Zoning for Downtowns

Some planners feel an innovative approach to zoning may be sufficient to encourage renewal activities. As described in an editorial from Small Town magazine:

This country desperately needs an enlightened public policy concerning downtowns and their relationship to overall land use. Zoning must reflect the downtown's role as the community social center. Therefore, zoning codes need to begin the process of pulling multiple uses back downtown. For example, the code should say that government must stay downtown and that shipping must stay downtown. Also, downtown is where the movie theater and other entertainment businesses must locate. It is also the place for offices and for service businesses. Zoning should exclude these uses from other areas and it should do away with such designations as commercial highway strip, planned shopping center, etc. In our rush to modernize, we've forgotten the fundamental truth that people need a central meeting place. The old downtown served that function once. Nothing has ever replaced that crucial foundation for community in those places that destroyed their downtowns. The most important agenda item for all concerned citizens and public officials is not the sewer or water system, or the roads or the police. It is how to forge and maintain a special sense of community. The solution starts downtown.¹

SHOP Zone: Washington, D.C.

For buildings constructed within the SHOP zone, requirements were established to ensure a better mix of retail with the office functions. The zoning required at least 20 percent of the floor area of new buildings be either retail or service uses. This was nearly four times the typical amount for a new downtown building, and meant that for most both the ground floor and the second floor be given for retail. In the calculation of floor areas, however, department stores could count as triple, since they were considered very desirable uses, legitimate theaters counted double, and minority or displaced businesses counted 1¹/₂. The zoning also called for continuous retail at the street level, as well as regulating entrances and display windows. The SHOP zoning district ordinance also discouraged popular indoor atriums, since they were determined as not contributing to the vitality of the street.

This technique is a rigorous technique for using zoning to create mixed uses, and has met with resistance from developers who feel it is too intrusive on their rights, but it has been successful in restoring retail uses to this important downtown area.

Other downtown zoning...

Other cities have established specially zoned downtown districts similar to Washington, D.C. In Cincinnati, 60 percent of ground level frontage must be retail; this calculation excludes banks, travel agents, and airline ticket offices. In Bellevue, Washington, the code encourages the establishment of neighborhood businesses operated by in-town residents. San Francisco, which has an affluent downtown clientele, insists in its ordinance that a certain mix of retail be established for less affluent downtown workers. Orlando's ordinance states their similar requirements applies not just to new buildings, but applies as well to older structures undergoing a change in occupancy.

¹ "The World From Main Street." Small Town magazine. July-August 1991. p. 3.

Suggested other pages...

Revitalization Strategies	Functional Strategies