Andrew Mikula

Should multifamily housing mean the same thing in Weston as it does in Concord? Before you answer, consider the fact that it currently doesn’t.

To be specific, the town of Weston’s zoning bylaw defines a “multiple dwelling” as a structure containing at least two dwelling units, while the town of Concord’s zoning bylaw says a “multi-unit dwelling” contains at least three.

More generally, the definitions, standards and terms of measurement used in one town’s zoning code often don’t correspond well to those in another, and a given code might have multiple standards or metrics that are either redundant or conflicting.

This lack of zoning standardization is one of a host of factors that contribute to overly burdensome land use regulations, increasing administrative complexity around development and widespread public ignorance about what zoning actually does.

Bad for Housing Costs, Bad for Democracy

Here’s another example: In Reading, floor area ratio calculations (used in density-related rules) do not include stairwells, but in Scituate they do.

While these examples might seem relatively trivial by themselves, they’re very much emblematic of how illegible zoning codes are, in part because there’s no one agreed upon definition of “multi-unit dwelling” or “floor area” – or even “height.”

This, in turn, contributes to the general public’s poor understanding of how zoning codes work, which is not only a bad thing for tamping down on MBTA Communities law misinformation, but also a bad thing for democracy in general.

It would be a lot easier for residents to make informed decisions about their town’s zoning if zoning parameters were uniform across the commonwealth. That way, regional planning agencies and the state could provide more comprehensive educational materials for involved citizens, and it would be much more intuitive to understand what a property owner could and couldn’t do on a given piece of land.

Learning the unique zoning paradigm of a municipality also constitutes a significant and unnecessary barrier to entry for real estate professionals, often necessitating the involvement of lawyers, design consultants, and the like. Zoning certainly conforms to Daniel Herriges’ bureaucracy rule of thumb: “[T]he more complicated a process or set of rules is, the more it will tend to favor…people with greater resources over those with fewer.”

In professional practice, this gives large, lawyered insiders an advantage over smaller, less experienced newcomers when it comes to securing project approvals.

A Realistic Way to Do It

Implementing a policy in which terms have the same definitions in all 351 local zoning codes would certainly be messy. A town-by-town approach would make it difficult to achieve meaningful coordination at a regional level, but a state-led approach would, at an extreme, require every municipality to undertake a comprehensive zoning overhaul at once.

A better alternative would be to standardize zoning incrementally, focusing on one narrow category of definitions and metrics at a time.

For example, the state could prevent municipalities from regulating residential development beyond a few specific typologies that are defined by statute, perhaps listed to align with categories used in the American Community Survey.

Then, localities could restrict or encourage each of those typologies to fit their own planning goals.

For example, if the state defines a new typology “small apartment buildings” to mean solely residential structures with either three or four units, Somerville might allow them everywhere they allow single-family homes, and Carlisle might ban them townwide.

A Middle Ground on Local Control

A further step might involve state legislation restricting the metrics cities and towns can use to regulate land use – for example, regulating density with maximum units per acre but not minimum square footage per unit.

This would prevent some towns from overcomplicating their zoning codes by applying different metrics to measure the same variable in different contexts. For example, Wellesley uses both “gross floor area” and “TLAG” (Total Living Area plus Garage space) to measure whether a project is large enough to trigger different types of review procedures.

Of course, these changes would engender plenty of opposition from those concerned about unnecessary preemption and subversion of local control. Importantly, localities would still be free to choose the level of regulation – they just wouldn’t have as much leeway to invent the metrics, categories and terms used in the regulation.

Again, the goal of these zoning standardization reforms would be to make it easier for citizens, municipal staff, elected officials and real estate professionals to read and interpret zoning. Simpler and more uniform zoning would enable both broader participation in planning processes from interested citizens and broader participation from builders and contractors in addressing our housing crisis.

Andrew Mikula is a senior housing fellow at the Pioneer Institute in Boston. He can be reached at amikula@pioneerinstitute.org.