Leander’s zoning draws attention

Leander’s zoning draws attention

Written by Kara Vaught Friday, 20 June 2008

When David Hutton looks out the window of his office in the City of Leander Planning Department, he envisions people strolling to eat lunch at picnic tables in a public plaza surrounded by a garden of native plants.

Hutton is the city’s director of planning and author of Leander’s Composite Zoning Ordinance, an award-winning document describing the city’s planning philosophy that directly affects how Leander looks now and in the future.

Hutton’s plan for a walkable, inviting plaza in Old Town Leander is one example of composite zoning at work. Others are already in place — and more are on the way — yet citizens are not abuzz about composite zoning. It doesn’t work that way, Hutton said.

“There are zoning cases every month where composite zoning has worked, and they are not all grand or hugely different, but piece by piece, we are building a community that works better.”

Where zoning went wrong

City governments divide the land inside city limits into zones. The problem with conventional zoning, Hutton said, is that it is based on use alone. Common zoning categories are residential, commercial and industrial. Myriad other categories were created to more narrowly define the uses acceptable for a given area, such as single-family residential or light industrial. Overlay districts, planned unit developments, special use districts and other tools attempt to allow cities to control the look and quality of development, Hutton said, but are confusing and just act as a bandage.

For example, Leander’s city council once rejected an application for a donut shop with a drive-through window because the zoning category that allowed drive-throughs also allowed uses considered inappropriate for the location.

The “what ifs” killed the project, Hutton explains in his article “The Power of Composite: Shaking Conventions With Conventional Zoning.” What if, after a time, the donut shop closes and a gas station, car wash or auto dealership buys the property? Then it would be too late to change the zoning again to prevent those uses. If Leander had had composite zoning at the time, the developers proposing the donut shop could have applied for zoning that permitted the drive-through window, but ruled out undesirable uses.

Conventional zoning is somewhat like ordering a hamburger and being unable to specify the doneness of the meat, type of bun or condiments. A hamburger — not a chicken sandwich or beef taco — will be served, but it may not suit the diner’s palate.

In 2005, Hutton created Leander’s Composite Zoning Ordinance, which, in terms of a hamburger order, allows the choice of a well-done patty on sourdough with pickles, cheese and ketchup.

Composite zoning defined

Rather than categorizing zoning districts only by the allowable uses for a given area, composite zoning is broken into three parts: use, site and architecture.

Use defines the activities that can take place on a given piece of land.

Site refers to building coverage, scale, entrance locations, parking, sidewalks, landscaping, frontage type, exterior lighting, signage, outdoor displays and other factors that can play a large part in compatibility with surroundings, Hutton said.

The architecture component includes the quality and type of building materials, height and the type and number of architectural features.

Composite’s results

With composite zoning, problems associated with zoning are avoidable, Hutton said, creating “a win-win-win situation.”

City decision-makers win because they are more certain of the result of zoning decisions.

“They won’t get surprised when someone applies for something and paints a pretty picture of nice architecture and high site standards that, when it finally gets done, looks nothing like that,” he said. “With just use standards, you may have some architectural and site standards, but they are defined with some lowest common denominator standard. With composite zoning, we can raise those standards to what is appropriate for the site.”

Homeowners benefit from composite zoning because the developments near their property have higher standards of appearance, Hutton said, and the uses at those establishments are more precisely matched for compatibility with neighborhoods.

Developers with quality projects find it easier to gain approval under composite zoning because the mix-and-match categories allow the application to be so specific, the city doesn’t need to worry about the “what ifs.”

Inspiration and awards

In America’s earliest cities, zoning codes consisted of use, height and area components.

“So we basically took an old idea and expanded that to better serve our new development patterns,” Hutton said.

Leander’s Composite Zoning Ordinance received two awards in 2006: the Innovative Planning Award from the American Planning Association — Central Texas Section and the Current Planning Award from the Texas Chapter of the American Planning Association. The latter is given to the best zoning plan in the state each year, Hutton said.

Since 2005, Hutton has been approached by other communities, several of which are in the process of copying his plan.

“I’ve had inquiries ranging from cities in California to Massachusetts and Minnesota to Texas and a number of places in between,” Hutton said.