Key to the City, page 1
To the people of the city of Hartford
Contents
Introduction
PART I. VIBRANT ECONOMIES
1. The Goldilocks Zone
2. The Magic of Makers
3. Cultivating Creativity
4. Rock Around the Clock
PART II. THE ESSENTIALS
5. Making It Home
6. A Bigger Menu for Movement
7. You Reap What You Zone
PART III. DESIGNING FOR DELIGHT
8. The Force of Nature
9. Completing the Street
10. A Curatorial Approach
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Introduction
Eighty-nine degrees and no breeze meant that the smell of oil and chicken permeated the air. The unshaded asphalt took on the cloying essence of the fryer. We had stopped in front of Popeyes, partway through our tour of the Upper Albany neighborhood.
It was the summer of 2014, and neighborhood leader Denise Best had been kind enough to spare a few hours to take me around. A few weeks earlier, I had become chair of the city’s planning and zoning commission, the public body that determines what can be built where in Connecticut’s capital city, Hartford. As a law professor deeply enmeshed in land use research, I had spent years studying how zoning shapes our lives, but this was the first time I had the chance to apply that knowledge. Our family had lived in Hartford’s South Downtown for four years, and I knew that neighborhood well. But I hadn’t explored other parts of the city nearly enough. So I asked Denise and other residents across our fifteen neighborhoods to show me what they loved about the places they called home, and what they wanted to change.
Denise’s tour started with some highlights: Scott’s Jamaican Bakery, a mainstay for our West Indian community, one of the largest in the United States. The Albany Avenue branch of the Hartford Public Library, a well-maintained haven for neighborhood families. The Artists Collective, offering training in the performing and visual arts with a focus on the African diaspora. She also showed me areas that promised big development opportunities: the Bravo shopping plaza, slated for a cosmetic facelift; two acres of cleared land at a prominent intersection; and a one-acre lot with a deteriorated former police substation that could be transformed for new public use.
And then there was the Popeyes. There had been a fast-food joint on the site since at least 1970, but in the years since 1986, when Denise bought her home—a charming century-old two-family—conditions had deteriorated. She was fed up with the cars idling and honking in the drive-through line and the trash routinely deposited in her yard around the corner. She also pointed out the wide curb cuts, which put pedestrians at risk of careless drivers—a fear confirmed by statistics, as Albany Avenue topped the state’s pedestrian casualty charts. All in all, the Popeyes was an eyesore for the neighborhood. Neither Denise nor I had anything against fried chicken. But it was easy to see why this place detracted from the community’s day-to-day quality of life.
As Denise pointed out, the restaurant was just one of many such less-than-optimal places lining the commercial spine of her once-thriving neighborhood. So was the Mr. Sparkle Car Wash, a wholly asphalted corner lot with six wash-it-yourself stalls, a jarring contrast to a handsome home with a two-story porch next door. And so were the four gas stations within about a dozen blocks, each producing toxic smells and too much traffic.
Exploring the avenue that summer day, it was hard not to feel anguish over what might have been—in fact, over what once was. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Hartford had ranked as one of the richest cities in the country. The insurance industry, innovative manufacturers like Elizabeth Colt and Albert Pope, and literary illuminati like Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe had given the city economic and cultural prominence. Back then, Hartford was renowned both for its commercial bustle and for its stately elegance. “Of all the beautiful towns it has been my fortune to see, this is the chief,” Twain enthused upon his first visit. “You do not know what beauty is if you have not been here.”
The past half-century-plus, however, had been unkind. The dawn of the automobile led to the rise of the suburbs and a shift at multiple levels of policy priorities that favored those suburbs over cities. In Hartford as in other American cities, civil-rights protests in 1968 after the death of Martin Luther King created lacerating images of inner-city damage, images that accelerated White flight, leaving behind neighborhoods that were increasingly segregated. Banks refused to lend. Businesses closed. More people moved away. Urban residents suffered from decisions that favored commuters. On Albany Avenue, property owners demolished three- and four-story ornate brick or wood buildings with abandon, putting gas stations, car washes, strip malls, and drive-throughs in their places. These types of businesses were convenient for drivers speeding to and from the wealthy western suburbs. Indeed, anyone visiting Albany Avenue today might quake a bit wanting to cross the avenue in certain places. However, these businesses generated little tax revenue for the city, and they tended to be owned by out-of-towners who neglected the needs of the community. (The owner of the Popeyes lot lives in a million-dollar home in another state.) Just a mile south, Mark Twain’s neighborhood has fared a little better, managing to retain a greater share of the architecture he admired. Still, across the street from his old home sits a one-story strip mall with a run-down parking lot running three hundred feet along Farmington Avenue. And following Farmington Avenue to the city line, you’d see a few gas stations and fast-food chains interspersed among the older buildings. The downgrading of Hartford is not just a matter of subjective perception, but a quantifiable reality. Connecticut’s capital is now one of the poorest cities in the country—an island of concentrated poverty in one of America’s wealthiest regions.
Of course, Hartford is not alone. Versions of its same story were playing out across the postwar United States, with such conspicuous similarity that one could be forgiven for thinking of urban decline as reflecting some natural process, ineluctable and inevitable. To be sure, the story does reflect broad evolutions and transformations in technology, demography, and industry. But that’s not the whole picture—and it would be wrong to view the changes in Hartford and other such cities fatalistically.
The devolution of Albany Avenue was not happenstance. It was dictated in large part by zoning laws that changed in the 1950s and 1960s and were then accepted for decades. Arcane zoning rules still in place the day I toured Upper Albany, for instance, would have prevented a property owner from rebuilding one of those gracious four-story brick buildings torn down a half-century ago, even if she had wanted to. Zoning set onerous parking requirements that resulted in more asphalt, less building and green space, and too many paved-over lots like the one we were sweltering in that July day. Zoning rendered impossible the lovely townhomes and apartment buildings that had graced the avenue in its heyday.
Even worse was the impact on health. In prioritizing cars and drivers, our city’s zoning code had effectively mandated the air pollution that made Hartford the asthma capital of Connecticut, and Upper Albany its neighborhood with the highest asthma rate. And as food options worsened—there is neither a sit-down restaurant on the avenue nor a grocery store selling fresh food—obesity rates skyrocketed. Today, Upper Albany has the highest rates of adults with diabetes (17 percent) and high blood pressure (44 percent) of any neighborhood in the city, which has some of the worst such health outcomes in the state. Overall, Denise’s neighbors have a life expectancy six years below the residents of Avon, a suburb just eight miles away. If you’re familiar with health disparities in America, it will not surprise you to learn that Upper Albany is predominantly Black and just 1 percent White, with a median household income of about $23,000, while Avon is 7 percent Black and Latino, with a median household income of about $131,000. And while zoning alone can’t account for this disparity entirely, it has demonstrably worsened it.
Why did Hartford condemn its own residents to this fate? Why did it adopt zoning policies that proved not only discriminatory but in some senses deadly? Looking back at the fractious events of the 1960s, one imagines city officials’ panicked efforts to keep major companies downtown and to cater to the White office workers who had fled to the suburbs. Yet by prioritizing the desires of those who had left the city, Hartford officials neglected the needs of the residents who remained. In the decades after, inertia may have resulted simply from inattention. Perhaps decision-makers felt reluctant to upend the settled expectations of property owners. At any rate, zoning changes, once made, went unexamined for decades. So even as attitudes toward central cities changed, and the standards and priorities of community planning evolved, Albany Avenue did not.
The history of zoning in the United States is rife with instances of racially invidious mischief. But one doesn’t have to assume malice or intent to explain the persistence of bad outcomes in the way we organize our cities. The paradox of zoning—the tragedy of zoning—is that it often starts out in a hopeful attempt to improve our cities and the lives we live in them. Then, all too often, it fails; it even does the opposite. Yet, when done right, zoning has the power to make all the difference for a community. Because zoning for good—for more vibrant economies, for greater household security, for more delightful experiences—is both achievable and necessary.
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By and large, people think of zoning as an often-bewildering set of rules enshrined in inscrutable maps and regulations. Except fo
The urge and need to differentiate uses in one’s surroundings—where to farm; where to build fires; where to locate waste; where to situate the sacred and conduct business and heal the sick, and so on—have shaped human society from the beginning. The earliest maps we’ve discovered, from China and Mesopotamia and Egypt, depict walls, temples, parks, plazas, and housing, as do later maps of the city-planning-obsessed Greeks and Romans. These maps not only showed what existed. Many also showed what could be, ancient graphics forming the template for growth to come.
Zoning codes are simply a modern means of codifying and enforcing our fundamental desire for ordering our world. Zoning as we know it today in the United States has a modern-day origin story. In part, it grew out of garden-variety municipal ordinances adopted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the hope of making development more orderly and protecting people from harms, known or perceived. Some pre-zoning land use regulations targeted potentially hazardous uses, like tanneries and slaughterhouses, separating these uses from residences and from nonhazardous commercial businesses. Cities passed ordinances shaping the design of signage, billboards, and theater marquees, an attempt to declutter the streetscape. Others established spacing requirements for new multifamily “tenement” dwellings, which aimed to reduce overcrowding and provide light and air to occupants. The prehistory of zoning is also rife with semicovert, racially invidious action, an excellent example of which is late-nineteenth-century laundry regulation in California, motivated by anti-Chinese sentiment.
Both the order-promoting and the discriminatory rationales behind pre-zoning land use ordinances were reflected in New York City’s 1916 comprehensive zoning code, the country’s first. At the turn of the twentieth century, explosive growth in that city—growth both reflected in and exacerbated by the construction of the underground subway system—yielded a built environment broadly viewed as chaotic. Business leaders became convinced that the city needed to adopt rules to guide ever-proliferating new construction, especially of skyscrapers, which were unrestricted in height and bulk. At the same time, they felt that the right rules might also curb the spillover social effects of haphazard city planning, including the mixing of different classes of people—such problems as the factory workers daring to use Fifth Avenue sidewalks, disturbing wealthy ladies out shopping.
In 1914, the state legislature granted the city zoning authority. Over a two-year period, the city drafted and enacted the Building Zone Resolution, consisting of a map and a thirteen-page-long text dividing the entire city into use, height, and area districts. That resolution received national attention, and other cities started to study whether to adopt zoning themselves. A zoning wave swept the country, and more large cities began to adopt their own codes.
Federal officials, including then–Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, took notice. Hoover and others came to believe that zoning could improve the economy by making development patterns more predictable. He convened an advisory committee, charging it with drafting a model state law for zoning, so that more legislatures could do what New York State had done for its biggest city. The resulting State Standard Zoning Enabling Act of 1924 gave broad powers to local governments to regulate the uses of buildings and land, and to regulate structures, too. These powers expressly allowed local governments to divide all land in their jurisdiction into districts—zones—and then to regulate land uses, structures, and lots in each of the districts. The act charged zoning with achieving the “purpose of promoting health, safety, morals, or the general welfare of the community.” Embedded in these words are the community-minded rationales used to justify pre-zoning land use regulation: to separate noxious uses, develop aesthetic standards, and promote public health. At the same time, it would be wrong to overlook the more sinister interpretations of the word “morals” in particular, given that so much zoning was deployed to maintain or promote racial and economic segregation through seemingly race-neutral provisions. As we will see, all of these motivations have had significant impacts on the way our cities look and work today.
The State Standard Zoning Enabling Act proved popular among state legislators and the political elite. By 1925, nineteen states had adopted the act, and by 1926 there were at least 425 municipalities with zoning. State legislators were further emboldened by the 1926 Supreme Court decision in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty, which upheld as constitutional a comprehensive local zoning ordinance dividing land into use-based districts. Within a few short years, all fifty states adopted state enabling acts, delegating zoning powers to local governments. Local governments could exercise these powers to adopt and administer zoning codes, consisting of text and a corresponding, color-coded map showing the district assigned to each lot (each piece of land, also called a parcel). Under those codes, which remain largely similar today, districts have a variety of names and purposes, but the most common are commercial, residential, industrial, open space, and mixed districts. Local governments can also create special districts for a specific kind of building or neighborhood, such as a hospital or museum district. Single-family homes are usually assigned to residential districts, while skyscrapers might be part of a commercial or downtown district. While these rules of thumb sound straightforward, most zoning codes are not. Using terms and jargon often difficult to decipher, code texts typically run about a hundred and fifty pages long. Maps, too, often lack legibility, with a smorgasbord of colors, hatch marks, and borders explained sometimes only by abbreviations for the names of zoning districts. To the layperson, zoning must seem impenetrable.
Yet its workings are everywhere around us. Zoning has become the most significant regulatory power of local government, and a central means by which cities attempt to shape their future. It dictates where and how we can build housing, factories, restaurants, parks, and shops. It limits how tall buildings can be. It defines how big a lot must be. It specifies tree plantings, stormwater management systems, parking, and sidewalks. Although zoning rules can’t ordinarily be applied retroactively, when they do apply, they are binding. You cannot open a new restaurant, expand your factory, or occupy your house unless you have first complied with zoning laws. Given this immense power, zoning has a huge influence on our economy, and on the very structure of our society. Hidden in plain sight, it governs the places we occupy and, by extension, our health, wealth, and happiness.
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What struck me most about my meeting with Denise, and my walks and talks over the years with so many other neighborhood leaders and local activists in Hartford, was how hard they had all worked to beautify their neighborhoods. They had identified problems and goals, and they had shown up at public meetings to fight for improvements in infrastructure and services. These were intelligent and thoughtful people, fierce advocates and defenders of their communities. Yet none of them had fully understood that Hartford’s zoning code was at least partly responsible for many of the structural problems they had identified over the years. Whether intentional or not, the code was cloaked in a shroud of mystery that obscured its culpability for and its contributions to these problems.
This book represents my effort to lift that shroud—because you have a right to know what it’s all about. The people of Hartford did, too. In the six years that followed my meeting with Denise, I recruited a new slate of commissioners who were committed to listening and working for change. Together, we engaged anyone who cracked the door open to a conversation, including business groups and religious organizations, individual property owners and children. We heard tremendous frustration with the way the city was developing. Dusting off the zoning code, we decided it was not only the culprit, but that it was irredeemable: we threw it out and wrote a completely new code. We redrew the zoning map to create districts that would transition Hartford from its industrialized past. We enshrined neighborhood priorities while fast-tracking the equitable, sustainable development that Hartford continues to need. We hired consulting planners who catalogued every parcel in the city and created a clear and user-friendly visual guide to the rules. In Denise’s neighborhood, we banned new fast-food joints, expanded two-family zoning to enable a revenue stream from rent for homeowners, required tree plantings for shade-starved heat islands, and ensured that new buildings would be compatible with historic architecture. In Twain’s old neighborhood, we blocked new drive-throughs—to the dismay perhaps only of an out-of-town landowner who wanted to build a McDonald’s so badly he sued the city five times before finally giving up. Citywide, we modernized outdated rules and pioneered innovations, including eliminating minimum parking requirements and freeing all housing from burdensome public hearings—both firsts for a city of Hartford’s size.
