OBI Zoning Reform Tracker
Are you interested in housing policy or zoning reform? Check out the Othering & Belonging Institute's Zoning Reform Tracker! It's a hub for documenting zoning reform efforts across the country, and is made up of two major components: a sortable database, and an interactive webmap.
Check it out here.
Background:
The Othering & Belonging Institute is proud to launch the Zoning Reform Tracker and share information on municipal zoning reform efforts across the United States.1 The Zoning Reform Tracker is meant to serve as a hub for documenting zoning reform efforts in the country.2 It is our belief that anti-density zoning ordinances play a powerful role not only in propagating race- and class-based exclusion, but in shaping life outcomes for children in communities, and therefore in furthering patterns of negative intergenerational stratification.3 Restrictive zoning is a powerful mechanism for hoarding resources, with great implications for racial residential segregation,4 and the former will not fundamentally change without reforming or overriding zoning regulations at the municipal level.5
In the first version of the Zoning Reform Tracker, we focus specifically on municipal zoning reform efforts, though we plan to expand this work to account for state reforms within successive updates. Throughout this project, we use the phrase zoning reform effort or initiative, because some of the events we track are not merely successful adoptions of zoning reforms, but are their ongoing status, as well as their denials, failures, false starts, and informal legislative tablings.
There are two components to the Zoning Reform Tracker: the database, and the webmap. The database is a sortable list of municipalities which have had some character of a zoning reform initiative, and inclusive therein are columns that describe various components of a given reform initiative. The database is then our most detailed collection or representation of zoning reform efforts across the United States. The webmap, on the other hand, is an interactive national map that marks the points of each reform initiative, and allows the user to explore the question of location, in terms of zoning reform initiatives occurring at the municipal level across the United States.