Key to the City, page 17
Frontage requirements, like height, help the town maintain continuity in the pedestrian experience. Walking along a sidewalk with gap-toothed development—say, a few charming brownstones next to a strip-mall parking lot—can be jarring. In Delray Beach, all buildings must sit within a tight range of the property line and must occupy between 75 and 100 percent of the width of the lot. Relatedly, the code eliminates side setbacks, meaning that each building can be as wide as the property itself, built from one side property line to the other. Together, these provisions prevent the incongruous development that we see in many other places, creating a parcel-by-parcel wall lining the street.
Importantly, the code also prevents the opposite: monolithic conditions can deaden a street. A building that exceeds 250 feet in length must provide a ten-foot-wide passageway for bikers and pedestrians to connect to alleys, streets, or parking lots behind the building. And it can’t have large “blank walls,” essentially exterior walls with no features, but rather must incorporate some kind of decoration or architectural detail—a vertical trellis with vines, say, or wall-mounted fountains, or public artwork. You might see these kinds of walls on the sides of a movie theater, performing arts space, or other large-interior volumes that repel the use of windows.
To add still more visual interest, Delray Beach delineates seven architectural styles after which property owners can model their buildings. This list captures the range of styles already on display in town and includes Art Deco, classical, Mediterranean, and “Florida Vernacular,” among others. Architectural guidelines separate from the zoning code further articulate the features of each style. While the code prohibits mixing styles, it fosters creativity within them, giving designers many options for rooflines, materials, colors, and fenestration.
A great shopping and entertainment street will almost always have lots of windows. People are curious creatures who enjoy previewing retail wares, watching a salon-goer get a haircut, and spying into a restaurant to gauge its look and crowdedness. Most of the establishments on East Atlantic Avenue already have large storefront windows, but to prevent a contrarian developer from declining to install them, the zoning code requires storefront windows covering at least 20 percent of all ground-floor wall area in every building on the avenue. And these windows must be “transparent”—no tinted or mirrored glass.
In Florida, pedestrians aren’t just looking for visual interest. They also seek shade. Delray Beach’s code sets guidelines for the installation of both awnings and arcades on East Atlantic Avenue and requires parking lots, plazas, and parking garage roofs be at least a third shaded. The code also specifies other, subtle details that a visitor might not notice but that contribute to the vitality of the streetscapes, like the lively variety of building widths. On East Atlantic Avenue, lots must be between twenty and seventy-five feet wide, which replicates the widths of the small- and medium-width lots already in place. These widths also effectively prevent big-box retailers, whose retail siting formulas require more frontage, from gobbling up the real estate on the avenue. In this way, zoning plays a defensive role for existing downtown businesses.
Amid these beneficial code provisions lurks one questionable decree: parking mandates. The city’s code requires up to 1.75 parking spaces per housing unit, plus one space for every 500 square feet of retail area, and between six and twelve spaces per 1,000 square feet of restaurant. Delray Beach would do well to delete this provision, strict enforcement of which could single-handedly undermine the many provisions that foster such a walk-friendly, mixed-use corridor.
Despite the onerous parking provision, the code appears to be working well, creating an appealing environment that helps promote patronage of local businesses. On our recent visit, we saw hordes of pedestrians browsing at shops, and we dined at a café with sidewalk seating. New projects seem to be fitting in nicely, too. The largest project to be permitted under the new code is Atlantic Crossing, a block-length development that will eventually contain six three- and four-story buildings, mostly in the Mediterranean and modern architectural styles. The development will include 343 housing units and roughly 80,000 square feet each of office and entertainment (shops and restaurants) space. The first phase of the project has produced a three-story structure that boasts awnings, arcades, and balconies on the East Atlantic Avenue façade, and another building behind, with two more nearing completion. Bermuda shutters and beachy colors visually connect the new construction with its neighbors. Using the slogan “Pedestrians Rule,” the developers seem poised to reinforce the sense of vibrant activity that Delray Beach’s leaders and planners set out to foster. Atlantic Crossing will bring hundreds of new people ready to stroll the Pineapple Grove Arts District, eat Cuban cuisine, and wander over to the municipal beach where my family and I started our walk.
For those interested in zoning, Delray Beach presents a paradox that’s important to understand. At first glance, its form-based code may seem to constrain creativity instead of unleashing it. But in reality it builds in flexibility, providing architects with limits within which they can inventively and fruitfully design. As Robert Frost once remarked in defense of traditional forms in poetry, you can’t play tennis without a net. Architectural styles that set basic rules don’t limit; they provide leeway for the creative mind. With clear guidelines, the form-based code has created a sense of certainty for property owners, raising property values. Most importantly, it creates a unifying sense of a place, one that is visually harmonious and easy to understand. Just as zoning can be crafted to ensure variety for commodity’s sake, so too can we zone for visual interest, to create or capture a community’s architectural essence.
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Tracing the Intracoastal Waterway from the Florida coast westward to the Texas coast brings you eventually to Galveston, a city of 53,000 people fifty miles southeast of Houston. Unlike Delray Beach, where the zoning code attempts to encourage delightful and complementary new construction, Galveston’s zoning code looks backward to preserve and enhance the old. The city occupies virtually all of Galveston Island, a slender barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico twenty-seven miles long and no more than two and a half miles wide. Incorporated in 1839, the “Queen of the Gulf” almost immediately boomed. Connected to railroads that crisscrossed Texas, Galveston’s busy port saw trade in cotton, grain, flour, sugar, tea, and fruit as well as immigrants arriving to the United States and craftsmen, clergymen, and tourists simply traveling the Gulf Coast. By the late nineteenth century, cosmopolitan Galveston had become one of the world’s wealthiest cities. Its primary commercial corridor, The Strand, hosted the most prominent businesses and earned the moniker “The Wall Street of the South.”
On September 8, 1900, all this changed. A hurricane obliterated the island, resulting in the deaths of more than 6,000 people—the deadliest disaster in U.S. history. The city responded as best it could, building a large seawall, raising the streets, and reconstructing at least 2,000 homes. But it never regained its status. Ships shifted to the Port of Houston and, in time, the banks, merchants, and producers followed.
In the decades since, Galveston’s fortunes have waxed and waned, but one constant has been its turn-of-the-century architecture, much of it intact to this day. Tourists frequent The Strand, five blocks of which are now designated a National Historic Landmark. The form nominating The Strand for this elite honor identifies forty-five buildings of interest, saying that “their preservation en masse … is of real architectural significance as a still extant visual segment of the business life of the latter third of the nineteenth century.” The popular styles represented include Greek Revival, Italianate, Gothic, High Victorian, and Beaux Arts, expressed in stuccoed brick, red brick, cast iron, and stone. Galveston’s annual Christmas festival, “Dickens on the Strand,” which draws tens of thousands of visits each December weekend it runs, uses these buildings as a backdrop to evoke Victorian-era England.
Though The Strand receives a lot of attention, the neighboring East End has equal appeal. Sprawling across its more than fifty blocks are hundreds of Victorians and Greek Revivals, built between the 1840s and the 1910s. A primarily residential area, the East End boasts strong historical associations with Galveston’s most prominent citizens. Even before the neighborhood became a National Historic Landmark, it earned the distinction (in 1970) of being the first historic district designated by the City of Galveston itself. The Strand followed, and many other sites in the city. This background is important because of where zoning comes in: the Historical Zoning District Ordinance provides not only the mechanism for the designation itself, but also for the protection of designated resources.
To trigger historic protection, Galveston’s zoning code lays out a multistep rezoning process that starts with the city identifying landmarks to protect and ends with the assignment of these landmarks to a historic overlay district. The first step is typically initiated by the property owners, who apply for a district to the city’s landmark commission. That commission reviews a variety of factors, including whether the site has an association with significant historical events or people, displays distinctive architectural characteristics, or contains important historical information. If the answer is yes, then the planning commission and city council review the application. Only after the council votes to proceed with the rezoning will the proposed district be assigned to the historic overlay district. Once this happens, the underlying district to which the land was originally assigned remains in effect. It controls the allowable uses, while the historic overlay introduces additional regulations for construction.
Before a property owner can change anything significant about a site in the historic overlay, she must ensure the change will work well with the historic architecture. And so she must apply for a “certificate of appropriateness”: a written finding that the city has deemed any proposed alteration, relocation, or demolition appropriate considering all relevant factors. To help officials make this determination, the city has developed design standards, which generally track widely accepted national standards for the rehabilitation of historic properties. These standards offer specific suggestions for different types of buildings, including materials, proportion, roof pitch, and more. The landmark commission has allowed public comment to shape them through public meetings and revisions, with the result that, in general, the standards do not bar new ideas, but rather reward creativity within guardrails that ensure that the new honors the old.
Galveston’s code does not merely provide for alterations. It also charts a path, albeit a difficult one, for property owners looking to demolish a structure. While the code bars demolitions of buildings that contribute to the historic significance of the district, it can make exceptions in cases where the owner would suffer an economic hardship from a denial. (Just over half of local governments with historic regulation have similar provisions.) The code specifies three necessary components of an economic hardship: the inability to realize a reasonable rate of return on the property, the inability to adapt it for a use that would offer a reasonable rate of return, and the failure over the last two years to find a buyer or tenants that would have enabled such a return. Owners must show the commission that they have tried to rehab, lease, and sell the property; they might also demonstrate that they pay high taxes, have outstanding liens (legal claims by creditors on the property), cannot afford required maintenance, or have a mortgage that exceeds the value of the property. The applicant must provide evidence of “good faith efforts” to work with local preservation groups and other interested parties, and must provide evidence of these efforts to the commission. Property owners must also sign affidavits, submit financial information, obtain appraisals, and provide a documented rationale for the demolition. Owners only get one bite at the demolition apple each year: The city refuses to accept repeat applications for a demolition within a year of a denial.
Given these procedural hurdles, it’s easy to see why so few buildings in Galveston’s historic neighborhoods have been torn down. The East End has been preserved so well that I decided to celebrate my fortieth birthday there, vainly hoping that I could remain so well preserved in years to come. My family rented a two-story charmer on Sealy Avenue. What delighted us as much as the surrounding architecture were the “tree sculptures” that artists have forged out of dead trunks. Across the neighborhood, squirrels, dogs, birds, warriors, and maidens emerge, in fairy-tale fashion, from random front and side yards. These sculptures are a metaphor for the way Galvestonians treat their community. Honor what came before by bringing it new life.
Together, Delray Beach and Galveston illustrate how code drafters increasingly use zoning to guide the aesthetics of buildings using measures that go well beyond zoning’s baseline function of regulating land uses. Across the United States, other communities appear to be doing likewise. The seven hundred places with form-based codes constitute about 2 percent of the 39,000 local governments around the country. As for historic preservation, I have published a census of over 3,500 localities—about 10 percent of all local governments—that regulate historic districts, either through zoning or through stand-alone historic preservation ordinances. Both figures continue to rise, as more and more communities figure out how to harness land use controls to curate our experience.
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At first glance, Las Vegas’s glitzy, mid-century-mod Strip couldn’t seem more unlike Galveston’s East End. Infamous for its garish and colossal signage, a place where colors, lights, shapes, and sizes surprise and delight, the Las Vegas Strip is the West’s sprawling answer to New York’s Times Square. With four miles of hotels, casinos, performance venues, and restaurants on Las Vegas Boulevard, the Strip offers retirees, bachelor partiers, and conferencegoers alike an entertainment oasis in the desert. Unlike Times Square, which packs a compact, vertical punch of billboards and moving displays, the Strip metes out its trademark imagery in linear fashion, best seen by car. This assortment at first reads as visual chaos, with no semblance of order. Yet the order is the chaos, its motley elements collectively if somewhat haphazardly communicating an almost exuberant joy in the possibilities of expression. Zoning can—and does—play a role in perpetuating this joy and in protecting this type of bighearted expression. Like Galveston’s charming historic neighborhood, Las Vegas’s immortal, immoral Strip also turns out to make deft use of aesthetic zoning.
The Strip became a tourist destination in the 1940s, when the first casinos popped up. They offered an alternative to other gambling centers, like Atlantic City (and, incidentally, Galveston). As new casinos and hotels were constructed, each seemed to outdo the last in both architecture and signage. Creativity in signage design was at its peak in the 1940s through 1960s. Classics still standing include the futuristic Googie-style “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign, the Hacienda Horse and Rider, and the Normandie Hotel’s “Elvis Slept Here” sign. You can see many other remnants of the signage from this era at the Neon Museum, north of downtown.
For decades, cultural elites and aesthetes derided the Strip for its gaudy showiness. Then came Learning from Las Vegas, a seminal 1972 monograph by three architectural theorists. Chronicling and assessing the architecture, symbols, and signage of the Las Vegas Strip, it took the boulevard seriously as an urban form, even comparing it to the monuments of Rome and Greece. The study celebrated the Strip’s appeal to the common man and encouraged the architectural community, and the world beyond, to reconsider their snobbish condemnation. At the time, Las Vegas was home to the longest and highest signs in the world—as well as some of the boldest. As the authors of Learning from Las Vegas explain, “Signs in Las Vegas use mixed media, words, pictures, and sculpture—to persuade and inform.” And a sign in Vegas, they hardly needed to say, is also used to entertain—a multifunctional device that “revolves by day and becomes a play of lights at night.” Learning from Las Vegas viewed the Strip hermeneutically, as the scene of competition between signs, or even signs and buildings, with some signs as large as buildings—and some buildings serving as signage. The book’s publication burnished Vegas’s image, encouraging readers to see the Strip not merely as tacky kitsch but as a uniquely American place, as fascinating as it is glitzy.
How exactly is this uniqueness managed and maintained? In its totality, Las Vegas Boulevard extends for close to fifty miles, weaving in and out of the city limits. The four miles of the boulevard with the highest concentration of character-defining signage actually sit not inside the City of Las Vegas but within unincorporated Clark County. The county’s zoning map puts most of the Strip in the Limited Resort and Apartment District, which aims to “provide for the development of gaming enterprises, compatible commercial, and mixed commercial and residential uses.” Some of the Strip sits within a district with general commercial purposes. In addition, as of 2019, county officials overlaid most of the Strip with the Mixed Use Overlay District, which aims to permit “a highly concentrated and intense development of mixed residential, commercial, employment, and recreational uses typical of high intensity central business districts.” With three districts governing this stretch and its signage, the county does not make it easy to understand the Strip’s desired outcomes.
It would seem natural for the zoning code to embrace the large, festive signage already existing on the boulevard, and in fact for freestanding signs, the code does enable larger sizes, allowing them to grow as linear street frontage grows. But the code limits other types of signs. For example, projecting signs max out at just 32 square feet in most districts. Animated signs are allowed in only a portion of the Strip, and only up to 150 square feet. A commercial complex or resort hotel can have only one revolving sign and must forgo constructing any other freestanding sign. Perhaps oddest of all, given the Las Vegas tradition, one portion of the code bans neon (other than “accent lighting limited to no more than 25% of a sign’s area”) as well as reflective lamps or bulbs. Some of the signs for which Las Vegas is best known probably couldn’t be put up under the county’s current zoning code.
