Is It Time To Replace Zoning?

"Old-fashioned zoning practices are delaying and discouraging the current surge of mixed-use developments in the nation's cities....The central problem, say critics, is that we've stopped creating--as earlier Americans did--great cities, towns and neighborhoods, places with public squares and greens that invite monuments...The chief villain, they say, is zoning...Now zoning fosters the big single-use pods of suburbia--malls and big box stores, subdivisions, industrial parks, isolated office buildings, plus massive parking requirements. Net result: big distances, auto dependence, vast road networks, and dull cookie-cutter places...[form-based codes] focus less on what's forbidden and more on what's desired."