Zoning

Zoning has always been about what goes where. But climate risk is changing the definition of “where.” In many regions, the toughest housing question is no longer just “how many units can we allow?” It’s “how many units can we allow in places that won’t be flooded, burned, or stranded? ” A key regional analysis tied to zoning capacity and climate risk put the stakes plainly for the NYC region: current residential zoning development capacity is projected to allow less than half

Parking is the quietest line item that can kill a housing deal. Minimum parking requirements don’t just mandate asphalt—they mandate cost, delay, and building form. They change what can fit on a lot, what a lender will finance, and what a builder can deliver at a price the market can absorb. That’s why parking reform has become one of the fastest-moving zoning changes in the U.S. A useful benchmark: researchers tracking zoning codes nationally have found that roughly 20% of e

If the 2010s zoning fights were about apartments, the 2020s fights are increasingly about infrastructure disguised as real estate. Data centers—driven by cloud computing and the AI boom—are land-intensive, power-hungry, and politically explosive when they land near neighborhoods. Zoning is now the front line. Northern Virginia is the case study because it’s one of the world’s most concentrated data center regions. As expansion accelerated, the conflict shifted from abstract

Local control is the mythology of American zoning. But in 2025, the real story is state power—especially in California, where the state has increasingly treated housing scarcity as a statewide economic emergency rather than a neighborhood preference. The result is a new zoning reality: your city’s plan may be less powerful than the state’s housing statutes. Start with SB 9, California’s lot-split and duplex law. It was designed to legalize small-scale infill in single-family

If NYC is rewriting rules citywide, Chicago is running a different experiment: fix downtown by changing what downtown is for. The Loop’s office-heavy identity is being rebalanced, and LaSalle Street is ground zero. Chicago’s LaSalle Street initiative has been framed publicly as a vision and an implementation pipeline—explicitly acknowledging that downtown needs more residents, more mixed-use, and a better public realm. Why conversions are the new downtown development Office

The loudest housing debates aren’t always about a single tower, a single block, or a single rezoning. More and more, the fight is over the operating system  of the city: citywide zoning packages that tweak the rules everywhere, unlocking “small” amounts of additional housing across thousands of lots. That’s the “ City of Yes” template —and it stays a core conversation because it touches every neighborhood, shifts what’s legal by default , and rewrites baseline feasibility for

The biggest housing reshuffles in America aren’t always announced with a flashy “rezoning map.” Increasingly, they arrive as something more technical—and more consequential: citywide zoning text amendments. These are rulebook rewrites that change what’s legal everywhere at once , turning “maybe, with a variance” into “yes, by-right” for small-to-mid intensity housing types. That’s what “gentle density at scale” really means. Not a handful of tower sites. Not a few corridor up