So I've always said the most important part of zoning isn't what it says. It's reading between the lines and reading what it doesn't say. And in every community I worked in, the development attorneys and the smart developers know those liminal spaces between the words. Hello, everybody. Welcome to MIT Learn. Today in the studio we have Jeff Levine, an associate professor of practice of economic development and planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning here at MIT. And together, we are going to find out why this matters. But before we get to this, thanks for being here, Jeff. Oh, thanks. Thanks for having me.

And thank you for traveling on all the way here. Private longest, travel for the guest so far. I really appreciate it. For this show, we like to start with a grand question, so to speak, to, to frame what we're talking about today. And since we are talking about zoning, I am I'm curious what you have to say for for the future of, zoning and how we plan out our lands. Do we have a duty to think forward about that? And, like, how can we have a a positive cycle when we make zoning decisions? Sure. That's a great question. Just to give a quick overview, zoning is mostly an invention of the 20th century. And honestly, kind of an American invention.

The idea that you should separate land uses, which sort of instinctively makes sense to some extent. And then over the course of the 20th century, as people got more concerned about their investment in their home, in their neighborhood, it became more and more restrictive. And it became over time what I call like 2 or 3 sizes too small. Or in a less kind way, it metastasized. It became almost a cancerous version of its original intent. And so I think a lot of the discussion over the last 10 or 15 years has been abolish zoning. And this was a terrible idea. You know, we never should have done it. We should just get rid of zoning.

And I think, you know, someone who sort of tries to think of the nuance of it, I try to remind people, while there are some things that maybe shouldn't be located right next to each other, there is some basic planning goals, and maybe we can figure out what was good about it and try to cut out the cancerous parts and and make it a force for proactive planning. And in the last ten years, there's been a lot of action, mostly at the state level and various states around the country, to reform how cities and towns can do zoning, to try to sort of make it more responsive. So I think I think it's an important piece of overall planning.

I do think its importance has been overemphasized. I think it's become a solution to everything for people. You know I don't I don't I don't like the color of that house across the street. Let's make it not allowed. Okay. And that's really not the intent of zoning. The zoning is to keep the pig farm away from you, or to make sure that if there is a big building near you, that the shadows aren't necessarily impacting your home garden in as much as possible, or your solar panels, again, trying to think sustainably. So I think there's a role for zoning, and I think most planners believe there is something in zoning that's good.

And we're in a mode right now, fortunately, where states are taking a good look at that and saying, well, what makes sense and zoning and what doesn't. So, for example, we shouldn't, we shouldn't say you can only have one household in a building, a single family home. We should say the building should only be generally feel a certain way and have a certain impact. And then within the walls of the home, you know, the American privacy idea of you can do what you want within your home. If you want to have two units in there, fine. And that's kind of the direction things are heading. And it's actually very promising.

There's a lot of things not that are not hopeful in this world right now, but I think the zoning reform movement has been very good and very thoughtful generally. And it has threaded that needle between abolish zoning or keep it the way it is. Everybody loves it, which, you know, is true for people who maybe already have a nice home and a nice place to live and a good job. But there are a lot of people who need housing or need jobs, and that's going to involve some changes to the way we think about zoning. Wonderful. Thank you for the so you mentioned this is an Am primarily an American invention. So, would you be able to give us a little bit of a history of how zoning became to be or also just what is zoning for the people that don't don't know, that aren't in America?

Sure, sure. So the the type of zoning I'm going to focus on is what's often called Euclidean zoning. And you'll learn why in a minute. There's actually a few different types of zoning that have emerged more recently. And those are actually part of the reform movements and our interesting ideas. Again, I'm not sure any one of them solves the problem, but it's good to add to the debate. So zoning was really created in the early 20th century. There were various versions of it in the late 1800s and then New York, and I think it was 1916, created sort of the first basic what, in retrospect, is a zoning ordinance that says buildings and uses have to be meet certain standards.

The big change happened, in the 1920s, the federal government created what was called the standards. So State Zoning Enabling Act. That said, here's a model of how to do zoning and of course, model, you know, everybody sort of cut and pasted it or whatever they did before computers because this was the model. So a lot of zoning through the 20th century followed that state zoning enabling Act. There was also a very important Supreme Court decision in Euclid, Ohio, which is what it's called Euclidean zoning that upheld the right to zoning as a police power of the state. The argument was, you can restrict what I do, but you have to pay me for it.

And the Supreme Court said, no, actually, there's a public sort of health, safety and welfare reason to have zoning, and it's basically okay to have zoning. And so after the races, a lot of state cities and towns went, particularly in the post-World War Two era, and with auto oriented development and the rise of the single family home and home mortgages being protected, by federal protections, a lot of that zoning became single family zoning. You can only have a single family home on your parcel, and the parcels might be fairly large, because we don't want to see a lot of development in our city, is that was often the philosophy, particularly in suburban areas where people bought their single family home and they wanted to make sure there was nothing but single family homes around them.

So this became very, expanded in the 50s and 60s. You start to see a lot of zoning ordinances passed in the middle of the 20th century. And then in the 70s, as people became concerned about the environment, and understandably so. There were a lot of responses to that. But one of them was to actually make zoning even more restrictive and say, you need an even bigger lot for your parcel now, because we're trying to we don't want the environmental impacts of various developments. And I think in retrospect, it actually caused a worse problem than it solved in terms of the environment, because as we became aware of climate change and what driving does to our culture and what it does to us personally, the impacts of that land use pattern actually probably have more environmental impacts than what it was trying to solve, which was don't take down trees, you know, try to minimize our impact on the Earth instead by putting everyone in a single family home on a one acre lot, we increase that impact.

So I think in the late 80s and early 90s, there was a realization that what was called smart growth made sense, which is we should sort of put our development in places where it makes sense and just not allow development in other areas to preserve, for example, farms that were becoming single family homes. So a couple of things that came out of that one was called performance zoning, which was a little bit of what I mentioned earlier, which is let's look at the impacts of what you're doing and not necessarily what you're doing. So how many car trips do you produce? You know, what are your impacts on your neighbors?

Instead of you can only have this one use and never really fully took off. But the concept became really important in future zoning. Another thing that came out of that area was called form based code. Form based code is a really interesting way of looking at zoning. Which basically says, first off, the most important thing is how you view how the buildings look and feel from the street, what they call the public realm. Because when you're on a public street, that's what really matters. What do you see? What does it feel like? What are its impacts on the street? And then form based code takes those streets and actually basically says, this is really what the building should look like on this street and almost redesigns them and says, this is the pattern of uses we want of looks we want to see on these streets.

And as for uses, actually form based code often says, well, we don't really care about the uses. We care about the esthetics of what it looks like, the feeling it has and the impacts it has. So borrowing a little bit from performance based zoning form based code became very popular. And so there are a lot of communities that have tried to adopt pieces of it. It works really well in some contexts. It works well in new areas where there's no development because you're kind of creating a pattern. It works well in places where the patterns really clear and maybe has sort of monoculture. In some ways, you know, like a downtown where, you know, what the buildings look like and you know, roughly how tall they are.

It's challenging and other places, in my experience, because zoning is about more than just what things look like and the feel from the public space. There are true impacts, of various uses. So you often see form based code kind of adopting pieces of Euclidean zoning on the, on the slide, sort of almost. But the idea is really important, which is, let's say, what we want things to look like, not what we don't want things to be like. The challenge is if you just do a form based code, you have to be sure that those buildings are actually buildable. And, you know, government doesn't generally build buildings.

The private sector does. So are these buildings financing? Well, can they rent the spaces out? Can they sell the condos? Are the materials realistic for the price point that they have? So the best form based codes in the best zoning in general does think about the private market and doesn't just say, well, if you can't build it, I guess you can't build anything but tries to figure out what's realistic to build and how it accomplishes the goals of the community and find sort of that sweet spot without being too restrictive. Do you find that there's a lot of mismatch between the private sector and what say, policymakers would want out of zoning, and it would that be the driving reason why people might have a bad taste when they think about zoning sometimes?

Sure. I think it depends on the community. Yeah. I think the best communities, you know, have think about what the development community wants when they think about zoning. And it doesn't mean just tell us what to write and we'll write it. It means having a focus group with developers. It means sitting down and saying, can you share me? Can you share your numbers with me? Confidentially, as much as feasible so I can understand at least what you will and won't be able to build under a certain zoning scenario. And with that sort of conversation, you can often find a middle ground. So, for example, you might decide you don't want buildings over five stories tall.

And a developer may say, but, with wood construction, I can go up to seven storeys with a concrete base, and I need to go to that maximum in order to pay for this. And you might say, well, okay, seven's not that far off from the number that I'd like. I can go to seven as long as I don't go to 20. And so often you find you're making those compromises or you're saying everything needs to be better made out of brick. That's not economically feasible. Okay, what about if the fronts have to be made out of brick? Where where the public realm is? A lot of communities don't do that interaction, and it's actually fairly time intensive.

But that's how you get the best zoning is by consulting, not just with community members who are really important because they're the ones you're doing it for, but also the people who might build the future you want to build in your community. And I think we all know about the challenges with housing in many parts of the country and the pressure to build more housing. So you can sort of let it happen to you somehow, or you can proactively plan for it and have it fit your plans as much as is feasible. Yeah. So you, we're, I would say a key part of the, the Portland, 2030 plan for, building and, and a lot for that that city, especially with zoning.

What what did you see as the, the ways that works to engage the community to get those conversations going? And, what if there are anything novel that you think that you'd like to highlight for housing affordability and the plans that are in there? Sure, sure. Yeah, yeah. So this was our comprehensive plan, you know, often do a comprehensive plan, and it's it's kind of like your master guide, your high level view of all sorts of issues transportation, the environment, the economy, housing, public finance, which is a really important part of this. And so that was our first attempt to do a comprehensive plan for the city.

The previous one had gotten fairly old, and it's good to do one periodically. What was what I would say is the most novel piece of doing that plan was that we actually decided to basically do it all in-house with our existing city staff. It's very common to hire a consultant to do a comprehensive plan, and I don't think that's inherently a bad thing. But we decided that it was important enough and that the city was engaged enough, its residents, and that we understood the issues well enough that we were going to do as much of it as we could with our city staff. And I could do a long sidebar about the the benefits of that in terms of office management and, and worker contentment, because you're actually doing the planning.

You're not just managing people doing it. But the most important part of that is we could we knew who to reach out to in the community to get started. And we also had a lot of enthusiasm for doing it. So we went to the high schools. And one of the exercises we did was we ask high school students, it's January 1st, 2030, which at the time seemed like a long way away. Yeah. The front page of the Portland Press Herald. It's good news what's in it. And so they did these headlines. They said, you know, homelessness and abolished as of yet December 31st, 2029. You know, housing is more affordable in Portland. The trails are complete.

You know, whatever they public transit is improved. And so it was great to hear from people who are going to be the future adults in the community. And then, of course, we reached out to the folks who are adults in the community and the neighborhood groups. I'm not sure we learned as much from them as we as as we needed as we could, because we already knew how they viewed things. I mean, they're, you know, sometimes disparagingly called the usual suspects. But, you know, we like working with them, but they represent one viewpoint. And then we reached out to the development community to understand what their interests were.

And really what came out of it was a pretty organic plan that had a broad level of buy in generally. And and it's been referred to frequently. They're getting started with a new plan now because it's been a while, and it's amazing to me how well, it's, it's done. And, and on housing, one of the things challenges we had is Portland has a serious housing shortage, and affordability crisis. It's a victim of its own popularity. You know, it's it's hard to be upset about it being popular. But honestly, if you lived there your whole life and you're being priced out, you're sort of sad about it. I mean, you say, I don't care if the restaurants are good, I can't afford to live here anymore.

So trying to address affordability and housing supply, but then also trying to do it in a way where goals were, I wouldn't say realistic because that sounds too negative, but achievable. So we set a goal of a certain housing production level over the next ten years, and it was lower than what the housing advocates would have liked to have seen. It's honestly lower than the need might ideally be, but we thought it was a realistic goal. And that goal has been met or exceeded pretty much every year. And that feels good because it feels like we set forth a vision and a strategy that then could be implemented through zoning, through public investment, through private investment, and with all the ups and downs of the economy, we generally been able to do it.

Portland still really expensive. I think it's these some of these problems are unsolvable. And I don't mean I don't mean that they're taking the edge off them isn't important, but there's only so much you can do about the market. And when people like a place like Boston or Cambridge or Portland, it's going to get more expensive. Well, that's good to hear. With the the housing affordability, what were some of the the levers in in zoning or related to that that sure really weren't. Yeah. Good question. I mean, I think a lot of advocates say the first thing to do is to get rid of the zoning. Okay. And I wouldn't go that far.

I do think there are a number of ways you can make the zoning more flexible. So in Portland, they legalized four units on every lot. They reduce minimum lot sizes, they reduce parking requirements, and they reduce things like setbacks to buildings that seem very arcane. But when you're a developer, really matter because they change how much you can build. And I think those things help. It's one tool to get rid of unnecessary regulatory barriers, and it's sort of a free tool. You can do you can add value to people's property by rezoning it. So it's important I will say it doesn't solve the problem, if construction is still really expensive, if there are other local ordinances, for example, Portland has a pretty strict rent control ordinance as well as, pretty strict what's called inclusionary housing ordinance that says a certain percentage of units on a site have to be affordable, both very well meaning ordinances, but they do affect what developers are willing to do, because at the end of the day, developers need to make money.

We're in we're a capitalist economy. Whether we think we are an auto wannabe, developers need to make money, and even more importantly, their investors need to make money. Because when you're a developer, it's not just your money, it's your investors money. And an investor can invest in your housing development, or they can put money into a startup or into the stock market. So you're competing with things that aren't housing. And that's where some of the other tools come in, for example, public financing, if you want to see affordable housing, have a robust program for public housing finance. So in Portland, we created the Affordable Housing Trust Fund.

It's now called the Jill Design Fund after a former city councilor, and that has helped fund affordable housing in the city and also help make projects work that may be getting other public funding, like from the state, but still have a gap because Portland's more expensive than the rest of the state. So taking proactive actions in terms of not necessarily going into the development business, but realizing that you're financing is an important part of it can also help a lot. And I think that's that's been important to get people outside that zoning bubble. If we just get rid of zoning, suddenly there'll be enough housing for everybody.

That's just I just don't think that's true. So Portland for our, global listeners, is a city in the state of Maine, in United States. And we're using code a lot for form based code. And code is just an interchangeable term for zoning. In this context. Yes, yes. Okay. That's something that's, I think more widely felt right now is after the Covid 19 pandemic, a lot of these high rise office buildings and everything are now empty or only partially being used. And, there might be a driver for companies to keep holding that real estate, but is that is that a zoning conversation? Because I think a lot of people would see that empty space and say, well, why can't I have an apartment there?

Yeah. Why can't there be a store? Yep, yep. That is sometimes a zoning conversation. I always encourage communities around the world to look at restrictions on, for example, housing downtown. Traditionally, cities and towns were nervous about allowing too much housing downtown because they wanted their downtown to be a commercial center. And then that makes sense. But in a situation like this where there's built stock that's sitting unused, it might be worth taking a look at. And I would also argue, given the changes in the global economy, that housing downtown is more important than ever, because with the other thing that happened during Covid is people learn to work remotely and the hybrid work schedule.

And I don't think we're getting rid of that anytime soon. In order for the businesses that serve downtown, in order for the parks and all the things that happen downtown to continue to feel vibrant, you can't rely on the 9 to 5 in rush of workers. And even that had its downsides. For example, Hartford in Connecticut was notorious for feeling empty on the weekends because now I live downtown, so I'm a big fan of doing more housing downtown as a way of helping to respond to the fact there are just going to be fewer office workers downtown, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. It could also help address our housing shortage.

Again, it's not going to solve the problem by itself. Particularly for office buildings that have been built since the 1970s, they're often built with a very large floor plate. They're built to be office buildings. They're very hard to convert into housing. One of the many things that's great about historic office buildings or any historic building is they're very adaptable, so they tend to have smaller floor plates. They tend to be more suited to housing. Some of them may have been housing in the past. So if you have an historic building you may have an easier time turning it into housing. With the large footprint office buildings.

It's possible. It's another way in which, communities need to be flexible because they may end up with apartments around the outside where there's windows in this sort of space on the inside, they don't know what to do with and uses that traditionally were seen as bad for downtown, like self storage. Should be considered in those dead spaces because you want people. You want the owner to get some money off that space. You may have people who wouldn't mind having self storage right nearby, and the goal of banning self storage, which is we don't want these dead spaces downtown. If you say it's just in the interior where there's no windows, it's not really going to have that impact.

So there's a project that I worked on a little bit in, when I was in Portland, Maine, about where one of the issues was an old hospital and had that space on the inside, and the zoning had to be tweaked to allow that to be storage space. So it's not as simple as, let's just allow housing. All these office buildings will convert. There's real challenges with a lot of those buildings, particularly the more recent ones, but I think it's a good thing. And I think downtown housing is great for communities. And you go around the world and there's a lot more downtown housing generally than there is in the United States.

It's it's interesting that you bring up the historic housing and or historic buildings in downtown would be more, apt to convert into these more mixed use spaces. What you alluded to it, but what are some of the main issues with, say, just a new age office building being flipped into something else? Sure. Well, I mean, certain things, like there's a lot of windows and maybe too many windows for housing. You may want some privacy. Sure. And they don't necessarily open. So are you going to retrofit some of them to open? Are you going to make it so that the HVAC is good for housing, which is different than it being good for office space, where it's the it's just a different standard.

With energy efficiency, are you going to make sure that every circulates enough if the windows don't open? So those are definitely pieces of the challenge. Honestly, a lot of those buildings aren't built as well as they could be anyways, so buildings from the 70s may be reaching some very serious, needs in terms of upgrades. Whereas that is, it can also be true of older historic buildings, but honestly, they tend to they tend to age better. It would partially because things were built better then and partially because materials were cheaper then. So they were like, oh, just put another layer of brick on there, like, you know, or, you know, my friend of mine reminded me, like houses used to have slate roofs.

When she took the slate roof off you, you gained all this load back on this building because you don't have a slate roof anymore. And slate is really heavy. But buildings in the 70s and 80s into the 90s were built as cheap as possible. And and it they can be challenging sometimes the answer may actually unfortunately be to demolished and replace them. And I think I think that's not off the table when you think about downtown revitalization. Is zoning one of the the core ways potentially to dictate what types of materials get used in, in new construction or is that a totally different policy? Yeah. So building codes tend to deal more with what are things built out of, what are the standards.

You know, how many staircases do you need? How often do they need to be open windows or things like that? Zoning does talk about it a little bit. There are often design standards and zoning. There's often things like setback requirements. So the New York zoning ordinance I referred to from 1916 was very famous for having what are called step back requirements. And that's why the skyscrapers in New York tend to taper, as you know, the like think of of the Empire State Building. And that was designed to keep more light into the streets. So thinking about those things, a lot of them make sense even for housing.

But sometimes there are standards that maybe are too restrictive. A lot of innovative materials are coming up. There's a lot of panel construction now. Do we really want everything to be a brick? Does it have to be brick? I mean, brick is nice, but maybe you say brick should be on the first two floors, where because 90% of your experience of the street is in the first two floors anyways, and maybe you are more flexible of the upper storeys. Maybe you, you you you start to become a little more in terms, open about what is the outcome I'm trying to achieve here. I'm trying to achieve an active and attractive streetscape.

That doesn't mean I need to list for materials and everything has to be built out of them. For example. So you mentioned zoning in some cases being too restrictive for for some developments. What are ways in this listeners don't you don't do this, but what are ways to get around, zoning in these, these situations? And how have you seen maybe larger or smaller entities, do that. Yeah. So I've always said the most important part of zoning isn't what it says. It's reading between the lines and reading what it doesn't say. And in every community I've worked in, the development attorneys and the smart developers know those liminal spaces between the words, for example, they may know there's a footnote on page 74 that gives them relief from setbacks under certain circumstances.

I worked in a community where setbacks could be smaller if you had what was called a counterbalancing amenity, and that term wasn't defined that well. So they they would come in and say, well, here's a counterbalancing amenity. And it actually gave the city, the town boards, the ability to give that relief when they kind of wanted to. On the other hand, in some ways it was too subjective because if you want to show it in a setback, you saw it in the setback, you know, but there's a lot of things like that where, where, you know, ways to work around the code. And the only development that often happens, happens around the code.

Here in the state of Massachusetts, the state Zoning act has language that says if you have a building that already violates a setback, you can increase that violation, without getting a variance. If you go to the boards and get what's called a less stringent level of review called a special permit, and as a result, it's this weird thing where a building that already violates a setback can sometimes do things that a building that doesn't can't. And it's this weird thing that doesn't entirely make sense. But communities have been able to use it because our build, our cities are very built out around here in Boston to actually allow growth and change to happen in a way it wouldn't otherwise.

Is it the best way to do it? Probably not, but it's, it's a workaround or a, you know, a way to make things feasible that wouldn't be otherwise. To that one. Why not make zoning make sense then? Sure. Yeah. And I think a lot of communities are trying to do that. Let's not rely on these workarounds. Let's say what we want to say. Yeah. And one challenge with that is that people in the community have a really hard time with change. And that's not a criticism. As humans, we just have a hard time with change. And when you've put your life savings into your home, you're particularly sensitive about what might impact it.

So you might be scared if someone wants to put a tall building across the street from my house, that's going to ruin my property values. Or it's going to put shadows on me or there's going to be too much traffic. So having those conversations and helping people understand that that's not the goal and that also that won't be the outcome if it's done well, takes a lot of time. You're also not going to satisfy everybody. You're still going to have a lot of resistance to comprehensive zoning reforms, but a number of communities are doing it. And the challenge, like I said, is that cities and towns are really strapped for cash right now.

And it's not a cheap endeavor whether you hire staff to do it in-house or hire a consultant. So it's not it's not as easy as, oh, I can just rewrite the zoning on the weekend. Particularly if you do it right and have the outreach that's important to various people before you do it. But I will say there's a number of communities that are rewriting their zoning kind of from scratch, sort of zero based zoning. And it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. I think it's a good it's a good step. But will it immediately change the built environment? The good news is it won't. The bad news is it won't. I mean, people say, well, you legalize four units, suddenly every house around me is going to pop up, up, up, up, up. They're all going to be four units.

No, because people live in them. Like they don't want to immediately turn it into a four unit building. So this change is very slow and organic and that's both good and bad news. It means you have plenty of time to change things if they're not working out. It also means if you're trying to solve the housing crisis with rezoning, it's going to take a long time. So zoning is also involved in, land use for, you know, freeways or, the public transit. And that's those are shared resources. And do you think people have a misunderstanding about how that relationship works when you're and expanding a community, say, from an urban sprawl or, or, adding new parking lots.

You know, I mean, I think the important thing for people to understand, particularly about things like transit, is if you want your transit line that you like to succeed, you're going to have to allow more housing along it. It needs more users. It's becoming more and more expensive to run public transit. And, you know, transit systems need people who will use them, and it needs people who will practically use it, not just, oh, I wish more people would use transit, but you need to build enough housing that's near transit and enough jobs that are near transit, that it's actually a convenient option for people.

And that often is a zoning thing. You can often see what's called a transit oriented development overlay in a community, and it says you can have additional height along this cadre because we have a rapid transit line here, or we allow more uses along this corridor because it's rapid transit, highways. You know, honestly, I think this is different in every country in the world. But in the U.S., at this point, we're we're probably a little out of strategy when it comes to expanding our highways. I think that there are places that are widening highways, but I think the results are mostly bad for communities.

I think what's happening with highways that's sort of more promising is places are looking to reinvent those highway corridors by putting caps over them so that it's easier to walk over them. In the case of Boston, they put it underground, but that was phenomenally expensive. On the other hand, the benefits have been enormous, a big dig. Yeah. Seattle did a big dig, but did it on a less expensive price point because I think they learned to some extent from what Boston did, their waterfronts. Amazing. In San Francisco after the earthquake in 1989, they just took down the Embarcadero Freeway, along the waterfront.

And everyone seems to agree that the benefits have way outweighed the drawbacks. So I think most planners will agree that it's not necessarily that the highways are bad, but that our system in the US is to some extent overbuilt. Or at the very least should be redone to have less impacts on the communities it flows through. Highways were often built through areas of low income and minority residents, because that was the path of least resistance. And that wasn't fair then. It's not really fair now to those communities. So, so I think that, there are situations where new roads make sense, are often strategic, like connections between places that aren't connected.

But we have a pretty extensive interstate system in the US, so I'm not sure we look as planners to do much more. And I would also say most planners feel that although everyone complains about parking downtown wherever they live, there's usually enough parking in most downtowns, it's usually not managed well. And the solution to build more and more surface parking lots actually gets rid of that downtown you actually love. So think about the loss of a building every time someone builds a new parking lot, if you can manage it more practically, and that includes pricing it, right. That includes information about where to park, and that includes perhaps lots that may not be right downtown, and easy ways to get to where you want to go through shuttle systems or a nice walking connections.

So there are better ways to solve these problems than to just build more parking. So there's this concept of the 15 minute City. And you mentioned walking and everything. And in the US, since there's so much, so much dependance on driving places and in transit, maybe struggling to get popularity, how is zoning playing into making that happen? And so even just for sustainable development, what are some things that would, I guess, what's the argument for? Yeah. Yeah. So it's 15 minute cities have really gotten a lot of press. There are those who I would say are somewhat conspiracy theory oriented that say that it's a way to trap you in your neighborhood.

They're going to sort of put a fence around it, and you're going to be stuck in this 15 minute area. Planners are all about choice. So I don't see that as an option. But wouldn't it be nice to have the choice to be able to do those things within 15 minutes if you wanted to? And zoning can help in certain basic ways. You know, they used to be more corner stores. They used to be a corner store you could send your kid down to. You could run down to get milk. So often now in the US, if you want to get eggs or milk or orange juice, you get in your car and you drive to a convenience store. You just have to, so zoning can help by legalizing the corner store, by saying this is a use, it's allowed in all zones.

You can have a little store, not a not a Walmart, but a store that's like, you know, under 20 500ft², under 3000ft² and allow one of those to exist in walking distance to your community. Zoning can also or subdivision law can also make sure that sidewalks are built when new communities are built, so that people have that option to walk. Because so often there's no sidewalk. And so you say, well, corner store is right there, but there's no way I'm walking there. I'm not walking along the side of the highway. So little things like that can make a big difference. But partially it's just about offering those choices and saying, this is not just an area where only single family homes can be built.

We can allow a corner store, we can allow certain things that people need, and even things like supermarkets, which people generally like having supermarkets, but generally it's something you drive to, a well-designed urban supermarket. People are still going to drive to it and you should have some parking for it, but you can make it so a lot of people can walk to it. And there are examples in the Boston area. They're examples. I was in Phoenix not that long ago, and they had a downtown supermarket that had basically no parking, and it was packed. They were it was full of people, ten at night. So just allowing those uses that are not just residential in residential areas is a big step towards, you know, giving people those choices that I would say a 50 minute city gives them.

How else can these mixed use the corner stores, in, say, suburbia? How how does that change that experience? Is it is it positive to the the whole community in that way? I think most people find it positive. They appreciate being able to get those things they want without getting in the car, or if they get in their car just driving a short distance. I think there are worries about how it might impact the residential feel of an area. And I think the reality is those impacts are very minimal, and can often be addressed through a good review process. So things like a corner store in an area, in a residential area would probably still come for some review, either by city staff or city board, and you can have a good set of standards.

Where are you going to put your trash? Where are you going to get your deliveries? How can we make sure that you're not? You don't have a bunch of blinking lights everywhere that are distracting people. These are all manageable problems. But if you start by saying yes, you can have a corner store that goes a long way. So for the end of our talk, I like to ask, about misconceptions to start. So do you have any common misconceptions you'd like to clear up? Sure. I think there's a lot of misperceptions about the planning community out there. And I think some of them are somewhat self-imposed and some of them are not.

For example, I think oftentimes when people think about planners, they start with a negative perception based on a lot of the urban renewal movements from the mid 20th century that involve tearing down huge swaths of neighborhoods, building these huge highways, not listening to communities often there were impacts on low income and minority communities and, you know, blaming the planners. So in the 70s, there was a whole series of books that came out called things like After the Planners or, you know, very negative about the profession. And most famously, Jane Jacobs wrote about, you know, how communities should be planned more organically than was being done.

And I think over time, planning as a profession, both internally and externally took on that baggage of, oh, we really messed up in the 50s and 60s. Urban renewal was our fault and we own it and it's created. It created a very insecure sense of we need to be really careful. We need to walk really lightly. We need to let other people tell us what to do. I think that's based on a couple of misperceptions. One is, honestly, if you go back and look at what was happening during urban renewal, many of what I consider to be actually the planners at the time were opposed to it and said, this is a bad thing. We don't want to tear down the West end of Boston.

We want to keep it. They lost, you know, they lost to people who I would not necessarily consider mostly to be planners. They were mostly in the economic development business, and they were in the business of building big things through public works. They had access to federal money. But a lot of the planners in the 50s and 60s were saying the same thing the planners were saying in the 70s and 80s and today, which is we should help lift up communities. We should be very thoughtful about investment. We should renovate when possible. We should make sure the current residents are served. But we should also welcome new people.

And there's a way to thread that needle. So that's one piece I would say is a misperception. And it's funny because you go to any planning school in the world right now, certainly in the country, and they don't have pictures of Robert Moses or the people who built urban renewal and the laws. They have pictures of Jane Jacobs and the people who opposed urban renewal. And this is where I tell planners to be a little careful because I say, you know, you realize Jane Jacobs didn't really like planners that much because she also had this perception that they were involved in urban renewal more than perhaps they were.

So I think that's an important piece. The other piece that I think is a misperception is most often, when you think when most people think of planners, they think of someone who's doing development review, who's reviewing things under zoning. And is often one of those people who's just going to say no to you that, you know, you can't do this, you know, your permits denied. No, that's a setback violation here. Or are you using the wrong material or you don't have enough parking? And the reality is, there are a lot of planning jobs that do development review. But there are a lot of planning jobs that don't.

And a lot of planners who maybe start off doing development review, like I did. And I actually recommend most planners spend a year or two in development review, almost like the draft. So I think it's actually a really great experience. I don't think planners should be allowed to write zoning until they tried to implement zoning. I think it's a really eye opening. Makes sense. Yeah. But but a lot of planners are doing things you don't even think of as planning. I mean, planners are solving really complicated project problems in this world because planners think interdisciplinary, and can take engineering and natural resource management and architecture and housing policy and sort of push them all together and try to resolve the, the things that conflict between them and come up with an answer that actually is optimized and makes a society better.

But oftentimes that person is not called a planner. Yeah. And sometimes it's called a mayor or a governor. I'm the the current lieutenant governor of Massachusetts is a planner. And I think that's great for the state because I think she understands how to put these things together. But a job title is in planner. It hasn't been planner for a long time. So so that's a big misconception. And I think even the Department of Urban Studies and Planning here at might intentionally renamed itself the Department of Urban Studies and Planning in the 70s to say, yeah, planning is sort of part of the ages of what we think planners do, but they also do a lot of other things as well.

We're not just going to work in a municipal planning office, even though as someone who did that for a lot of my career, I think that's an enormously important job. There are other things planners are doing out there. Great. So we've reached the TLDL section for too long. Didn't listen. So, I think I coined the term. We'll see if it sticks. And this is where I'd like to give you the floor to tell our listeners why what we've been talking about today, why this matters, and if there's anything to look forward to or how to engage as a non planner in, in the concept of zoning. Sure. So focusing on zoning specifically, I think in our world where we're often online, we're often working out of a computer in our bedroom.

We often forget that so much of our experience is where we are and what it feels like where we live. So once you walk outside your front door, what does it feel like? Do you not like it? And you immediately get in your car and leave? I mean, sometimes you need to go drive somewhere. I get it, that's fine. But that environment around you is so important. And it's actually happens with a lot of different people working together on it. So that's where planning is exciting, especially when it comes to zoning, which is what kind of what do you want your neighborhood to look like? What would make you feel happy here, and what would make you feel fulfilled here?

And what would meet your needs here? And if your current situation isn't, what should change about it? And are we restricting what we should change about it with zoning? Or can we use zoning to help encourage the things you'd like to see? You like housing to be more affordable in your community? Okay, here's some ideas where zoning can stop getting in the way of that. You like a corner store that you could send your kids to? We can help with that. So I think getting people to think about the fact they spend so much of their time in their home or near it, and that they shouldn't just ignore the fact that there's things that can change about those areas to make them better.

If you walk around your neighborhood, it's almost like, keep a list of things you like and don't like. And planners can help with a lot of that. But people are. So I think we're so used to being online or getting in our car and driving somewhere, we forget that we all live somewhere and we all have neighbors. And, you know, when you lived in good and bad neighborhoods, you can tell the difference. I don't mean dangerous by bad, I just mean just doesn't feel good for some reason. And I think that's a lot of where land use planning and zoning can make a big difference. Well said so from myself and all our listeners, thank you for joining us today.

We've had Jeff Levine, an associate professor of practice from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning here at MIT. And to our listeners, I've been your host, Daniel Brokenshire. Thanks for listening. Chat with you next time.