How Creative Design Can Turn Strict Zoning Codes Into Success Stories
(Images courtesy of R. John Anderson.)
Our communities are struggling with a lack of both available and affordable housing. Our current approaches to housing are not working, and people are writing volumes on how the system is broken — but I believe the more important conversation is about how we can respond to the crisis. We need to focus on the tools that people are discovering that could allow us to build housing at scale with locally available resources.
In "Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis," my colleagues Chuck Marohn and Daniel Herriges broadly recommend three areas where local governments and advocates on the ground can make significant progress:
Regulatory reform.
Growing an ecosystem of incremental developers.
Local financing of entry-level housing (local government and philanthropy in cooperation with local banks).
I am an urban designer who worked within city and county government, so regulatory reform is my jam.
Let’s talk about it.
Regulatory reform is more than just adopting a new code or amending the text of an ordinance. Regulatory reform is also about leveraging the regulations we already have to yield the results we desire. Zoning and development codes are merely tools that provide acceptable boundaries for a community. As the saying goes, it’s not the tool, it’s how you operate it.
The administrators of your community’s development regulations have some level of discretionary authority when reviewing development applications. Regulatory reform must include this management, as well as the procedures utilized by our communities to apply development regulations. A really good designer can develop a good plan under a really bad code. A poor designer can also develop a really bad plan under a really good code. The odds are actually in our favor that the result will be a good project.
My friend and incremental developer, John Anderson, is a really good designer who can find the sunshine in the darkest of development codes. Through his years of experience, he has learned the hard way that it takes a lot to amend a code, and the scars from this work have shifted his approach to development. John now advocates for working within existing codes, and he specifically seeks out communities that know how to use them.
John recently shared a very clever piece of zoning code he found in the city of Durham, North Carolina. The community was attempting to solve a common subdivision problem where, after large lots are subdivided into multiple smaller lots, some of those smaller lots don't have direct access to the street. Durham's solution was to allow lots in the shape of a flag. The building is located on the "flag," a piece of land that meets all lot size requirements of the zoning code but is located behind another lot. A long, narrow piece of land is the "flagpole," which connects the flag to the street and provides the only street frontage for the lot. In many cases, the flagpole is as wide as a single-car driveway.
Flag lots are generally the result of the natural chaos of city development colliding with the aspiring order of a development code. Flag lots’ awkward shape can cause problems, so planners usually discourage their creation. In rare cases, though, cities like Durham embrace flag lots and provide instructions through development codes on how to create them.
(Source: City of Durham.)
Durham’s code is unique because it not only permits the creation of new flag lots, but it's minimum width requirement for the flagpole is much smaller than average, only 5 feet. This gives designers some flexibility, which is all a talented urbanist like John needs to leverage this mundane bit of existing code for good — in this case, to support the development of a cottage court.
A cottage court is a group of small detached homes arranged around a shared court that's visible from the street. This is a traditional pattern of development composed of small starter homes, and it can address the important need for smaller and more affordable housing. Unfortunately, cottage courts have been removed from many zoning codes, making them illegal to build. In the few places that do allow this type of development, additional development regulations have been added that require each of these homes to be on their own fee simple lot with a minimum street frontage. These additional requirements remove the ability to create the best feature of a cottage court — the court. But John realized he could use the lack of minimum street frontage for flag lots as a loophole to create one.
John selected two typical lots in Durham and prepared a series of sketches showing the step-by-step development of a cottage court that leverages existing zoning codes.
The current lot plan includes two separate lots that are 60 feet wide and 100 feet deep. This is a common lot size in many communities, and conventional thinking may yield a maximum of two large homes.
By leveraging existing development codes, however, these two lots could be subdivided into five lots. Since Durham doesn't define a minimum flagpole size, the minimum connection to the street for a development like a cottage court could be the width of a walkway. In this example, John uses 5-foot connections, but (as you'll see as the plan develops), 5 feet is only used as a measurement to subdivide the lots.
Each flag portion of the new lots is right-sized to fit a small, one-bedroom cottage. John is using two of the stock plans available through the Liberty House Plans platform. There are a variety of plans and an infinite number of architectural styles that can be selected.
The final plan layers in the fine-grain details of the development. We can now see that these homes are accessed through a common walkway. Landscaping shapes the courtyard. Parking is addressed with a private drive with on-site parking, as well as utilizing on-street parking.
The plan with five one-bedroom cottages yields on paper 18 dwelling units per acre, yet the character of the development is that of two small homes. From the street, this cottage court looks like two houses built on the street, matching the character of the neighborhood. The three additional homes are hidden behind them.
I share this as an example of regulatory reform. This development does not require changes to the zoning codes, weeks of public hearings or overly complicated systems. This type of development requires us to think differently and leverage the resources available. Durham has a code that allows for innovation, Liberty House Plans has a catalog of smaller homes and John is a creative incremental developer connecting the dots. This is a repeatable approach, with a process that can be implemented at scale to respond to the housing trap.
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Edward Erfurt is the Director of Community Action at Strong Towns. He is a trained architect and passionate urban designer with over 20 years of public- and private-sector experience focused on the management, design, and successful implementation of development and placemaking projects that enrich the tapestry of place. He believes in community-focused processes that are founded on diverse viewpoints, a concern for equity, and guided through time-tested, traditional town-planning principles and development patterns that result in sustainable growth with the community character embraced by the communities which he serves.