Contract and Conditional Zoning Without Romance: A Public Choice Analysis

The growth and development of the United States after World War II left the country needing more flexibility in zoning law. Over the past few decades, zoning has undergone drastic changes to make the process more flexible. Two methods used to meet this new demand are contract and conditional zoning. Jurisdictions are split on whether to permit contract zoning, conditional zoning, both, or neither. This is an important question that a growing number of jurisdictions have recently encountered. This Note seeks to propose potential solutions to the conflict by analyzing it through public choice theory. By applying the principles of public choice theory, this Note finds that increased flexibility in zoning will likely have the undesired consequence of allowing legislators to easily appease interest groups, rather than bargain for the most efficient land use allocation. From this observation, this Note ultimately concludes that jurisdictions should either prohibit both contract and conditional zoning or, if economic efficiency concerns prove too great, permit both contract and conditional zoning but apply a strict standard of judicial review

Why Buffalo Needs Inclusionary Zoning: Affordability, Job Access, Inclusion, and Quality Housing

Buffalo’s housing market faces four severe challenges: affordability, job access, inclusiveness, and quality. Inclusionary zoning is a proven tool for addressing all four issues. Inclusionary zoning asks that when a developer creates new housing units, it reserve a certain percent for affordable housing. Thus, inclusionary zoning leverages the power of the market to create more high-quality affordable housing units, often near job centers and transit lines, and to make neighborhoods more inclusive and less segregated. In 2014, recognizing the need for more affordable housing, the City of Buffalo committed to “lobby for regional acceptance of inclusionary zoning provisions.” In 2016, hundreds of Buffalo residents submitted comments supporting the adoption of inclusionary zoning as part of the City’s new Green Code. In passing the Green Code, Common Council members promised to promptly take up and pass inclusionary zoning legislation. This brief presents data demonstrating Buffalo’s need for such legislation

ZONING DESIGN FOR HAND­WRITTEN NUMERAL RECOGNITION

Microsoft, Motorola, Siemens, Hitachi, IAPR, NICI, IUF In the field of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), zoning is used to extract topological information from patterns. In this paper zoning is considered as the result of an optimisation problem and a new technique is presented for automatic zoning. More precisely, local analysis of feature distribution based on Shannon's entropy estimation is performed to determine "core" zones of patterns. An iterative region­growing procedure is applied on the "core" zones to determine the final zoning

New York City Zoning -- 1961-1991: Turning Back The Clock -- But With An Up-To-The-Minute Social Agenda

Since the last update over 30 years ago, there is a need to once again change our zoning laws. Over the years, societal concerns and priorities have fluctuated with the times and, as a result, exceptions have been made to the zoning regulations which reflect these changing social interests. The result is a Zoning Resolution which stands at 806 pages (and still counting). It is an ad-hoc, convoluted, chaotic non-plan for the City, held together by binders rather than a common vision. This essay examines the zoning history of New York City and concludes that a new Comprehensive Reassessment, which will guide future development in accordance with the needs and values of today\u27s society, is needed to unify the goals of city planning and to reinvigorate the potential effectiveness of zoning in New York City

Zoning on purposes as a contemporary alternative for zoning on land uses of open spaces in an urbanised context

The (mono)functional zoning in land use planning has already a long record of service and finds its roots in an historical political and societal ambition of separating functions and activities in space. But above all, the continuous success of this type of zoning is linked to the legal security it creates. Although a decrease in legal security still seems an invincible problem, the technique of functional zoning in spatial planning is increasingly being questioned. An alternative planning discourse of ‘open space as public space’ for instance, a planning discourse about open space fragments in an urbanised context developed in the context of my PhD-dissertation (Leinfelder, 2007 and 2009), seems incompatible with this functional zoning … but also three other alternative planning discourses about the relation between city and countryside, discussed in my dissertation, do not result in spatial entities that are inspired by land uses, but by differences in dynamics, environmental impact and meaning of places. Based on these observations, a ‘rediscovery’ of the zoning plan – as a ‘strategic’ zoning plan – seems necessary. The addition of ‘strategic’ indicates a more active, more realisation oriented and more selective approach than today’s comprehensive and passive functional zoning. The zoning in a strategic zoning plan is no longer related to the allocation of zones to one or more land uses, but to entities that refer as much as possible to the (societal) purposes for the open space involved. The name of these zones tries to express as much as possible the most relevant spatial characteristics of the entities desired for – concerning dynamics, vulnerability, meaning, … And the juridical rules related to these entities define the conditions in which – maybe yet unknown – spatial projects can take place without mentioning the land uses by name. In other words, development and management of space become increasingly dominant to the traditional allocation of space. Undoubtedly, also landscape as a holistic frame of integration is becoming of more and more importance in such zoning plans. The strategic zoning plan also has to be considered as a more indicative and temporary frame of reference for private and public actors through which the decision making about specific projects and measures can be coordinated – even when the choices at the moment of the decision are different than those at the moment of the design of the plan

Optimal Density for Municipal Revenues

The distribution of lot sizes and associated improvements affect property values. Hence, zoning affects municipal property tax revenues. If optimal lot size is inconsistent with the targeted zoning density in a community, municipal revenue can be increased through zoning change. This paper theoretically derives the optimal lot size that maximizes tax revenues as a function of the elasticities of improvement value and lot size prices with respect to density, and the elasticities of land and improvement demand with respect to lot size. Empirical hedonic pricing model estimates for a Michigan Community suggest that the optimal lot size for recently sold property is lower than current zoning on existing properties. The possibility that municipal revenue can be enhanced through greater zoning density hints of a cost associated with exclusionary zoning. Local units of government should therefore more seriously consider the fiscal implications of their zoning decisions as they pursue growth control.Optimal lot-size, municipal revenue maximization, zoning, hedonic pricing, Financial Economics,

Extending the automated zoning procedure to reconcile incompatible zoning systems

This paper concerns the problem of matching incompatible zonal geographies, for example in the context of comparing census outputs over time. The automated zoning procedure (AZP) proposed by Openshaw (1977) is reviewed and extended to permit its application to the intersection of two zonal systems. A population stress statistic is proposed which may be used in the extended AZP algorithm in order to maximise the match between two zonal geographies. An implementation of this approach is described, and illustrated by reference to UK Census dat