1) The National Zoning Atlas is a collaborative of researchers digitizing, demystifying, & democratizing ~30,000 U.S. zoning codes. It is housed at the Cornell University Legal Constructs Lab, led by Professor Sara Bronin, and has team members working on regional and statewide atlases around the country.
WHAT: Zoning laws, adopted by perhaps 30,000 local governments across the country, dictate much of what can be built in the United States. The National Zoning Atlas will help us better understand these sometimes-opaque but incredibly influential laws by depicting their key attributes in an online, user-friendly map.
As a federated academic enterprise, the National Zoning Atlas encompasses several disciplines. It is a legal research project, as it delves deeply into the regulatory frameworks that dictate so much of the way we use our land. It is a data science project, and it deploys novel systems of collecting, analyzing, and displaying geospatial and regulatory data. It is a digital humanities project, innovative in its methodology and having the potential to unlock new research on the central instrument that shapes our urban built environment, social relations and hierarchies, and geographies of opportunity. It is a social science project that will improve our understanding of our politics, society, and economy - and expand our collective ability to reimagine future, alternative, and reparative trajectories. And it is a computer science project, deploying machine learning and natural language processing to expand our understanding of how algorithms can read complex regulatory texts.
WHY: Zoning laws have direct impacts on housing availability, transportation systems, the environment, economic opportunity, educational opportunity, and our food supply. Despite codes’ importance, ordinary people can’t make heads or tails of them. They are too complex and inscrutable.
The National Zoning Atlas will help people better understand zoning, which would in turn broaden participation in land use decisions, identify opportunities for zoning reform, and narrow a wide information gap that currently favors land speculators, institutional investors, and homeowners over socioeconomically disadvantaged groups. It would also enable comparisons across jurisdictions, illuminate regional and statewide trends, and strengthen national planning for housing production, transportation infrastructure, and climate response.
To understand the kinds of things a zoning atlas can show, review this research paper documenting the findings of the Connecticut Zoning Atlas.
HOW: To date, this project has relied on manual reviews of thousands of pages of zoning code texts and their corresponding maps. A how-to guide for these reviews is available for free download. (You can supplement these efforts by starting your own atlas!) The project is also using grant funding from the National Science Foundation to automate this process so we can more quickly map the 30,000 localities estimated to use zoning.
WHO: This project consists of a growing collaborative of researchers. Project participants overwhelmingly include representatives of academic institutions, nonprofits, and government agencies. In addition, at times, private partners may participate on specific geographic teams or provide data. Because this project aims to expand knowledge for the public good, its resulting online atlases will remain free to view regardless of who pitches in to create them.
https://www.zoningatlas.org/
2) HUD press release -- HUD is . . . announcing an award of $350,000 to Cornell University’s National Zoning Atlas through PD&R’s Research Partnerships program. The goal of this grant is to close data gaps that limit our understanding of the relationship between zoning and segregation, affordability, and other outcomes of interest. Specifically, these research funds will enable researchers to study the impacts of zoning in the largest cities in the United States by contributing to the first-ever comprehensive geospatial repository of zoning conditions.
Past efforts by the National Zoning Atlas and its local partners have helped make the case for local and state regulatory reforms by illuminating how excessive regulation via restrictive zoning dampens housing production and exacerbates the housing shortage.
https://www.hud.gov/press/press_releases_media_advisories/hud_no_23_072