Best Practice Action Detail

Best Practice Action 8.6

GreenStep City Best Practices: Land Use

Mixed Uses No. 8

Develop efficient land patterns that generate community health and wealth.

Best Practice Action 6

Incorporate form-based zoning approaches into the zoning code, in those areas where a diverse mix of uses is desired.

Implementation Tools
Star-level Examples

The form-based SmartCode, the most complete open-source transect-based model code to date, regulates the physical dimensions of the built environment first to help shape places of quality, and secondarily determines the mix of compatible uses. More flexible than use-codes, form-based codes aim to accommodate a changing mix of business in one district through by-right development (instead of an uncertain discretionary design review process), though sometimes cities create a hybrid code (such as St. Paul's Traditional Neighborhood Districts) structured around form-based language and including typical use-based language. Cities can make form-based zoning mandatory for central business districts and corridors while offering it as an optional overlay elsewhere.
Inventory tools such as this block typology template allow replication of high-quality city spaces by defining the form-based elements to be favored in rehab and new development. See also guidance for optimal building heights to frame public squares that result in places that are gracious, used, and are human scaled.
Pairing form-based zoning and by-right zoning approval delivers cost, time, walkable urbanism and affordable housing benefits. See also the Lean Urbanism project that devises model codes/ordinances/processes so that building development/entitlement takes less time, reduces the resources required for compliance, and frustrates fewer well-intentioned entrepreneurs, by providing ways to work around onerous financial, bureaucratic, and regulatory processes.
The built environment through which a transportation system traverses can have a substantial effect in how/how much people choose to travel. As a rule of thumb, choices can be influenced by physical changes in the 5 D's -- Density, Design (of streets, buildings, block size), Diversity (of land uses), Destination Accessibility, and Distance-to-Transit.

	Use form-based codes (or a hybrid code) in a downtown or historic district.
	Use form-based codes (or a hybrid) in at least one corridor; specify build-to lines vs. setbacks; adopt a permissive home-based business ordinance.
	In residential and downtown/commercial sections, use a 3 to 6 ratio of building widths to heights (higher for residential, lower for commercial) to best create a sense of place.