A team of urban planning researchers at the University of North Texas is mapping out land-use policies across the state for the first database they hope will inform community conversations on housing regulations.
The Texas Zoning Atlas — led by Lauren Fischer, assistant professor of urban planning and policy, and six graduate students at UNT — is an open-source data project that will allow the public and policymakers to view and compare zoning regulations in every city in the state.
“What we’re hoping to do with the zoning database is to foster more conversations with housing and homelessness advocates and with city officials, with elected municipal officials about how our current practices may be undermining some of the other policy goals that we’re trying to get to,” Fischer said.
Mapping zoning policy is particularly challenging in Dallas-Fort Worth’s sprawling metroplex, which has more than 231 municipalities, all with their own regulations.
“Here, we don’t have as much of that strong state leadership as other places, and so we just see much more diversity on how local governments go about solving the issues that show up at their doorsteps,” Fischer said.
Fischer’s students visited every municipality’s website, downloaded development and zoning ordinances and collected them into a spreadsheet before building geospatial visual tools.
“In some cases, these documents were 800 pages,” she said. “In one case, they were four pages. So we see a big, big range.”
Researchers collected data on housing sizes and shapes, setbacks from the street, minimum lot sizes and parking requirements.
Zoning history
For the last 15 years, Fischer has studied infrastructure and land-use management’s effect on equity, resiliency and sustainability. The last 100 years of public policy have only increased segregation and exclusion in cities, she said.
Since 1926, when the Supreme Court upheld zoning’s constitutionality, land-use regulations have been a universal tool cities use to regulate growth and shape what communities look like.
Cities across the U.S. are much more prescriptive with zoning, unlike in European countries, especially when it comes to regulating a building’s use, such as for single-family or multifamily residences, Fischer said.
“This very detailed approach to zoning has interacted with the structures of race and income in this country to largely be used as a tool of exclusion,” Fischer said.
When a city requires larger lots for single-family homes, the costs for housing, infrastructure and utilities automatically increase, often pricing out lower-income households who are often non-white.
“The regulations are held in place by these narratives and discourses that we tell ourselves about what development looks like, about what kinds of people come with what kinds of development,” Fischer said. “I hear a lot of concern about renters in a community are going to bring down my housing values, they’re going to do all these other negative things. And the reality of it is that the empirical evidence doesn’t support that.”
Robust research on zoning is lacking, Fischer said. One of the biggest challenges for her team is navigating the different cities’ patchwork of land-use policies.
“These are all ordinances that are created locally through a local democratic process,” Fischer said. “And so there isn’t one database or a data set that you could go to and download all of the zoning regulations. And even if you could, all of the zoning regulations wouldn’t necessarily look the same.”
Without a comprehensive database, policymakers are having conversations on local land use regulations and housing affordability in a “data gap” where examples are often cherry-picked to make policy arguments.
The Texas Zoning Atlas database is expected to be live and available to the public by March, Fischer said. The research team also plans to develop policy statements that summarize trends for each county across the region.
