#zoning

After years spent poring over mysterious and arcane plat sheets and deciphering long-forgotten building codes, city councilmember Mike LaMere unearthed the mysterious City Zoning Amulet Friday.

“Behold!” LaMere said, holding aloft the solid-gold amulet, which is emblazoned with the Ever-Evaluating Eye of Surr-Vey, Lord Of Demarcation, He Who Measures And Assesses. “With this sigil, the power of zoning comes. Through me, the power of zoning flows! All will behold my power, and I shall bow to no man when designating matter-of-right developments for major retail and office spaces to a maximum lot occupancy of 75 percent for residential use!”

An Ontario property developer alleges two former Ford government staffers — including one at the centre of the Greenbelt scandal — promised to use their influence at Queen's Park to get several plots of land rezoned. In exchange for access to their "backchannel contacts and political connections," the developer would pay the pair through a GTA construction management firm to "make their involvement less transparent," a statement of claim filed in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in December alleges. Both men still worked for Ontario's Progressive Conservative government when the alleged agreement was made in the summer of 2023.

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Big thanks to Councilmember Jason Dozier for introducing legislation to eliminate parking minimums citywide in Atlanta at this week's City Council meeting!!

This is a great proposal. Several U.S. cities have eliminated parking minimums in the past few years as a means of lower housing costs, improving land use, and lifting up other forms of transportation that are more fitting for walkable neighborhoods.

This doesn't mean "end all parking," it means letting communities and developers jointly decide what works for a property instead of having the City force an often arbitrary minimum number of spaces in.

If approved, the change would be worked into the city's zoning rewrite, dubbed ATL Zoning 2.0. You can see the current state of the rewrite here:

We Asked 770 People What Architecture They Prefer

The vast, vast majority of people prefer classical architecture.  And this doesn’t really mean Classical-classical architecture, ust not modernist and/or brutalist bullshit.

But, I’ve talked at length about how important it is to just let people build, keep regulation as simple as possible to build.  But, this doesn’t mean no regulation, are even low regulation, but simple and concise regulation.

Each neighbourhood would be mixed-usage, with it’s own democratic council.  Let them vote on architectural styles that are allowed, and as long as people follow these guidelines, you can dramatically reduce the need for public consultation.  They have the power to vote on the issue anyways, so if they wish to change it, they can.

Public consultation, and repeated returns to the government, or any time you have to go though the government, dramatically slows construction.

If you want to create something that violates these rules you... don’t need to go through lengthy public consultation.  All you need to do is have a few town hall meetings, bribe people to show up with refreshments, and then just do a local, mail-in referendum.