2nd City Zoning | Hacker News Reader

2nd City Zoning

secondcityzoning.org

228 pointsmichaefe107 comments

This is very neat. A thing that's a little crazymaking in all of these maps though: one of the most important things you're looking at in a zoning map is the distinction between single-family lots (exclusively for detached houses) and multi-family lots. You have to zoom in to the single-neighborhood level to see that distinction here (between paler green and darker green), and it's subtle.

It's nowhere nearly as bad as my neighboring municipality's zoning map, though:

https://www.oak-park.us/sites/default/files/zoning/2021-02-2...

I'm convinced this map was colored specifically to obscure that distinction.

The links to zoning variance documents in the planned development (red) zones are a really nice touch!

What's wrong with your neighborhood’s zoning?

> car repair, machine shops, furniture making

None of which is really unbearable to live somewhat near to (unlike heavy industrial, they do shut down at night), but they're often pretty locally polluting. Brake dust, metal shavings, wood finishes with VOC's, paints, and then all sorts of chemicals used as solvents for cleaning, rust removers, etc.

I actually like to be able to walk home after dropping off the car for inspection at the shop. Those pollutants should be pretty contained, we're not in the 70es any more?

If there are enough solvents in use to be detectable off–site, then the industry is in the wrong zone.

What about those examples generates brake dust more than any other business? Mechanics replacing brakes doesn't generate new brake dust.

How does it bother the outside world if there's metal shavings in a machine shop? They save and recycle those for - they aren't just dumping them in the street.

Mechanics replacing brakes clean up areas with lots of it.

A lot, but my critique is of the map itself, not of the zoning.

Ah. I agree that the map is not amazing :). Color choices could be better too.

Fun challenge: find the non-SFZ residential on that map. You're not allowed to use the eyedropper tool.

What would you want more of our of that map? It looks like a lot of zoning maps I have seen but I can't think of any way to improve them other than consistency and a better viewing medium (not PDF)

It took me a moment but I think OP is trying to distinguish areas where single family homes are allowed/required from those where multi-family units are allowed.

Are you sure it’s not just that there isn’t enough gradients to tell?

Within 1 block of my house there are townhomes, a mansion, single family homes, 2 parks, mid rises, a hotel, real commercial, a high rise, an sro and a school.

The commercial, parks and hotel are accurately represented but only 1 set of townhouses are otherwise. And that’s the set that takes up a whole block.

Otherwise the mixed blocks all come up as single family. Which might just be a fidelity problem.

The parks and school are ~mostly correct as well.

Oh, the data is good, I just think there has to be a better color scheme for the residential areas (it needs to be green to fit the SimCity aesthetic, but there must be something else you can do).

I’m not convinced the data is good. At least in my neighborhood the zoning requirements are address by address and I’d be easily convinced coming up with a coloring scheme that attributes everything correctly is a hard computer science problem.

I'm just saying, to look at this map, you'd think Beverly and Lincoln Park were comparably zoned.

>I’d be easily convinced coming up with a coloring scheme that attributes everything correctly is a hard computer science problem.

It's not a computer science problem at all. It's literally just a matter of having a uniue color for each type of zone.

I looked it up this morning. The cities own map has accurate data for my area. They get around the color issue by overlaying the actual zoning code number over the zones.

I like the idea of not using color to encode a high level of detail. SC2K breaks it down into dense and light zones (and changes the color accordingly) and that's it.

There should be more detailed info in the tooltip for each parcel.

Is it possible that many of those uses predate the current zoning? There are numerous buildings in Chicago that would not be permitted by their current zoning.

I just looked it up on Chicagos map and no, at least the half dozen things I checked were all properly zoned.

That’s crazy to me that you have all that within a block of where you live. Are you in an East Coast city or something?

Chicago. My house is on this map.

Sadly I never got to live in a tier one city and probably never will. Please enjoy as much as you can!

Oak Park has a history behind the zoning. Not a pleasant one.

So does all of Chicago.

Yeah it’s kind of shameful to be honest.

I don't know what you're referring to, but I'm curious as I moved to Chicago relatively recently. Could you elaborate?

Most likely: racism/segregation.

Chicago was one of the places restricted covenants were first struck down in the US, so the city political machine used a combination of zoning & public works (notably highway construction & public housing) to keep the city segregated and to limit the political power of Black people.

Wild how often a viaduct or train track separates a Black neighborhood from a neighboring non-Black neighborhood.

You don't want to get me started on this.

The phrasing I liked the best was ”the area colored pale green are reserved for families who qualify for a seven-digit mortage”

I would bet 90% of the properties in the pale green section of the linked map are worth much less than $1M (technically the bar would be $1.25M for a $1M mortgage at 20% down since it would be a jumbo).

In Zillow, choosing recently sold houses only within last 60 days shows mostly $300k to $600k detached single family houses, with a few $1M+ houses in the northeast section (I-90/94 seems to be the demarcation of most $1M+ homes).

The originally submitted title ('Chicago zoning in the style of SimCity' or words to that effect) was much more informative.

To be fair, this is a great web site, but the it doesn't look like SimCity 2000 at all apart from some icons here and there. I'm glad that SimCity inspired the web site's creators, but nowhere near to call the web site "SimCity style". Maybe I'm missing something?

You're probably missing the fact that SimCity and SimCity 2000 are different games. In particular the original was a 2D overhead view (like TFA), but 2000 was a 3D isometric view.

Surprisingly only 4 years apart though.

The creators of the web site specifically mention SimCity 2000 flavor for their inspiration. But regardless, let's assume that they wanted to imitate the original SimCity: having a 2D street map doesn't make something automatically SimCity style. Otherwise, every map app would be SimCity style. Again, great site. I see some icons from SimCity, but I don't see a web page in SimCity style, hence my objection to mentioning "SimCity style" in the title.

There's some code in there for a helicopter so I assume that there are some easter eggs that would bring a more SimCity vibe to the whole thing.

Wait, so commercial zones are supposed to be only in strips and around street, and industrial zones are not actually far away from residential? Guess I always played SC2000 wrong back in the days.

The trick was to use railway and no roads!

What does Patchouli smell like in binary?

Like foresight.

You want to keep your industrial zones away from nice residential ones. It's fine for the paupers to be breathing in zinc.

industrial revolution intensifies

east sideeeee

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/may/12/blowing-wind-...

And now, of course, we have industrial and residential often in the same building!

Putting industrial far away from your residential is a classic mistake that causes all kinds of traffic problems, but also the industrial in a real city is going to mostly be relatively innocuous. It’ll be car dealerships, car repair, machine shops, furniture making, data centers, warehouses, etc, etc. In Sim City industrial was always giant factories with belching smokestacks, steel foundries, chemical plants, coal gas, and so on.

Something I enjoy in SimCity2000 is that you can avoid the traffic problems by not making a complete network of road connections between the residential and the jobs. This works because commuters can 'spawn' from a single residential tile despite pulling from the pool of residents on the entire map! So you can zone single residential tiles on isolated industrial road networks for minimal traffic issues.

Yep. As fun as SC2k was, I really prefer Cities: Skylines because it actually bothers to simulate people going about their lives. Traffic delays actually cause them to fail to accomplish their goals, to the detriment of your city.

Here’s the GitHub repo [1] for those who are code-curious.

https://github.com/datamade/second-city-zoning

Wow this is amazing. Clicking on zones is also more informative than I expected. Massive kudos. Also, it's nice touch to let me turn on SimCity music. Fantastic all around.

Pretty nice website of chicagos zoning

Fyi there’s an initiative to create a nationwide (USA) zoning map https://www.zoningatlas.org/

Very cool visualization! A meta comment here is that you look at the shapes of the zoning districts and they make no real sense, except that they were applied as the best fit to whatever happened to be on each lot at the time the codes was adopted. It’s sad how much our local governments main job is to try and freeze everything in place and prevent change.

>look at the shapes of the zoning districts and they make no real sense

???

Commercial zoning aligns with the major streets of the grid, per design.

Industrial zones along the Chicago River, where barges can access, and rail lines.

Residential everywhere else.

What doesn't make sense?

> It’s sad how much our local governments main job is to try and freeze everything in place and prevent change.

I wish we had mixed zoning outside the rare cities like NYC: it would offer at least one scalable option to reduce urban sprawl - say when lots are demolished.

Plenty of mixed zoning in New Orleans. Unsurprisingly for a French-founded city, the older areas (not just the French Quarter) use the traditional shops-on-ground-floor-living-quarters-above method. And they have a lot of small commercial streets within their neighborhoods, which are demarcated more by the larger divided streets (many of which had streetcar lines running down the space between - in most places, it's the "median", but in NO, it's the "neutral ground". No, I have no idea why they call it that - never lived there but go quite often).

The neutral ground was so named because it demarcated neighborhood boundaries between French (Acadian) and American neighborhoods.

If you look at the north and south sides where there are large swathes of green residential neighborhoods, you can see they are regularly divided by blue commercial corridors along the cardinal directions. Chicago's grid design was adapted from the original Northwest Ordinance, which divided the land into square mile sections. Those blue strips are one mile apart, and in denser neighborhoods an additional blue strip exists midway at the half mile mark. This organizing principle is what made Chicago a city of neighborhoods, since each section or quarter section is bounded by commercial thoroughfares on each side, and the neighborhood turns inward. The section line and half section line thoroughfares are wider roads which permit more traffic volume. I think it's a good compromise between facilitating traffic flow and also isolating it from the contained neighborhoods where the bulk of people live.

As far as freezing the zoning in place, that's not really true as downtown areas were once like the neighborhoods and were subsequently upzoned as density and desirability increased. The original zoning plan is intact in the neighborhoods because there just hasn't been a desire or need to upzone them (yet). Chicago is known as a relatively pro-development city which is flexible on things other cities are inflexible on.

It’s sad how much our local governments main job is to try and freeze everything in place and prevent change.

That's not really what the local government's main job is supposed to be. Local government is supposed to be a venue for regular people to participate in the kinds of everyday decisions that affect their lives. But then it ends up mainly representing local property owners and developers who are its most interested (in the sense of stake or investment, not curiosity) constituents. It is these special interests who try their hardest, not necessarily to prevent change, but to protect and grow their investments.

> Local government is supposed to be a venue for regular people to participate in the kinds of everyday decisions that affect their lives.

Because it takes time and energy to sit through public hearings, something most people working manual labor or evening/night jobs with variable schedules don’t have (i.e. lower income/wealth people with few investments).

Plus, future people don't have a say. If something you do could help 400 new people live a happy life if they moved there, but it angers the 40 people who already live there, you're never going to get the popular vote of the 40 people who are there because future people can't be counted.

The zoning makes a lot of sense. The place where white people live is zoned to have nice, single-family houses with a huge yard that takes up a ton of space and is given outsized say in local politics. The place where black people live is zoned to be as underfunded and crowded as possible on the other side of the highway.

Mission accomplished for the local governments who decided how zoning should work.

This is sarcastic, but it's very much how it works in a lot of places, and it no accident.

This book is a nice deep dive into how that came about: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/richard-d-kahlenber...

I'm being "sarcastic" in that I completely agree with you.

Why is this modded down? It's absolutely the truth. The local governments here are doing exactly what their (more affluent and politically connected) constituents are demanding of them.

There’s a growing argument that most of the things we think zoning is protecting us from, it isn’t really necessary for, and that without those risks there’s no justification for government to have the power at all.

https://gisapps.chicago.gov/mapchicago/ has more information. Your city probably also has a GIS page - just look up "gis <city>" and you will probably find it.

In general, that link does have more information. But if one wants to learn about how individual blocks or areas are zoned, the OP's site (https://secondcityzoning.org) is much easier to use and seems to offer more information, too.

A Reddit post by me:

>A Detroit News columnist playing the city-management computer game SimCity "found that Godzilla attacking the city in the 1972 Detroit scenario caused less destruction than the mayoralty of Coleman Young". <https://www.reddit.com/r/Detroit/comments/3r3dtl/a_detroit_n...>

That's not really fair; he was mayor from the early 1970s all the way into the 1990s, a period that captured the peak of panic selling and white flight (not just in Detroit but across the midwest) and the deindustrialization and hollowing-out of the Detroit auto industry.

Was the mayor completely helpless to these phenomena?

I mean it's only in hindsight that we can look back and say that these things happened. At the time, they were slowly happening over many years. Surely someone who served as mayor for decades may have had some power to help stem "white flight" and deindustrialization.

A pattern I've seen a lot especially in big US cities is hard-leaning leadership getting elected, leading to many people who are capable of leaving doing so. This makes it even easier to elect hard-leaning leadership, which then makes even more of the same people leave. It creates a self-reinforcing cycle, and then residents of these cities end up blaming their issues on anything other than what they voted for. As a result, I'm skeptical of claims like these.

Yes, in both instances.

I guess that settles that. I may have to look into running for mayor. It seems like shrugging one's shoulders anytime a problem doesn't rest squarely within one's city limits allows for avoiding all accountability for one's own policies and actions (or lack thereof).

And the tradition continues today.

Yes. It's a cushy job. Nobody will expect you to singlehandedly reverse white flight or re-industrialize after the nation's largest industry decides to offshore the bulk of its production. All you'll have to deal with is the aftermath.

Apparently you can even make those things worse and still keep your job for decades, while avoiding blame, too. Tough to beat that.

I've built something kind of similar to this for the UK which shows prices of post codes, so you can see what are the cheap / expensive areas in a town or city.

https://postcodeprices.com/cambridgeshire/cambridge

Where's the Disasters menu?

I think I found Godzilla!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSYNfFh24i4

Dunno, but it looks like someone built an arcology at Marina City.

Search button doesn't work for me on mobile safari. Using the find me link does, but hard to tell if the map was centered around my address or not.

I thought so too but there just wasn’t a visual indication that it did anything. The map definitely moved.

Find me actually showed me the zoning, but not search.

"the color scheme: green for residential, blue for commercial and yellow for industrial."

Meanwhile, a boatload of the map is red.

This is something I've been meaning to do with my city to show how bad residential zoning is. Kudos to whoever made this.

Jokes on us, the mayor set all of the budgets to 50% and the transportation manager was right: we regret it.

Dismiss petitioner

Why are all the `y`s missing from the text in Chrome but not in Safari?

wow, impressive. Colors could be better, but overall, it's pretty informative and cool.

As a Chicagoan, i approve

Political take: even if many people would like mixed zoning in dense urban centers (with commerce at the street level, and housing above), the familiarity of zoning from games like SimCity makes mixed zoning less legible.

Laws mandating parking space and accessibility requirements add to the problem to make it unfixable: any relaxation (allowing mixed zoning at time t) could create future legal and social problems (not enough street parking at time t+N)

cities: skylines 2 has mixed zones and it's easy to visualise. Just a matter of picking a new colour.

That is because American zoning is often use-prescriptive.

Japanese zoning is pretty easy to visualize because all zoning types are defined by intensity level, where high intensity zones also allow all lower intensity uses. So rather than a series of venn diagrams, the structure is more like a pyramid.

American zoning is typically—though not always—cumulative (aka Euclidean) as well. I believe Chicago is an exception to the norm though. The problem is also that people just don't often want to live in a commercial or industrial zone even if they have the right.

Housing in less ideal places makes up the bedrock of affordable housing. The reality is that eventually a city becomes too large to house everyone in a house with a large yard on a cul-de-sac.

The entire affordability crisis is driven by bougie tastes pricing people out by eliminating the entire bottom rung of the market. In many places the starter home simply doesn’t exist anymore.

To get to the root cause, you have to go one level further.

People (broadly speaking) want to live near people at least at their socioeconomic level, or higher than themselves. People want to live away from people below their socioeconomic level. At least for the purposes of their kids’ commingling in public schools.

A society with greater differences between its members, whether it be due to skin tone, income, wealth, ethnicity, religion, language, etc, will result in more stratified development. Not necessarily, but apparently quite likely.

I mean there is a housing crisis in egalitarian Scandanavia as well. In fact aside from Japan every single developed country has a housing crisis.

How does "not enough street parking" creating legal problems? Most of the north side of Chicago is mixed-use, medium-density, and street-parking reliant; it works fine (these are some of the most valuable and economically vital in the city).

there is a common conception in America that there is a 'right' to parking availability, which is not really a thing anywhere else.

in practice, 'not enough parking' often means 'not enough parking, that I am personally willing to pay for, in a location that I am willing to park in'. which could mean anything from 'all the spots are taken within a half mile' to 'I don't really want to pay for a $2 garage one block over because the street parking is free'

There's some sort of idea that everyone has to like what I like. Personally, I dislike paying for parking, and I dislike being in a setting thick with people and buildings... So I'm going to be out in the suburbs or exurbs or semi-rural and not bother you all in the urbs.

Sometimes there is some reason for me to go into the city, and I'll try not to drive the whole way, because it will upset me when I have to pay for parking when I get there. But if that works, I think that's part of the point.

I don’t think this is an issue of everyone needing the same preferences so much as a straight forward economic one. In the US we dramatically subsidize cars.

One of those subsidies is free parking. That preference might not even be obvious if you don’t point out what are negative outcomes from that subsidy (for instance many progressives will demand parking mandates to get housing built, trading 1 real preference, equitable housing for one that they don’t prefer, cheap ice ownership).

Taking parking minimums out of the zoning code is about not hoisting people's desire onto developers and people who buy or rent those units without using it, and requiring car owners to put their money where their mouth is.

Zoning in other countries is easy to visualize, even though it's completely alien to the Sim City ways: I recall being disappointed in the first game, and SC2000, because there was no way to make my home city. Residential zoning? My hometown doesn't have such designation at all, apartment buildings have commercial underneath in almost all cases, and office buildings and apartments end up sharing walls.

Not that Sim City ever took traffic or parking even remotely seriously: Even in modern city builders, nobody attempts to represent the amount of space dedicated to surface lots in the US, because it'd look awful. It's always a fun exercise to, go to Google Maps, take a picture of the downtown of, say, St Louis, and then coloring every surface parking, or multi-level building solely dedicated to housing cars for commuters and sports events attendees: It's well over 30% of the surface area. Then people wonder why the city is dead after 5 pm

> Not that Sim City ever took traffic or parking even remotely seriously

Hilariously, it did: https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/9/4316222/simcity-lead-desig...

> "Our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots," SimCity lead designer Stone Librande says

My favorite example of this is how much of Apple's old HQ that is taken up by parking:

http://maps.google.com/maps?t=k&q=loc:37.332+-122.02964

Compare size of parking to the size of office buildings, which even includes a nice green area that most business buildings don't have.

Property must be really cheap there to not even consider underground parking.

There is also underground parking! There are two entrance and exits: one right of bottom building, the other is west of the south-west building, next to the store.

That link didn’t work for me.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/mpwhpRhxX8wFzG9g7?g_st=ic

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