Form-Based Code, 'Neighborhood' Approach to Zoning, Passes Through Cleveland City Council Committee

Lynette Stover, a resident living on Chester Avenue in Hough, shared her concerns for Form-Based Code zoning on Tuesday at City Council. Credit: Mark Oprea

For the past 92 years, the city of Cleveland has seen its share of buildings razed and erected, streets widened and others narrowed, trees planted in lots and parking spaces in others.

And for that same amount of time, the city’s operated under—relatively speaking, save for a smattering of edits—the same set of zoning laws. Euclidean zoning, the common way to describe that code’s overall feel, divided every single thing you see in built Cleveland into a variety of uses: a two-story home here, an industrial park there.

On Tuesday morning, following roughly nine years of work behind the scenes, City Council agreed that Cleveland’s zoning code was out-of-date. Its Development, Planning and Sustainability Committee passed what’s called Form-Based Code, some 200 pages of rewrites that will completely reshape how the city’s look and feel is developed over the next few decades.

“When we’re talking about the goals of this code, we’re talking about creating a more healthier, safer, more sustainable, and more equitable community for all of Cleveland residents,” Shannan Leonard, a city planner who spearheaded the work on the Form-Based overall, told the committee on Tuesday. “Including my own children, you know, my own family. This is the step in the right direction.”

That direction, it seems, is deeply in line with Mayor Justin Bibb’s goal of a 15-minute city, where dense development of housing and retail use replaces years of preference for parking lots, wide streets and restrictions on what could be built and where.

On the left, Euclidean zoning is meant to divide spaces of land based on use, which had lead to, in the past, the need for cars. On the right, Form-Based zoning would lead to, it was presented on Tuesday, a more walkable, connected Cleveland. Credit: City of Cleveland

Instead of relying on requests for mixed-use development, via the always tedious process of applying for variances, Form-Based Code, its proponents told Council, would create 23 highly-bespoke zoning districts to allow, with neighborhood input, developers more freedom to build, say, lines of condominiums or low-rise apartments with that café and grocery store without encountering legal barriers.

But the code overhaul takes that city feel, Leonard said, a step further. Everything in the public realm—that space long ignored by zoning of yesteryear—will have both design specs and rule considerations.

Street trees must be planted “every 20-30 feet.” Low-rise apartment complexes (what FBC calls “Community-Scale” housing) must include “no parking between the building and the street.” And anything with over four units must have “required long-term bicycle parking spaces.” You think of an object to be crafted in a city, and the code has principles to guide its design.

In Tuesday’s meeting, Leonard pitched FBC to an intrigued Council as a layout of instructions for how a more walkable, dense Cleveland, where shops, cafés and safe streets are more of a forethought than an afterthought.

“Sure, our current code has over 23 conditional uses, but there’s not a lot of instructions on how that works or it’s not clear throughout,” Leonard said. “This code really defines how conditional uses and written interpretations work. So that’s the meat and potatoes, if you will.”

Leonard and a small team at City Planning first tested the waters with a so-called Smart Code makeover in 2019, when they chose the Detroit-Shoreway, Cudell, Fairfax and Hough neighborhoods at petri dishes for such an experiment.

Through a handful of community meetings, where residents got to pitch re-zoning ideas on Post-It notes, came a thorough understanding for both parties: neighbors were interested in reshaping how their blocks felt if they could comprehend how the zoning process worked entirely.

Tuesday’s presentation brought a full house of those who helped draft its 200 pages of code updates in the past seven, eight years. Credit: Mark Oprea

Councilwoman Jenny Spencer, who helped facilitate meetings in Cudell and Detroit-Shoreway, said she saw the potentials for increased affordable housing, even as a new code allowing more homes would most likely lead to developers constructing those with a surefire payoff.

She still questioned Planning’s promise. “Still, will the potential benefits of form based code outweigh potential risks?” she added. “And more specifically for the Cudell pilot area: is Form-Based Code more likely to tip the scales towards displacement or towards affordability?”

U.S. cities like Cincinnati, Hartford, Conn., South Bend, Ind., Nashville, and Las Vegas have boasted FBCs for years, with varying degrees of success. Proponents like Smart Growth America and the Form-Based Code Institute claim that FBCs allow cities to, eventually, escape the detriments of Euclidean, single-use zoning—from the racial divide of redlining to car dependency and pedestrian accidents (from streets without decent sidewalks).

Yet, even though the committee would approve the overhaul, most of the commentary skeptical of the change was focused on exactly that housing issue. That is, if the housing market, driven in part by cash-wielding investor types, would smile on or be corrupted by the ability to build more as developers please.

“If we allow properties to be turned from two units to three units or two units to four units or one unit to four units, then we’re going to invite, by market force, more investors into our city, to purchase properties and turn into more rentals,” Councilman Kris Harsh said.

“There’s already a national problem of people investing in single family housing to control the market,” he added. “There’s fewer and fewer houses available. A thriving neighbor would say, ‘Hey, investors, go to season! You can now buy all these houses and throw them into doubles and get another rent.'”

Zoning that smiled on density also worried Lynette Stover, a Hough resident who felt that code that allowed accessory dwelling units (or “granny flats,” as some call them) and in-law flats could lead to a kind of claustrophobic dilemma.

“I’m very close to Chester Ave.,” Stover said. “And I’m worried about a building being built right at the back of my home. Is there going to be room for them and for me back there? That is a concern.”

For most of her responses, Leonard used a kind of piece-of-the-puzzle trope: FBCs are just one factors in the multiplicity of reasons a city like Cleveland suffers from a shortage of affordable apartments and homes to own.

And the main caveat: the FBC legislation passed would only allow FBC to be implemented in the same neighborhoods it was tested in. Then, if things go well, it would be fitted for the whole city. (And, according to the amendment proposed by Spencer, be scrutinized every six months.)

Then, ideally, the code overhaul would fit nicely with Building & Housing’s Residents First legislation, an oversight tool on shady landlords. Or with the Tree Commission’s fight to plant more greenery in less-leafy East Side blocks. Or with the Midway plan to connect East and West sides with protected cycle tracks.

“There’s more to affordability than zoning can handle alone,” she said.

For August Fluker, the FBC update signified more than just a leap from the mentality of turn-of-the-century Cleveland, where spaces were designed with distance on purpose.

He referenced a nearby City Council photograph from the 1920s. “I don’t know how many white male councilmen were sitting up there? But that’s not what society looks like today,” he said. “So I have to believe what we’re proposing here is a far cry better than what was proposed almost 100 years ago.”