At the end of last year, Buffalo, New York approved the first major overhaul to its zoning code in 63 years old.
It is officially called the Buffalo Green Code Unified Development Ordinance, but, not surprisingly, most people seem to be just calling it the Buffalo Green Code. Its name should give you clues as to what it is trying to accomplish.
Here’s a snippet from a City Journal article by Aaron M. Renn:
The Green Code is a so-called “form-based code,” encouraging mixed uses. Buffalo will be only the third major city in the U.S. to adopt a citywide form-based code. The goal is to encourage development of buildings in a more traditional, Main Street style.
As an older city, Buffalo is already built like this in many areas. But past zoning choices have had lingering negative consequences. “Sixty years ago planners sought to replace the city with a suburban auto-dominated (dominated, not oriented) model,” says Brendan Mehaffey, Buffalo’s executive director of strategic planning. “Most of the city as built was non-conforming with the existing development. Through urban renewal and other programs, planners sought to replace the city’s built environment block-by-block.”
Perhaps one of the most noteworthy changes being ushered in with the Green Code is the complete elimination of parking minimums. This change makes Buffalo the first city in the United States to remove this requirement on a citywide basis.
The Green Code also dramatically simplifies the current code, taking it down from 1,802 pages to 338 pages.
I haven’t yet gone through the Green Code in detail (you can do that here if you’d like). But already other cities are starting to look to Buffalo as a model for how to rewrite their own zoning codes.
