Let’s take a break from the saga of street standards to respond to a couple posts on Austin Contrarian:
The first one, the second one, and a response by an infill developer.
In response to the first post, Nick suggests: The [Austin] council really does need to upzone large swaths of the city that’s in the desired development zone proactively so that situations like these can be avoided in the future.
Minor problem with this approach: rather than bring the wrath of a small group of busybodies (as in the Austin Red Bird upzone), you bring the wrath of an entire swath of the city on the planning dept. More to the point, doing this means the planning department either loses the support of the city council, or the city council loses the support of the citizens and gets replaced at the next election by a council that doesn’t support the planners.
This problem is intrinsic to every zoned city.
In a city like Houston, we’re used to freedom, and we have a healthy debate on the pros and cons of both future and past ordinances. We’ve added some (the 27du/acre cap on townhomes), we’ve withdrawn some (the lot size standards), and we’re still debating others: check Kendall Miller’s recent editorializing on how restrictions drafted in response to Ashby may hinder the Urban Corridors. But in a city like Austin – or Portland, or Seattle – zoning often predates the current neighborhood residents. Because the restriction of zoning was there when they got there, and has been there ever since, it has acquired a veil of normalcy. It comes to be accepted.
Upzoning represents an easing of legal burdens, a movement from a more restrictive state (everything is banned except single-family residential) to a less restrictive state (everything is banned except for single-family and duplex residential). But for residents who’ve lived under that zoning for 5, 10, or 20 years, it appears as an increased burden. The upzone is a change in the status quo, and the status quo is entrenched far enough that change is psychologically difficult.
In Portland, Oregon, there are two maps. The planning map is the result of the METRO planning agency’s analysis of the region’s demand for growth, the amount of new construction required to accommodate that growth, and the “best” way to allocate it among the various centers and “sub-centers.” The zoning map represents the legal restrictions as they exist on the ground at that time.
The zoning map is *always* more restrictive than the planning map. The region’s actual capacity for growth, as determined by its laws, is always less than what the planners think it needs.
Why? Mass downzones are no problem, because mass downzones only effect developers, and all developers are evil. If you live in a 5,000 square foot lot that gets downzoned to a 10,000 square foot minimum zoning district, you don’t notice a difference. But mass upzones result in populist uproar. Mass upzones are done at the behest of a technocratic elite (the planning department) at the expense of Joe citizen, who just wants his neighborhood to look exactly the same as it did 20 years ago when he bought his house. Is that so wrong? Fact is, once the single-family or residential designation has been in place for several decades, change is politically impossible.
So how does Portland deal with this? They take a measured approach. Portland focuses its biggest, headline redevelopment projects on nonresidential areas. The “Pearl District,” a mostly built-out clump of midrise condominiums and trendy street-frontage retail, replaced a neighborhood of warehouses, tattoo parlors, and a giant rail yard. And the up-and-coming South Waterfront district is being built over what was once shipyards and freight transfer facilities. Avoiding NIMBYism is easy when there aren’t any backyards to begin with.
But this only works for dense development: it’s not cost-effective for duplexes. So Portland follows a time-honored urban planning tradition: they put it all in poor and minority neighborhoods.
A look at the map shows you what’s up:

Beige and yellow are single-family. Blue is multi-family. Gray is industrial, red is “central commercial,” and purple is an odd little zone called EXd that’s supposedly geared towards “employment” but actually allows an unlimited number of residential units subject to the FAR restrictions.
First off, note the VAST SWATHS of beige. These are single-family residential with 5,000 square foot lot minimums. Next note the downtown CXd/EXd splotch and its purply-red fingers: Pearl District to the north, Lloyd Center to the east, South Waterfront to the south. What’s left?
Look at the blue. Interstate Avenue, which runs up west of I-5, got light rail service in 2004, so you’d expect to see multifamily there. But notice how asymmetrical it is? To the west, where white people live in “nice” neighborhoods, the multifamily falls off after a block or so. But to the east, where 50 years of I-5 traffic noise have reduced property values (and the socioeconomic class of neighborhood inhabitants), the zoning extends all the way up to the freeway. You’d expect this to be symmetrical.
Now check the other blue. There’s a big splotch of blue in the southeast near Powell and 39th. These are small, narrow homes built for industrial workers along SP’s rail yards. And there’s another splotch of blue to the north, along the inner portion of Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. I’ll let you make your own associations.
In short, the Portland zoning map is a vast swath of single-family residential and local service commercial, punctuated by splobs of dense development overlaid on (i) formerly nonresidential districts and (ii) poor and minority neighborhoods. Such is the way things evolve when you combine longstanding restrictive zoning codes and representative democracy. There is simply no politically feasible way to upzone most single-family residential neighborhoods.
Thankfully, Houston never had these regs. It’s a city completely free of the scourge of 40-, 50-, and 60-year-old zoning ordinances. And the developers of our older neighborhoods had the foresight to create deed restrictions that expired, so that single-family neighborhoods could in time grow and reach their highest potential. Thus does new development occur not just in formerly-poor areas like Washington, but also in established trendy areas like the Montrose, the Med Center, Kirby, and a hundred other places.
A note to Don Johnson: if you ever decide to move south, keep in mind that we have eminently sensible civil engineering standards regarding stormwater runoff. The pipes are beefy, and we promise not to make you pay $20,000 of in-lieu fees for not building a mosquito trap on your projects’ front lawns.