Sorry gentle readers that I have not been at the blog lately, but there has been much going on, both at the work front and at the activism front. I had to go into work three times off hours within the past week. No, that's not fun.
I will be spending the next week or so writing about what some of the speakers at the Houston American Dream Coalition conference had to say on the various topics that were covered at the conference. The American Dream Coalition has DVD's for sale for people who may be further interested in what featured speakers had to say.
My first speaker to be featured is Lolita Buckner Inniss, a law professor at Cleveland State University, who spoke about the topic of form based codes or FBC's. Ms. Inniss teaches property law and practiced for over a decade dealing with municipalities and zoning issues.
Ms. Inniss has written some academic papers on the issue of form based codes, and about the idea that FBC's are presented as an alternative to zoning and its perceived problems, including physical decay, segregation of ethnic, racial, and economic groups, and being implicated as a reason for aggavating economic downturns. Inniss argues that FBC's are not the panacea they are sold as. She argued that:
1) FBC's try to do by design what used to be originally spontaneous.
2) New Urbanism or Smart Growth, at its heart, is a very contested notion. There are several flavors of New Urbanism.
3) FBC's imply that they will allow a reliance on community involvement in urban development, but Ms. Inniss argues that most of the community is left out of the so called community involvement most of the time.
4) The supposed tool for community involvement is called the Charrette. Pardon my French, but having lived in Houston all my life, this word which is used everywhere but Houston, is apparently a fact of life in urban planning. This word, which somehow conjures up images of beret wearing neighbors sitting at a cafe, sipping coffee and planning what the future will be like, is also sometimes known by another term, the Charade. More on Charrettes later.
Ms. Inniss went on to say something that the Wizard has long known about Cities, namely that they were not about social activities and only occasionally about political ones. Cities have always been about the money. If you look at the lens of history, cities were where the rich lived. The poor lived in rural areas.
Ms. Inniss went on to say that land use was, before the advent of zoning, governed largely by servitudes, nuisance law, and easements. Ms. Inniss made the commonly issued argument about nuisance law, namely that it is limited. Facts and objectiveness is often in doubt. Differing aesthetic tastes and judgments often throw a wrench into its use.
Ms. Inniss then went on to say that zoning codes coincided with a period of tremendous economic growth. Population crowding, pollution from the Industrial Revolution, and increased social mobility all probably played a role in the rise of zoning. She argues that there were class conflicts, where the poor and middle class had access to areas of wealth and power. One early promoter of much of this stuff was Ebenezer Howard, who advocated garden cities, green belts, and so forth. What is less well known is that Mr. Howard also advocated the abolition of private ownership of property on the grounds that it was a cause of overcrowding. Planning would get rid of that.
Post Zoning Challenges
Professor Inniss wrote that FBC's are prescriptive, not proscriptive. FBC's are proscriptions on designs, but they are not telling you what to do with your property. Her observations are that the poor or minorities are usually left out of the Charrettes, and that usually planners and elites will get what they want out of the community involvement process.
I also learned another word in the land use lexicon and that word - yes, Virginia - is called responsibilization. Responsibilization apparently is government inspired imposition of autonomy for land use decision making. In practice, what this really means is that government abdicates responsibility while still retaining control of land use. Claims are made of deregulation of land use and privatization, but often the free market is not really allowed to function to its fullest form. Put in another way, if FBC's work as intended, then responsibilization means that local governments say that we are in charge if it works as desired, but if it doesn't and social ills or undesired results occur, then it was because you were in charge.
Ms. Inniss summed up her talk by saying that FBC's are often an ad hoc process approach to land use. It does not represent unplanning or unzoning of land use. FBC's are often used as an alternative to planning or zoning by people who may not be accountable for decisions made and who may not represent many members of the community.
Next up, Mai Nguyen, professor at the University of North Carolina, and a co-author of an interesting paper entitled Who Sprawls the Most?
Ciao for now.
Wizard