Minimum Design Standards in Zoning Regulation

 

The picture associated with this essay is intended to illustrate a possible motivation for design standards but is not even close to the worst tenement examples that can be found throughout history.

Minimum mathematical design standards in a zoning ordinance are independent regulations that have often attracted excessive conflict and variance requests to reconcile the expectations created by their conflicting stipulations. Design regulations do not stand alone like separate offenses in a penal code. Their mathematical standards must be correlated within the text to consistently achieve given physical, social and/or economic objectives.

The intent of minimum design standards is to protect the public health, safety, and welfare with the least regulation of free enterprise possible. It is a simple goal statement, but goals are often too general to solve complex problems. They require additional definition with more precise language capable of correlating the strategies and tactics required to reach them. It took science centuries to make headway in its conflict with opinion and needed a precise language of definition, classification, measurement, evaluation, and success to support its arguments.

LANGUAGE

Classifying building design categories and deriving a precise, correlated language of shelter capacity evaluation represents my attempt to introduce a leadership language of measurement, evaluation, definition, and decision to the relatively infinite spectrum of desirable and undesirable design topic choices that determine the pattern, form, and intensity of the places we inhabit outside the shelter we occupy. The language represents a strategic method of precise communication that is needed to lead the design decisions of many away from the undesirable options currently encouraged by the concept of “minimum design standards” in a zoning ordinance. The entire concept of independent, uncorrelated mathematical regulations has too often contributed to sprawl, excessive intensity, and economic instability. 

PROBLEM

Allocation of site plan areas and building height decisions on every parcel of occupied land are the invisible foundation for results in architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, civil engineering, and so on. This allocation is often the product of minimum design standards and private enterprise motivation that has frequently led us to produce random sprawl and excessive intensity. These “density decisions” often represent expectations from investors reading the mathematically uncorrelated regulations in a zoning ordinance. They symbolize our confused attempt to lead the physical design decisions that consume land to shelter activity.

Building design category classification has been nonexistent. Some prominent design topic specifications remain unlisted and unspecified. Those that do exist remain mathematically uncorrelated. This makes the term “minimum design standards” a hollow phrase lacking the substance and correlation needed to avoid random results and inconsistent success. It was the best we could do at the time.

The mathematical specifications of zoning regulation are a perfect example of an incomplete, uncorrelated, and contradictory language with an admirable goal. For example, when a designer is faced with the associated density, building height, parking, and setback requirements of a zoning code, it can often be difficult, if not impossible, to reach a client’s permitted density expectations given his/her desired dwelling unit mix and average dwelling area - even with excessive pavement. The inability to reconcile these criteria prompts a desire to request variances. In these cases, the requests reflect an inability to correlate client density and design expectations with zoning regulations that are not mathematically interactive and not available for option evaluation during joint discussions.

The bottom line is that mathematical zoning regulations are a collection of independent, uncorrelated requirements that often conflict in practice when married to more detailed client intent. This inevitably leads to variance requests that are, in essence, negotiations needed to reconcile these conflicts and contradictions with inconsistent decisions.

Most, if not all, governments lack the data science and mathematical language needed to measure, predict, evaluate, and correlate the shelter capacity, intensity, and activity that grows on their incorporated land. This cannot continue. It must be consciously allocated and monitored to produce the revenue needed to adequately protect the health, safety, and quality of life of its population over time. From this perspective I have called the city a farm with zones of shelter and activity that must produce a minimum average economic yield per acre that equals or exceeds its cost per acre to operate, maintain, improve, and serve its debt. It must do this without consuming its source of life using annexation as an expedient but life-threatening solution. The concept of minimum design standards leading the decisions of private enterprise will not get this done. It’s time for data science and shelter capacity evaluation, and implication measurement.

CORRELATION

Few, even in the design professions, recognize the full scope of mathematical correlation required to consistently lead shelter options and decisions in a desired direction. I pointed out the scope of initial urban design specification decisions for one building design category in my previous essay. For those interested, the scope of possible specification combinations for the G1 Building Design Category was shown to be 5.31404665706133 x 10¹⁴⁷⁰⁶ or 5.31404665706133 times 10 to the power of 14,706. In fact, the scope produces the problem. Both ends of the spectrum are undesirable but permitted under the concept of minimum design standards. We call one end of the spectrum “sprawl” and the other “excessive intensity” but have been unable to mathematically define the implications of either through an organized and consistent definition, measurement, evaluation, prediction and decision process. We have had to rely on conflicting opinions and opposing motivation that produces what we seek to avoid.

SHELTER CAPACITY EVALUATION

The objective of city planning and zoning has been to protect the public health, safety and welfare from the individual freedom to compromise these benefits in the pursuit of profit. There are countless pictures of unhealthy, unsafe, and inadequate shelter from centuries of neglect that symbolize where we have been and still are in many places.

In my opinion, success in our efforts to protect health has been the most successful because we have developed a precise diagnostic language as a foundation, and it keeps improving. Our efforts to protect safety have produced partial success with the evolving language, opinions, strategies, and tactics of jurisprudence. Our efforts to protect our social and economic quality of life in the cross currents of cultural conflict, economic motivation, public opinion, and political leadership will continue to fail without a more precise language that can adequately monitor and shelter growing activity within limited geographic areas.

Minimum design standards in a zoning ordinance do not represent the design language needed to guide a global army of designers toward a strategic objective. The objective is shelter to protect the social and economic activity of growing populations within a geographically limited Built Domain defined to protect their quality and source of life. The goal is not unconditional surrender of the planet. It is symbiotic survival for the planet’s entire population.

The language of shelter capacity evaluation can supplement the concept of minimum design standards and contribute to the measurement, evaluation, and accurate direction needed to protect our land’s ability to sustain the built and natural worlds on a single planet.

Walter M. Hosack: August 25, 2024