning map of Paris, for example,
you only see a few zones
and the vast majority is simply zoned general urban.
Mixed use development is allowed basically everywhere,
but each area in the city
has a very specific form-based code
that regulates everything I just mentioned.
Floor-to-area ratio is one of the most important,
as it specifies the overall volume of the building.
FAR, as it's known, is simply a ratio
of the size of the parcel
to the size of the building's floor plates.
So here's an example of an FAR of 1,
and here's an FAR of 1 as well with just two stories,
instead of one.
Within the general urban zone of Paris,
there are subsectors that have different FAR values
to regulate height and building mass,
but all allows some kind of mixed use.
Many of France's regulations
focus on protecting architectural and urban heritage.
They care about the building envelope
but don't care as much about what happens inside.
Clearly the four countries I've mentioned
in this video all regulate land use,
and they all do it quite differently.
What can the United States learn
from these different examples?
While the first one I think is just to loosen up
on the exclusivity associated with non-hierarchical zoning.
Maybe make it so that residential and commercial
mean predominantly residential and commercial,
not 100% exclusively residential and commercial.
Doing so would also allow cities
to reduce the number of zones,
which in some places can be a dozen or more.
Fewer, looser zones would also allow for more corner stores,
which I've already talked about on this channel,
and a wider variety of housing density,
which I've also talked about on this channel before.
An even bolder idea will be
to give more land use planning power to state governments.
In all the European countries I profiled,
they have a more centralized standard system.
Why not here in the United States?
You would end up with more standardization,
fewer NIMBYs to deal with,
and you'd ensure that statewide planning goals are met.
Here in California,
the state legislature's been starting to do this
to force local governments to loosen up restrictions
on new housing construction.
Now, I'm not saying this is a silver bullet solution,
but European countries have been doing this for decades
and have more vibrant mixed-use cities to show for it.
European cities might even allow an aerospace machine shop
to be built in a residential zone,
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