ABOUT THE NATIONAL ZONING ATLAS

WHAT:

Zoning laws, adopted by perhaps 30,000 local governments across the country, dictate much of what can be built in the United States. The National Zoning Atlas exposes these sometimes-opaque but incredibly influential laws by depicting their key attributes in an online, user-friendly map.

The National Zoning Atlas encompasses several disciplines:

• Legal research, as it is the largest and most complex geocoded legal research project in the United States.

• Digital humanities, as it exposes the central instrument shaping our urban built environment, social relations and hierarchies, and geographies of opportunity.

• Social science, as it improves our understanding of our politics, society, and economy, while expanding our collective ability to reimagine future, alternative, and reparative trajectories.

• Data science, as it deploys novel systems of collecting, analyzing, and displaying geospatial and regulatory data.

• Computer science, as it advances machine learning and natural language processing to refine algorithms that read complex regulatory texts.

WHY:

Zoning laws have direct impacts on housing availability, transportation systems, the environment, economic opportunity, educational opportunity, and our food supply.  Despite codes’ importance, ordinary people can’t make heads or tails of them. They are too complex and inscrutable. 

The National Zoning Atlas helps people better understand zoning, which in turn broadens participation in land use decisions, facilitates zoning reform, and narrows a wide information gap that currently favors land speculators, institutional investors, and homeowners over socioeconomically disadvantaged groups.  It also enables comparisons across jurisdictions, illuminates regional and statewide trends, and strengthens planning for housing production, transportation infrastructure, and climate response.  

To understand the kinds of things a zoning atlas can show, review this research paper documenting the findings of the Connecticut Zoning Atlas (the first statewide atlas) and this research paper in HUD Cityscape describing the motivations of the project.

HOW:

Here are operating principles that guide everything we do:

• Deploy data for the public good ​

• Evaluate and adapt methods and approaches ​

• Collaborate broadly ​

• Cultivate up-and-coming talent ​

• Assume that this is a solvable problem, worth solving 

As far as the mechanics of the project, to date it has relied on manual reviews of thousands of pages of zoning code texts and their corresponding maps. A how-to guide for these reviews is available for free download. The project has also used received grants from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Housing and Community Development Community Block Grant Disaster Recovery Program to automate this process so we can more quickly map the 30,000 localities estimated to use zoning.

WHO:

The National Zoning Atlas has its roots in 2020, when Sara C. Bronin developed the methodology that created the first Atlas. Today, the team operates through Land Use Atlas, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Overall, around 400 people - including representatives of academic institutions, nonprofits, private firms, and government agencies - have contributed.