The Center for Zoning Solutions’ hosted a webinar on how zoning regulations can impact a community’s climate efforts. Attendees heard from Jeff Roberts, the Director of Zoning and Development on the City of Cambridge’s Climate Resilient zoning measures, Bridge Rauch, a Community Organizer from Clean Air Coalition of Western New York on their coalition’s work to advance an environmental justice overlay district, and also got a preview of our upcoming climate havens report.
Addressing climate impacts in land use planning is a critical step to ensure that climate goals are reflected in a local regulatory framework. If a comprehensive plan aims to prioritize climate resiliency, but the zoning code allows development in areas with a higher risk of experiencing a natural disaster (e.g., flooding), long-term resiliency goals will not be reflected in the built environment outcomes. Aligning regulations with values is even more important when thinking about a prevention strategy to preempt development in disaster-prone areas to stop harm before it happens.
Here are our top takeaways from our land use and climate impacts conversation:
1. Climate havens are becoming increasingly relevant. As residents across the U.S. are impacted by extreme weather, best practices for becoming a climate haven— whether or not you have been classified as a climate haven— are important for any community to know. Climate haven measures are important to consider for all communities, whether it is anticipated that you will receive new residents who were displaced due to climate events, or if you are interested in future-proofing the community from ever-worsening climate events.
2. Your zoning is only as good as your planning efforts. Zoning is a tool—it can yield good or poor results based on the regulations your community prescribes. To make the most of this tool, zoning reform should be grounded in strong planning that looks at the current conditions of your community and anticipates future needs and evolving conditions. The City of Cambridge has built its climate resiliency measures on a strong basis of research, citizen advocacy, and professional expertise in balancing housing production and climate regulation priorities.
3. Regulating land use changes in your community is an act of balancing priorities. Regulations should reflect your community’s values and allow you to fulfill your long-term planning goals. Currently, there may be an inherent conflict between your regulations and values. For example, if your city council would like to promote housing production but you have zoning regulations such as large minimum lot size requirements, or only permit a low number of dwelling units per acre, you may be restricting new development to yield only single-family homes. In this case, your city will need to prioritize which regulations to preserve, and which to change and/or remove to remove barriers to increased housing production.
4. Coalition building brings together residents to create a shared vision for your community. This is a long-term process that will require time, patience, and investment to yield a strong consensus.
Going Deeper: Exploring key questions from the webinar
We were thrilled to have many attendees pose thought-provoking questions to our panel of speakers. In an effort to address some lingering questions from folks, here are a few questions posed by attendees along with our follow-up responses.
A key concept of smart growth is locating development in areas connected to jobs and other needs, whether they drive, take transit, walk, or bike. An opportunity for suburban and rural communities that have trails and shared-use paths could be to ensure that these paths connect to key amenities in your community (e.g., employment centers, commercial corridors, neighborhood retail, schools, etc.), and to promote denser development around these locations. Don’t just build a trail to nowhere, the trail needs to connect people to everyday amenities and serve as green infrastructure. This approach can encourage an uptake in the use of these paths to access destinations in your community, provide an alternative for residents to use active transportation methods rather than relying on a car to access goods and services, and provide access to green infrastructure to support residents’ physical and mental health. This type of planning could look like changing the base zoning district of parcels abutting your trail and path network. Encouraging this targeted location-based development can boost active transportation and promote density in well-connected areas of your community.
Cambridge’s Cool Score refers to the city’s performance-based “Green Factor,” which is triggered on any development projects subject to the City’s Green Building Requirements. Cooling features can include tree canopy preservation, new tree planting, green roofs and facades, and pavements with a solar reflective index or shaded area.
During the webinar, Jeff Roberts shared his experience creating climate-informed zoning to achieve Cambridge’s climate priorities. Advancing climate resiliency is a key priority for the city alongside spurring more housing production, which has been the subject of recent reforms.
The city’s process for enacting climate resiliency measures began in 2018, when Cambridge created a task force composed of residents, developers, technical experts, and city staffers to recommend updates to the city’s zoning ordinance. This collaborative approach allowed residents to meaningfully shape the development of new regulations that align with community priorities. All meetings held by the task force were accessible to the public. In addition, two public hearings were held on the zoning amendments themselves prior to the zoning petition’s adoption in February 2023.
Messaging is key here. Avoid using language that may result in the conversation being dominated by critiques around verbiage rather than discussing the heart of the issue. Use outcome-oriented language that can be easily understood and that all people can get behind. When thinking about the results you would like to achieve, how can you frame this as a conversation that comes back to people? What positive impact would this intervention have on people’s lives in your community? How would it make their day-to-day better? Focusing on the end result can help to build support for the interim steps needed to achieve this goal.
Take advantage of statutory regulatory timeframes to advance innovative solutions; if your community has to update its zoning by law, this is especially the time to pursue innovative solutions such as climate-friendly zoning, FBCs (which are inherently climate-friendly), and/or performance-based green zones.
If there is no existing system in place to regulate your land uses, this may result in additional expenses for your community, as there is a lack of a standardized process and procedure to follow when assessing new development applications. This adds uncertainty for both developers and municipal staff. If there is buy-in to pursue a standardized regulatory process, this could be an opportunity for your region to encode its values within your local land use regulations (i.e., greening measures). Consider taking an alternative approach to zoning via the adoption of a form-based code, which allows your community to focus on the design standards of new development and new buildings’ interaction with the public realm, rather than focusing on a separation of land uses. Adopting a form-based code can increase your community’s flexibility in approaching land-use regulations and allow you to tailor your standards to reflect the local conditions of your community.