Rick Cole writes that zoning codes are the problem, not the solution, in the effort to build and maintain great cities. He writes:
“The American Dream” of single-family tracts, shopping centers and business parks owes more to zoning mandates than to market economics. Zoning was imposed on the American landscape by an unholy alliance between Utopians preaching a “modern” way of life and hard-headed businessmen who profited from supplying that new model, including an auto industry steeped in the ideology that “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.”
Cole is a former mayor of Pasadena, Calif., and now city manager in Ventura, Calif. Instead of zoning, he says, use “codes” — something more and more municipalities are doing. Then he has a good analysis of the terminology of “form-based-codes” (a cumbersome term that addresses the how, but not the why you’d have one) vs. “smart codes” (a term that’s been adopted by lots of developers whose projects were anything but smart).
A number of smaller municipalities in this region have adopted codes that are akin to the form-based code. Charlotte isn’t one of them.