Dive Brief:

• In more than two dozen municipalities – mostly cities – around the U.S., local governments are updating what zoning is for. Regulations have been changed that loosens some building standards or performance goals, which leaves developers free to make projects work.
• The standards of performance-based zoning included how many jobs a development would generate or quantity of housing, whereas form-based zoning deals with issues like how the new construction will fit with the streetscape and transit availability.
• The new approach does not use the thinking embodied in the early 20th-century that tried to figure out what uses a land parcel should have on it, which got in the way of creative thinking.

Dive Insight:

A ruling in a 1926 case in which the city of Euclid, OH, tangled with a company called Ambler Realty, the Supreme Court said zoning fell under the police power that embraces government as the protector of the public health, safety, and welfare. But as smoky factories and toxic tanneries are pretty much gone, advocates of the new way of thinking say that it is time to end the mindset that dictates exactly what should be done where.