In my last article, I gave several reasons why our suburban sprawl has negatively impacted our society. These articles going forward will suggest pragmatic solutions to slowly but surely curb sprawl and help us create a more beautiful, human-scaled, and walkable San Antonio.
First, let’s imagine what we want in a city. Most people that I talk to want a safe city where they don’t have to worry about their kids getting run over by a car or thrown into a van. They want a city where they can age in place, surrounded by community, and not feel isolated. They want a place where their kids can walk to school while neighbors keep an eye on them. They want a place where their aging parents can either walk or drive at slow speeds to get groceries or grab a bite to eat. They want neighborhoods where people check in on older folks every so often to make sure they are okay.
They want places where they can get to know each other. Places where they can easily meet, date, fall in love, and start their lives or families together. Places they can remember—distinct neighborhoods with landmarks and culture they can contribute to. They want places where they can start local businesses and be part of the community fabric. And they want parks and green spaces that inspire and refresh.
Unfortunately, our codes outlaw this in 90% of the metro area.
What residents want are traditional neighborhoods. These neighborhoods are extremely popular, but they are in very limited supply. Think of some of the most attractive places to live in the San Antonio area: King William, Lavaca, Mahncke Park, River Road, Tobin Hill, Beacon Hill, Monte Vista, Alamo Heights, Olmos Park, downtown Boerne, and downtown New Braunfels. Every one of these neighborhoods and towns has a traditional neighborhood pattern: some cozy commercial spaces, a mix of single-family homes, apartment buildings, and townhouses, with churches and parks within walking distance. Nearly all of them grew, or grew mostly, either before the car or shortly after, and most did not have strict zoning when they were originally built.
In fact, these neighborhoods and towns usually operate under different “zoning” than the standard code applied to the rest of the area. Zoning was retroactively fitted to lock these places in, or new layers were put in place to protect them. All of the neighborhoods I’ve mentioned have some form of “Historic District,” “Neighborhood Conservation,” or “Downtown” overlays.
Why do the places we love—and the places so many of us flock to—have different zoning than the rest? Why was their development pattern the status quo in the past but in the present is only allowed in a select few places? Why do we now regulate our city so much that the result is a built environment vastly inferior to what was built and allowed before?
The sad answer is that we no longer have control over the process. We are still governed by the 100-year-old pseudoscience of technocratic planners and engineers from the early 20th century. They set out to create a system of controlled inputs and outputs, thinking like machines, and the system grew completely out of control. These “enlightened” experts put into place a structure the average citizen couldn’t understand, and they placed a massive curtain between the citizen and participatory democracy. They abstracted a living, human city into little sections and zones that could be neatly organized. It’s why so much of our suburban development looks fake, stale, and homogenous.
Time to Reform Zoning
The first step we need to take to get back to traditional, beautiful, and walkable neighborhoods is to reform zoning.
This is already happening in part with the State Legislature taking preemptive measures to allow more housing. Several bills have passed, such as SB 840, which allows higher-density housing on commercially zoned properties, and SB 15, which prohibits minimum lot sizes above 1,400 square feet. As positive as these bills are for increasing the housing supply, the City should not have to wait for the State to act. It should focus on the broader and higher goal of better community, of which housing is important, and it should proactively reform zoning to meet that goal. San Antonio should start the process of liberating its zoning code by starting to regulate more by nuisance than by land use.
What do I mean by this? Regulating by land use is when the City says you cannot use your property for a small business or for two housing units; your property can only be used as a single-family home. Regulating by use is prohibitive and prescriptive. Regulating by nuisance, in contrast, is after the fact. Regulating by nuisance allows the small business to be in the middle of the neighborhood but gives it consequences if it imposes external negatives on its neighbors.
We should only regulate land use based on obvious health and safety issues. For example, we should make sure residential neighborhoods and preschools are far away from steel plants or nuclear reactors. Just as important, we should also make sure that anything that isn’t dangerous is allowed. A coffee shop, a flower shop, a bakery, a little corner grocery store, and even small-scale manufacturing should all be permitted. If there is a bad actor—if a coffee shop is blasting loud music at 3 a.m. in the middle of a predominantly residential neighborhood—we give them a nuisance fine and they stop.
This way of regulating would go a long way toward building civic trust. The City needs to tell citizens it respects them and trusts them to be good. If a citizen violates that trust, there are consequences, but at least they are given the dignity and respect to make a choice. Pre-planned regulation by use, in contrast, tells citizens they are not trusted to make good choices and that the “experts” know best beforehand. It is demeaning and it hasn’t worked out well.
To gently begin reforms, the City could allow the next level of housing density by right, as well as allowing non-intensive commercial uses. It should also get rid of parking minimums, front and rear setback requirements (and side setbacks in many cases), and allow seven stories and a mix of uses by right on all commercial corridors, regardless of the current zoning.
How does this play out? If you have a mansion in Monte Vista, you can build another guest house. If you have a vacant lot in King William, you can build multiple townhouses on it. If you have a commercial parcel on Broadway or St. Mary’s, you can build a seven-story apartment building with ground level retail. If you have a bungalow in Mahncke Park, you can turn the bottom floor into a coffee shop and live upstairs. That old industrial parcel along San Pedro along the railroad tracks that has been an eyesore for decades? You can turn it into a mixed-use village with public spaces.
As for parking, you wouldn’t be required to smother your land with impervious pavement anymore. Blocks that have broken apart by seas of parking could become cohesive and connected again. This would not happen overnight. Since we still live in a car-oriented society, people will continue to build plenty of parking at first, but gradually, as demand shifts, less will be built. The amount of parking to include will be an owner-driven decision based on common sense rather than mandated by archaic rules.
A good question to ask is how much worse can it really get than what we have now?
We don’t need a perfect system: that’s a fool’s errand. What we need is to be liberated to be imperfect. To be recognized as humans and not as machines. If a policy reform is in error, we can always correct as needed. Reforming zoning means that, over time, we can reclaim the liberty to build our own environment in ways that are dynamic, accessible, and meaningful. Given how awful our current sprawling environment is, we shouldn’t be afraid of liberalizing our codes.
With zoning reform, parking and traffic will probably be the number one concern of the status quo. People will say “ok great, but what about all the cars that will now park on my neighborhood street?” This makes sense, and it is a reasonable concern. Nearly all of our modern American cities are automobile-dominated and that is why street reform is also necessary—and just as important.
Street reform goes hand in hand with zoning reform. One without the other is almost pointless. In my next article, I will discuss why street reform is so critical to restoring the traditional neighborhood development pattern that we all love—and the pattern we need to have a healthy community and a healthy democracy once again.