A hundred years ago people didn’t go to zoning hearings, they didn’t worry about being able to operate a business on their property, and any limits to the number of units on their land was more a function of the amount of land. But also a hundred years ago the industrial city was not always a pleasant place. A factory might open in the block behind your newly built home, spewing pollutants and creating noise at all hours.
The solution to these urban ills was zoning. Cities would create “land use” maps segregating industrial, office, retail, and housing. Early efforts were often used to keep industry from spoiling more pleasant areas of town. In Ohio the Village of Euclid, a Cleveland suburb, enacted zoning in 1921 to keep Cleveland’s industry out of its jurisdiction.
A property owner viewed the restriction on the future use of their land as a “taking” by the government and filed suit. The case, Village of Euclid, Ohio v Ambler Realty, went all they way to the U.S. Supreme Court. A lower court had ruled the zoning law to be in conflict with the Ohio & U.S. Constitutions. The Supreme Court, however, disagreed and reversed the lower court’s ruling. Their November 22, 1926 ruling declared use zoning as legal. Since then it has been known as “Euclidean zoning.”
Planning firms such as the St Louis based Harland Bartholomew & Associates prepared “comprehensive” plans for hundreds of cities which included the adoption of Euclidean zoning. By the 1950s they would still encounter cities that had not adopted use-based zoning. In other cases they found cities with “incomplete” zoning because while it might segregate uses it failed to regulate the heights of buildings.
In the 82 years since the Supreme Court validated the zoning ordinance for the Village of Euclid, Ohio we’ve managed to take a simple concept — keeping out heavy industry — to a point beyond reasonable. Cities and their suburbs now over regulate uses on land. Residential areas, for example, are broken down by single-family, two-family, multi-family. Even within Single-family you have different sections requiring different minimum lot sizes.
“Exclusionary zoning” is the term used when zoning is such that it excludes that which might be perceived as undesirable. For example, if a municipality has al their residential zoning so that lots sizes must be at least 3 acres in size. Minimum house size is another way to keep out more affordable housing options. Similarly, maximum sizes for apartments means those will end up being kid-free zones. It is one thing for a developer to set project specific standards but another for government to mandate it.
Houston is famous for its lack of Euclidean zoning. It does, however, have regulations such as 5,000 sq. ft. minimum lot size for a single family house. In Houston, according to Wikipedia, “Apartment buildings currently must have 1.33 parking spaces per bedroom, and 1.25 for each efficiency.” These sorts of rules produce the same results – sprawl and auto dependency.
I personally like streets that have single-family homes, two & four-family buildings, an apartment building at one end and a storefront on the other end with an apartment over the shop. This is just far more interesting and dynamic than a street of all the same thing.
Unfortunately, 82 years of Euclidean zoning has created a strong bias against anything but strict adherence to maintaining strict segregation of uses. With all of our industry overseas there is little threat to a polluting plants taking over idyllic residential streets yet we act as if that is still the reality.
We’ve taken Euclidean zoning to the extreme and our regions (core, inner ring, edges) all suffer as a result. It is time for St Louis and the region to evaluate our many varied zoning regulations and revamp them to create the type of community we desire rather than what folks 50-80 years ago thought we should have. The world is a different place. Zoning needs to adopt and change along the way.
St Louis’ former director of Planning, Rollin Stanley, got us going in the right direction. In 2005 the St Louis Board of Aldermen adopted a new Strategic Land Use Plan. The missing element is the new zoning to go with it. Without Stanley advocating new the new zoning we are no further ahead than we were before his arrival.
