On January 21, The Center for Zoning Solutions kicked off its new webinar series with a webinar on “Advancing Equity in Planning.” Participants had the opportunity to hear from the City of Kingston on its use of a form-based code to advance the city’s housing goals. Additionally, Elevated Chicago shared their plans for an equitable transit-oriented development policy, and our steering committee members Leslie Oberholtzer and Karen Parolek shared their perspectives.
Top five takeaways
- Zoning is a wonky topic. During community engagement, it is important to meet residents where they are, breaking down technical concepts into something that is meaningful to their day to day life. What could change look like? Can you visualize it? Can you share concepts via storytelling?
- Equitable community engagement includes valuing people. Providing compensation for people’s time and making engagement opportunities enjoyable helps resident’s look forward to coming to the table and engaging with the process.
- Make your zoning code easier to understand. This creates opportunities to work with a wider array of nonprofit and private partners to meet your community’s housing goals.
- Create coalitions and build strong relationships with your municipality. This allows for your work to have continuity and momentum in the face of administrative change and municipal staff transitions.
- Equitable transit-oriented development and form-based codes are not mutually exclusive ideas. One can be used to shape the type of development that occurs near key community nodes (e.g., transit hubs), while the latter can more broadly shape the built environment, including the public realm and building design standards for a corridor, neighborhood, or city.
The Center for Zoning Solutions is thrilled to be elevating this important work communities are doing to advance equity through zoning reform. Pursuing an equitable zoning framework allows your community to become more economically resilient, and provides opportunities for a diversity of housing types and businesses to exist, creating a thriving local ecosystem of homes and amenities. Everyone should have access to a high quality built environment, and CZS will continue to leverage its expertise in taking an interdisciplinary lens to zoning reform to promote equitable, people-scaled development.
“Equitable zoning is a driver of economic development, removes barriers for small-scale developers, supports local businesses, and can attract investment from diverse stakeholders” -Leslie Oberholtzer, Principal, CodaMetrics