Pick your hustle. Maybe it’s a vintage resale shop you want to open on Cherokee. Or a rental unit you want to create out of your garage in Dogtown. Or a slick new townhouse you want to build and sell in the West End neighborhood. These days, the likelihood that such endeavors will need a variance—an exception to the city’s zoning rules—is high. And that can require a hearing at the Board of Adjustment, letters of support (from neighbors and the alderperson), months of waiting, and possibly money, if you’re paying interest on a loan while you wait. And all this assumes you don’t give up.
“Our zoning code creates many barriers that are quite difficult to comply with, even for very reasonable things,” says Miriam Keller of the city’s Planning and Urban Design Agency. “I hope in two years we’re not in that position anymore.”
Between now and then, the city is leading an effort to revisit the goals and rules for its land use. If everyone in a neighborhood is agog for an upcoming corner grocery, for instance, but the grocery owners must get variances, then the land-use goals (what folks want) and the land-use rules (what the zoning code allows) are not aligned. So to realign them, the city must first make sure its Strategic Land Use Plan (a.k.a. “the SLUP,” pronounced “sloop”) captures, among other things, reachable resident goals. The SLUP serves as a sort of vision board for the city. Deviating from it is not impossible, but not easy, either, so it acts as an ongoing nudge in a chosen direction. The current plan dates to 2005. Since November, the city has consulted about 1,500 residents, in addition to experts and developers, to create a new one.
Liz Kramer and her firm, Public Design Bureau, have helped the city connect with residents in multiple ways—through surveys, workshops, and focus groups. All over town, she says, at meetings inside rec centers and churches, one desire has been voiced again and again: walkability. People want to walk to buy ingredients for dinner, sit in a park, or just reach another neighborhood, she says—and they’d like that walk to feel pleasant (e.g., under tree shade in summer). But this goal exists in tension with how car-dependent our citizenry is, she says. So to get residents thinking about tradeoffs, she and her colleagues have presented them with printed maps that they could adjust using stickers of options, such as parking lots and trees. The first step is often simply exposing them to the idea that the plan exists, Kramer says: “Very few people know what the SLUP even is.”
But a new SLUP’s impact will be noticeable. Any city can be a magnet to new residents, Keller says, by “being a city”—that is, by offering things that suburbs can’t. Density is one such thing. Fostering density near transit hubs is not an obvious strategy in the current land-use plan, Keller observes, but it could be in a new one. The new plan could also become, if residents want, less permissive about gas stations or auto sales and repair. “We obviously need those things,” she says, “it’s just a question of where and whether they conflict with walkability goals.”
Keller’s hope is that the Planning Commission approves a new SLUP by the end of this year, so the city can move on to the thornier task of updating the zoning code. That update is what will reduce time and complexity in development, she says, and “hopefully make reinvestment in our city more doable and predictable for all involved.”
Certain U.S. cities have moved straight into zoning reform, observes Dan D’Oca of Interboro Partners, which is leading the city’s effort. But for a city to skip the step of refreshing its land-use plan is, in his view, a trap. “It’s like building a house without a blueprint,” D’Oca says. “You’re not seeing the big picture if you’re just doing zoning.”
Keller agrees. She says the city must choose a direction, because change will chug along whether it’s steered or not. “If we don’t know what we’re going for,” she says, “all we can be is reactive.”
You can check out upcoming SLUP engagement events here.
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