Decoding Zoning: How Machine-Readable Zoning Data Bridges Housing Gap

Zoning is foundational to urban development, yet its complexity becomes a stumbling block for those seeking to shape our cities. Buried in technical verbiage and scattered across numerous documents, zoning's vital information remains elusive for many. This obscurity affects small developers who lose time and resources deciphering these codes, and researchers who grapple with integrating zoning with other pivotal urban metrics.

To overcome the challenges of how zoning codes are documented and accessed, a team from Harvard's Graduate School of Design and the Jacobs' Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech have developed a groundbreaking urban planning tool, "Open Zoning". Open Zoning translates complex zoning policies into a machine-readable format, where zoning data can be visualized at the parcel-level. Through the Open Zoning platform, planners, small-scale developers, policy-makers, and researchers can visualize the impact of zoning codes with ease, as well as access the zoning open-data that powers Open Zoning.

In this presentation, we will share the story of how Open Zoning came to be (including its initial launch in Minneapolis), as well as how to tool was designed to specifically fit the needs of cities and developers who are interested in closing the "Missing Middle Housing" gap.

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