"A High School Education and an Hour of Your Time"
On Tim Corcoran's first day as South Bend, Indiana's planning director, back in 2016, he met with staff from the Area Plan Commission talking about an obscure landscaping rule buried in the city's zoning code:
“Why is it even in there? It makes no sense to require somebody to put evergreen trees fronting an alleyway.”
“It’s always been there. We always give it a variance.”
Corcoran thought, "If this rule keeps coming up and we just exempt people from it every time, then why don't we get rid of it?"
In software engineering, there's a concept called technical debt. It refers to the high cost of retrofitting code that has become bloated and complicated over time to make it simpler and more legible. These revisions get put off, sometimes for years, in the face of more pressing deadlines—and stopgap fixes may compound the problem by addressing one issue while creating three more.
Cities, too, have all sorts of technical debt problems, as anyone who's cracked open a local zoning code knows. There are provisions that might have made sense at the time they were enacted, but now nobody remembers why they were enacted. There are rules that might make sense in isolation but interact with each other to produce unwanted consequences.
One of these consequences is often to make it more expensive, risky, and time-consuming to get any sort of development project approved—no matter how modest, no matter how compliant with the spirit and intent of the city's rules. In fast-growing places, the effect of a complicated tangle of zoning regulations is to privilege very large-scale developers and projects over small ones: the big boys are the ones who can afford land-use lawyers and absorb the costs of months or years of delay.
In a place like South Bend, though, which has suffered years of economic decline and population loss, the effect is even more damaging: to deter badly-needed redevelopment altogether. This isn't a booming city where the profit margins of development are big enough to withstand zoning rules that make it really difficult.
Corcoran's background is in urban design: a reason, he tells me, why he's "always challenging the rules." Design-focused people are pragmatic, interested in what works. Corcoran and other longtime South Bend planners found themselves frustrated with "bad regulations wasting everybody’s time." So the city's staff began working on streamlining the zoning code and making it more legible and sensible.
Asking "Why" Leads to a Simpler, Better Zoning Code
Corcoran's staff, in the span of less than three years, have radically overhauled South Bend's zoning ordinance—but they've done it as a collection of small, sensible changes, not a single massive rewrite effort. The biggest change is to the format: the code now proposed for adoption in November 2019 emphasizes legibility and usability. Planners cut out over 200 pages of text, added diagrams, and added explanations of such concepts as ADUs and missing middle housing. "A high school education and an hour of your time, and you should be able to understand it," says Corcoran.
Odd, complicated rules like that evergreen-tree stipulation were axed along the way. "We needed to ask ourselves “Why?” each time we came across an existing standard," he says. "If five planners can’t figure out the “why” of a rule, then it’s gotta go, right?” The ultimate goal, according to Corcoran, is a zoning code that "regulates what matters" in achieving a prosperous, livable city, and omits what doesn't matter.
Next on the agenda is a "Teacher’s Edition" of the zoning ordinance for elected officials and appointed boards and commissions. In this version, each rule will be accompanied by an explanation of the rationale supporting it, so that users of the code can understand why the rule was put in place. Corcoran describes it as a sort of "urban design primer" for those who might not automatically intuit why planners consider certain design principles to be best practices.
Spelling out the rationale for a rule also encourages future planners to revisit it, and assess 5, 10 or 20 years from now whether it still makes sense and reflects the city's priorities and values. According to Corcoran, it also empowers the public, through their representatives, to demand good design that is good for South Bend's future.
An Incremental Approach to a Zoning Rewrite
Some cities have attempted to tackle the technical debt and outdated priorities in their zoning codes by launching a massive initiative to rewrite the whole thing from the ground up. The appeal of this is obvious: many of these codes date to the 1970s or earlier, and outdated (often very suburban and car-centric) assumptions are deeply embedded in them.
But this is a risky proposition: when it fails, it fails big. One of the most nationally prominent examples was the abandonment in Austin, Texas in 2018 of the city's multi-year, exhaustive CodeNEXT effort (Strong Towns wrote about the CodeNEXT situation in a five-part series).
Recent zoning code changes in South Bend emphasize built form and urban design, such as the pedestrian-friendly streetscape in front of this local business, and relax some restrictions on allowed land uses and parking requirements.
South Bend's approach has been markedly different. Over about 3 years, Corcoran and his staff have approached elected officials with 8 ordinance changes containing over 100 "quick fixes" to the code. This approach has several advantages: it builds trust between staff, elected officials, and the public; it promotes an ongoing process of learning and dialogue; and it brings people on board gently with the idea of modernizing zoning.
The team's initial step was to identify and eliminate obsolete regulations that were already being largely ignored—rules to which an exception was granted nearly 100% of the time if requested. This step was an uncontroversial way to do some good and build trust and rapport with elected officials, says Corcoran. "That’s not a policy decision; it’s cutting red tape—everyone can get behind that."
Equipped with credibility and good will—"that you’re really trying to do good things for the community, that you’re on the side of making the place stronger"—South Bend's planners gradually tackled more difficult issues with the code, such as those involving parking standards, accessory dwelling units, and how buildings are sited on a parcel.
The result is a proposed code that is substantially brand new, although it didn't get there all at once. And many of the old rules that inhibited good urbanism have been scrapped, in favor of what Corcoran describes as "form-based lite." South Bend has gradually implemented elements of form-based codes and transect zoning: the city now permits more flexibility in land uses and parking (the new code has pared down what was once an unwieldy list of over 500 land uses to a more manageable 65), but places a greater focus on the siting of a project, to ensure that urban development is appropriate to its urban context.
South Bend is also pulling out of the Area Plan Commission, a County agency, that administers both the city’s Zoning Ordinance and the ordinance for unincorporated areas of the County since 1965. While regional coordination is important when it comes to such things as watershed conservation and transportation planning, Corcoran says, South Bend officials felt it was time for the city to take more control of its own destiny when it came to zoning.
And one thing that has enabled this revitalizing Rust Belt city to embrace its own urban identity is the past 3 years of zoning revisions. Corcoran credits his team with an intense amount of hard, thoughtful work in successfully carrying out a gradual, pragmatic effort to look at what South Bend's codes were requiring of development, and repeatedly and relentlessly ask "Why?" They've sought to answer that question for each rule, old and new, in a way that not only the city's leadership, but anyone with a high school degree and a free hour, can understand.
(All photos courtesy of Tim Corcoran.)
Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is also a founding member of the organization. His work at Strong Towns focuses on housing issues, small-scale and incremental development, urban design, and lowering the barriers to entry for people to participate in creating resilient and prosperous neighborhoods. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota, with a concentration in Housing and Community Development.
Daniel’s work with Strong Towns reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children.