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Very cool visualization! A meta comment here is that you look at the shapes of the zoning districts and they make no real sense, except that they were applied a

Very cool visualization! A meta comment here is that you look at the shapes of the zoning districts and they make no real sense, except that they were applied as the best fit to whatever happened to be on each lot at the time the codes was adopted. It’s sad how much our local governments main job is to try and freeze everything in place and prevent change.

hammock 3y ago
>look at the shapes of the zoning districts and they make no real sense ??? Commercial zoning aligns with the major streets of the grid, per design. Industrial zones along the Chicago River, where barges can access, and rail lines. Residential everywhere else. What doesn't make sense?
csdvrx 3y ago
> It’s sad how much our local governments main job is to try and freeze everything in place and prevent change. I wish we had mixed zoning outside the rare cities like NYC: it would offer at least one scalable option to reduce urban sprawl - say when lots are demolished.
- devilbunny 3y ago
  Plenty of mixed zoning in New Orleans. Unsurprisingly for a French-founded city, the older areas (not just the French Quarter) use the traditional shops-on-ground-floor-living-quarters-above method. And they have a lot of small commercial streets within their neighborhoods, which are demarcated more by the larger divided streets (many of which had streetcar lines running down the space between - in most places, it's the "median", but in NO, it's the "neutral ground". No, I have no idea why they call it that - never lived there but go quite often).
  - jackcosgrove 3y ago
    The neutral ground was so named because it demarcated neighborhood boundaries between French (Acadian) and American neighborhoods.
jackcosgrove 3y ago
If you look at the north and south sides where there are large swathes of green residential neighborhoods, you can see they are regularly divided by blue commercial corridors along the cardinal directions. Chicago's grid design was adapted from the original Northwest Ordinance, which divided the land into square mile sections. Those blue strips are one mile apart, and in denser neighborhoods an additional blue strip exists midway at the half mile mark. This organizing principle is what made Chicago a city of neighborhoods, since each section or quarter section is bounded by commercial thoroughfares on each side, and the neighborhood turns inward. The section line and half section line thoroughfares are wider roads which permit more traffic volume. I think it's a good compromise between facilitating traffic flow and also isolating it from the contained neighborhoods where the bulk of people live. As far as freezing the zoning in place, that's not really true as downtown areas were once like the neighborhoods and were subsequently upzoned as density and desirability increased. The original zoning plan is intact in the neighborhoods because there just hasn't been a desire or need to upzone them (yet). Chicago is known as a relatively pro-development city which is flexible on things other cities are inflexible on.
chongli 3y ago
It’s sad how much our local governments main job is to try and freeze everything in place and prevent change. That's not really what the local government's main job is supposed to be. Local government is supposed to be a venue for regular people to participate in the kinds of everyday decisions that affect their lives. But then it ends up mainly representing local property owners and developers who are its most interested (in the sense of stake or investment, not curiosity) constituents. It is these special interests who try their hardest, not necessarily to prevent change, but to protect and grow their investments.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  > Local government is supposed to be a venue for regular people to participate in the kinds of everyday decisions that affect their lives. Because it takes time and energy to sit through public hearings, something most people working manual labor or evening/night jobs with variable schedules don’t have (i.e. lower income/wealth people with few investments).
  - alexb_ 3y ago
    Plus, future people don't have a say. If something you do could help 400 new people live a happy life if they moved there, but it angers the 40 people who already live there, you're never going to get the popular vote of the 40 people who are there because future people can't be counted.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
alexb_ 3y ago
The zoning makes a lot of sense. The place where white people live is zoned to have nice, single-family houses with a huge yard that takes up a ton of space and is given outsized say in local politics. The place where black people live is zoned to be as underfunded and crowded as possible on the other side of the highway. Mission accomplished for the local governments who decided how zoning should work.
- davidw 3y ago
  This is sarcastic, but it's very much how it works in a lot of places, and it no accident. This book is a nice deep dive into how that came about: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/richard-d-kahlenberg/excluded/9781541701465/?lens=publicaffairs https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/richard-d-kahlenber...
  - alexb_ 3y ago
    I'm being "sarcastic" in that I completely agree with you.
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  Why is this modded down? It's absolutely the truth. The local governments here are doing exactly what their (more affluent and politically connected) constituents are demanding of them.
- Schiendelman 3y ago
  There’s a growing argument that most of the things we think zoning is protecting us from, it isn’t really necessary for, and that without those risks there’s no justification for government to have the power at all.

hammock 3y ago

>look at the shapes of the zoning districts and they make no real sense ??? Commercial zoning aligns with the major streets of the grid, per design. Industrial zones along the Chicago River, where barges can access, and rail lines. Residential everywhere else. What doesn't make sense?

csdvrx 3y ago

> It’s sad how much our local governments main job is to try and freeze everything in place and prevent change. I wish we had mixed zoning outside the rare cities like NYC: it would offer at least one scalable option to reduce urban sprawl - say when lots are demolished.

devilbunny 3y ago
Plenty of mixed zoning in New Orleans. Unsurprisingly for a French-founded city, the older areas (not just the French Quarter) use the traditional shops-on-ground-floor-living-quarters-above method. And they have a lot of small commercial streets within their neighborhoods, which are demarcated more by the larger divided streets (many of which had streetcar lines running down the space between - in most places, it's the "median", but in NO, it's the "neutral ground". No, I have no idea why they call it that - never lived there but go quite often).
- jackcosgrove 3y ago
  The neutral ground was so named because it demarcated neighborhood boundaries between French (Acadian) and American neighborhoods.

jackcosgrove 3y ago

If you look at the north and south sides where there are large swathes of green residential neighborhoods, you can see they are regularly divided by blue commercial corridors along the cardinal directions. Chicago's grid design was adapted from the original Northwest Ordinance, which divided the land into square mile sections. Those blue strips are one mile apart, and in denser neighborhoods an additional blue strip exists midway at the half mile mark. This organizing principle is what made Chicago a city of neighborhoods, since each section or quarter section is bounded by commercial thoroughfares on each side, and the neighborhood turns inward. The section line and half section line thoroughfares are wider roads which permit more traffic volume. I think it's a good compromise between facilitating traffic flow and also isolating it from the contained neighborhoods where the bulk of people live. As far as freezing the zoning in place, that's not really true as downtown areas were once like the neighborhoods and were subsequently upzoned as density and desirability increased. The original zoning plan is intact in the neighborhoods because there just hasn't been a desire or need to upzone them (yet). Chicago is known as a relatively pro-development city which is flexible on things other cities are inflexible on.

chongli 3y ago

It’s sad how much our local governments main job is to try and freeze everything in place and prevent change. That's not really what the local government's main job is supposed to be. Local government is supposed to be a venue for regular people to participate in the kinds of everyday decisions that affect their lives. But then it ends up mainly representing local property owners and developers who are its most interested (in the sense of stake or investment, not curiosity) constituents. It is these special interests who try their hardest, not necessarily to prevent change, but to protect and grow their investments.

lotsofpulp 3y ago
> Local government is supposed to be a venue for regular people to participate in the kinds of everyday decisions that affect their lives. Because it takes time and energy to sit through public hearings, something most people working manual labor or evening/night jobs with variable schedules don’t have (i.e. lower income/wealth people with few investments).
- alexb_ 3y ago
  Plus, future people don't have a say. If something you do could help 400 new people live a happy life if they moved there, but it angers the 40 people who already live there, you're never going to get the popular vote of the 40 people who are there because future people can't be counted.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

alexb_ 3y ago

The zoning makes a lot of sense. The place where white people live is zoned to have nice, single-family houses with a huge yard that takes up a ton of space and is given outsized say in local politics. The place where black people live is zoned to be as underfunded and crowded as possible on the other side of the highway. Mission accomplished for the local governments who decided how zoning should work.

davidw 3y ago
This is sarcastic, but it's very much how it works in a lot of places, and it no accident. This book is a nice deep dive into how that came about: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/richard-d-kahlenberg/excluded/9781541701465/?lens=publicaffairs https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/richard-d-kahlenber...
- alexb_ 3y ago
  I'm being "sarcastic" in that I completely agree with you.
shiroiuma 3y ago
Why is this modded down? It's absolutely the truth. The local governments here are doing exactly what their (more affluent and politically connected) constituents are demanding of them.
Schiendelman 3y ago
There’s a growing argument that most of the things we think zoning is protecting us from, it isn’t really necessary for, and that without those risks there’s no justification for government to have the power at all.