Zoning has transformed everything from historic skylines to modern living, steering the growth of cities like New York and shaping the places we call home. Discover the hidden impact of zoning on your daily life: from the skyscrapers to the suburbs, learn how invisible lines shape our cities.

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• Marchetti’s constant:  the average time spent by a person for commuting each day

• Zoning is the codification of land use, grouping land into categories like residential, commercial, and manufacturing, to dictate what can be built and where.

[00:00:00] Before you hit fast forward or close out your podcast player. Just stop and think about this. Probably live in a town or city. That town or city has a municipal government. And it has rules about what you can build and where you can build it. And those rules affect how you live and move about your city. So sit back, we’re talking about zoning.

Welcome to journey with purpose episode 20. This is your host, Randy Plemel. We are going to talk about zoning. It’s our zoning primer episode. So zoning is a huge topic and we’re going to have to leave some out today. We’re going to have a bibliography in the show notes and other links for you to connect to. But really this is a first step in us helping explain things and to connect to other issues that you’ll find on the podcast.

So what is zoning? So a bit of innovation in air quotes of zoning was the codification of land [00:01:00] use. How you can use your land. And what you could do on it.

Zoning groups land in different types of use with different rules about what you could do and build in each zone. And most zoning rules segregate that usage into rigid zones. Generally you find different categories of zoning. You can have residential zones where people are supposed to live. Commercial zones where people are supposed to work and buy things. Manufacturing zones where people make things. And special purpose zones like harbors, airports, whatever.

So, this is a really new thing. For most of human existence, we worked in lived and made things in a very small area.

Marchetti’s constan shotws that across time, people really only wanted to commute. A maximum of 30 minutes or so each way. So for most of our time is people when we lived in cities, that meant it was pretty low rise because. Material science kept it pretty low and people really didn’t want to walk up lots of stairs. [00:02:00] Then the combination of high quality fireproof structures, which includes cast iron and steel allowed us to build safer and taller. The safety elevator allowed people to not have to walk up a bunch of steps. The stock corporation allowed a bunch of different investors, too combine into one larger company. And financing allowed people to build taller and more diverse set of buildings.

Now there’s many reasons why zoning came about, but most of them are fairly reactionary or the reasons are pretty antiquated and outdated. But almost everywhere in the U S has some form of rules on what you can build.

First a little bit about the ins and outs of zoning. We’re going to start with New York city because that’s where I live. That’s where I’ve done the most work on zoning. We have residential commercial manufacturing, special zones. We also have a bunch of special overlay zones and districts where it gets more [00:03:00] complicated, which allows different types of usage. And then for each zoning district. We have further details.

So in residential zones we have 10 district types. From R-1 to R-10 districts. R-1, R-2, R-3 are various flavors of single-family homes. R4 and five districts are generally row homes and lower apartment buildings. R-6, R-7, R-8 are mid-rise apartment buildings. And R-9 and R-10 districts are tall apartment buildings. We also have eight commercial zones, which are primarily focused on commercial activities, such as offices and bodegas and stores and such like that. But many commercials zones also allow residential usage. So you can see how this gets complicated, fast, and also we have manufacturing districts which allow everything from storage, a heavy industry, but again, in some manufacturing distric...