Students Attempt Land Use Revolution in Ann Arbor

Matt Yglesias highlights this great story out of Michigan:

Here's something cool. Some University of Michigan students are putting together a campaign for local office as the Mixed Use Party with a plan to revolutionize the town's zoning code. The idea is to replace the current "Euclidean" code (under which some areas are residential, some are commercial, blah blah blah) with a very simple "form-based" code. They would create essentially two kinds of zoning areas for the town: "Mixed Use" for downtown and a few dense corridors and "Restricted Mixed Use" for the rest (a small swath of land is set aside for heavy industrial uses).

Here's the plan for Mixed Use areas:

1. Structures must be set back three feet from properties zoned Restricted Mixed Use. On corner lots, structures must not block a driver’s view of a road intersection.

2. The maximum height for a structure is either thirty-five feet, or one-half the distance between the structure and the closest property zoned Restricted Mixed Use. The greater value is the maximum height.

And then in the larger Restricted Mixed Use Area:

1. Structures must be set back three feet from properties zoned Restricted Mixed Use. On corner lots, structures must not block a driver’s view of a road intersection.

2. The maximum height for all structures is thirty-five feet.

Steve Clowney