Great Expectations

Hi Matt,

You raised "how council members will react" to changing the process as a concern/question. Have any of them given any strong indication as to what their thinking is on the topic?

How do we make sure our city doesn't end up like Manhattan? I.e. a creepy Disneyland and shadow of its former self where no one can afford to live?

Also - on the idea of a master city plan - shouldn't that come before the zoning code rewrite? And is there such a thing as too much planning - shouldn't cities be allowed to grow organically? Didn't William Penn kind of do enough?

Great question, Anonymous.

There seem to be a couple good reasons why council members may end up reluctant to approve a new zoning code when it's finished.

First up, some have wondered if the whole thing wasn't a developer plot. There's no doubt the development community (in the form of the Building Industry Association) was a major force pushing for the change. Councilman Brian O'Neill was initially opposed to setting up a Zoning Reform Commission, worried the end product could make it harder for his constituents to fight off bad projects. O'Neill relented once he saw support for the measure extended well past the builders. He now sits on the ZCC.

The second reason is more complex: While district council members complain at having to spend so much time on zoning matters, they also enjoy considerable power over what gets built in their districts. It's part of "councilmanic privilege"; if the district council member doesn't support a zoning change in his or her district, it generally doesn't happen. A tighter code means fewer zoning changes ever make it to council -- and that, strictly speaking, means less power for the council member.

The only strong indication I have on council's thinking comes from Frank DiCicco, who's staunchly behind reform and speaks as though the power to micro-manage development in his district is a power he can do without.

Given the fact that Philadelphia is - at its most micro level - a city of tiny communities that awkwardly clump together to make up neighborhoods, how do you feel a broad governmental approach to cleaning up a code that was probably created by this village-within-the-village identity will be received?

Hannah Miller,

There is indeed a thing as too much planning -- when the planning is bad. Here I'm recalling with a tear the dozens of small American cities (including my hometown) for whom urban renewal plans of the 60s left nothing but rubble.

But these days, I think your planned-vs-organic opposition is not an accurate picture. Planning has changed, and planners today talk as much about "organic growth" as any gardener. But the trick is: what type of growth? Because suburban strip malls are considerably more "organic" and unplanned than Society Hill.

Mattgolas,

This is indeed a city of "tiny communities that awkwardly clump together." It actually was a patchwork of tiny municipalities (Northern Libs., Germantown, etc) until unification in the 1840s, and until further growth fused the city into one great brick mass with a seemingly endless carpet of row houses.

That means Philadelphia planners have a challenge ahead -- but it comes after the new zoning code is drafted and it's time to map it.
Writing a code is "broad and governmental." But there's no reason the mapping process can't be streetwise.

Mapping is the application of a central code to specific neighborhoods. Pittsburgh is doing it right now, one neighborhood at a time, with healthy community input. With 88 neighborhoods, they've been at it for 10 years!

By some estimates, Philadelphia has 152 neighborhoods. Ask me in 2030 how it all went!

Yet the past 50 years of decline has bought us time. Most Philadelphia neighborhoods simply aren't seeing much construction.

That's why I've been convinced that the ZCC should reverse its current inclination to start with stable neighborhoods and plunge right into places where the real estate pressures are most intense. Yes, mattgolas, I'm talking about the waterfront.

More on Hannah Miller's question:

"How do we make sure our city doesn't end up like Manhattan? I.e. a creepy Disneyland and shadow of its former self where no one can afford to live?"

It's the sort of question that makes sense from my office in Center City, but sounds off-the-wall everywhere else, from Point Breeze to Olney.

That perceptual divide is the familiar shape of our city: An ever-richer core surrounded by neighborhoods that continue to lose population.

In our core, zoning can help Center City stay economically diverse. In New York, new housing developments often end up what's called "80/20" -- that is, 80% of units are market-rate and 20% are whatever passes for affordable in the Big Apple.

This is called "inclusionary zoning" and if you'd like to see it in Philadelphia's code, it's time to start lobbying the ZCC commission member nearest you! Find a list of their names at www.zoningmatters.org or on www.planphilly.com.

And in our neighborhoods, yes, zoning can help here too! Streamlining the code makes development faster and therefore cheaper. Combine that with some cost concessions from building unions (maybe) and a neighborhood-oriented 10-Year Tax Abatement on new construction and rehabs (Nutter said he might create such a thing), and Philadelphia neighborhoods may one day attract the kind of investment we see on the other side of the city line.

Speaking of the Zoning Code Commission ... what is your take on Mayor Street's five missing code commission selections? They are designated choices, that is, planners, real estate developers, architects, etc., sort of the pro choices, if you will. Is Street ceding his picks to the next mayor? How much changeout on the commission do you think will take place with a new administration?

Speaking of the Zoning Code Commission ... what is your take on Mayor Street's five missing code commission selections? They are designated choices, that is, planners, real estate developers, architects, etc., sort of the pro choices, if you will. Is Street ceding his picks to the next mayor? How much changeout on the commission do you think will take place with a new administration?

Mr. Blanchard:

Thank you for your very well-done article. I run a small construction company, mostly doing renovations. An architect I work with told me this city has only had zoning for the last 50-60 years and most of Philly was built without it. I sometimes deal with zoning regs and I gotta wonder why do we need it at all? Something like a building code is needed, but why zoning? It seems like too much control is put in the hands of city govt types on this whole issue, controlling what people do with their own property, even when it doesn't impact anyone else.

Mattgolas,

I think we'll see major changes on the ZCC with Nutter in (or Taubenberger), principally and predictably among the department heads of Planning, L&I and the ZBA, all of whom must sit on the ZCC by the law that established it.

The ZBA's David Auspitz, for one, told me in a recent interview he had little expectation of staying on past the Street administration. And more importantly, I think the next mayor will have to decide whether to keep the very worthy Janice Woodcock atop the Planning Commission. Whoever chairs the PC chairs the ZCC.

As for Street's 5 picks I am probably in as much a fog as any other reporter who's called the Mayor's Press office demanding to know why the "ZCC Five" are still missing. We've all been told the appointments would be announced "by the end of the week." That was four weeks ago.

Don,

You should consider moving to Houston, a great American city where there is no zoning.

The results in Houston can be weird, however: A relative's expensive apartment house there shares a block with an office building, high school athletic fields and an Exxon research facility -- oh, and there's also a shanty town of rundown motel-style apartments out back.

The problem is that none of these uses relates to any other. Each sits on its own plot, turning inward, having no communication with its neighbors. I suppose buildings have to turn inwards when you can't be sure what might open up next door.

And that's the strength of zoning: Done well, it offers predictability and protects the public sphere. It began in 1916 near Wall Street in Manhattan. The Equitable Life Insurance Company had just built a 38-story skyscraper that completely filled its lot, a great bulk rising straight up from the sidewalk and throwing streets below into shadow. New York City answered the Equitable with the nation's first zoning law, requiring set-backs above a certain floor to protect the public light and air.

Zoning than spread to towns around the nation, including Philadelphia in 1933, finally separating poisonous factories from houses, in a sense untangling the dense knot of the 19th century industrial neighborhood by separating commercial, industrial and residential uses into separate zones. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and maybe it was.

These days, we might consider canning the word "zoning," for something like "place-making" or "growth control," because it's not so much zones we seek to encourage but livable, lively places.

Philadelphia's current code is the old style, dubbed "Euclidean" for a town in Ohio. It's complex and sometimes pointless and that's why you hate it. But the newest ideas in growth control take a more place-based approach.

When Miami recently commissioned a re-write of its zoning code, they shifted to an entirely new paradigm called "form-based zoning." Here, regulations define how buildings meet the street, and how offices and barber shops and restaurants and homes can all be blended for the urban village feel we enjoy here in Philadelphia.

It's true that some of the best neighborhoods in the city were built before zoning. They were also built before 60-story-skyscrapers, parking garages, all-night dance clubs, and most everything else you don't want being built next to your house. With a thoughtful re-write by the ZCC, the code you hate could become a codebook for new urban places you'll love.

Thanks, Matt, for your lucid prose. And good answer on "Why do we need a zoning code at all?" (as an architect I was ashamed when "Don" mentioned that his architectural colleague doesn't understand why we need zoning... gee, what do they teach in design schools these days: have the forgotten Wm H White and Jane Jacobs et al?).

My question (doubt I can be online btwn 1-2pm today) is:
How can one or two citizens with really deep special interest in forming the zoning code to reflect the inevitable if hard to predict with any precision the rapidly descending impacts of global warming, peak oil and resource depletion? I believe that zoning is a tool that CAN address a lot of this - from built-in self-adjusting features as ocean levels raise river shorelines, as local agriculture becomes more economically affordable, as access to water puts pressure even in our water-rich region like that we've seen for centuries only out west, to how land is "covered" - e.g. zoning has setbacks and coverage limits and "FAR" (floor-area ratios) to define how much of a site can be covered by how many square feet of built space. But it could have stipulations about what land is actually for but which the last few hundred years of human "development" have ignored: managing and filtering rainwater to recharge ground water and water courses, and the life they support.

Why isn't there a conservation biologist or the like on the ZCC? How can we who are trying to prepare for and adapt to the inevitable and onrushing future ensure that such essential principles NOT BE IGNORED any longer in our use of natural resources (earth, water, air et al)?

You don't have to "know" the answer, but we need to build a consortium or get a spokesperson whose opinion will be respected, and get those voices to deeply sway this ZCC and incoming Council-Mayor.

Thanks, every and anyone.

Bill

Matt,

It's interesting that you raise the issue of this being seen as a "developer plot" because in my area in Upper Roxborough, while recognizing the brokeness of the the current code, one of the first responses many people had was a concern about who would be on this commission and whether it would essentailly try to clear the decks for developers or possibly write in some "Satantic Verses" that they would later exploit. I have to say that when I saw the make up of the group- there are really only two people I think could be considered bottom up reps- I had similar concerns. The other issue, to which you also refer, is that while people recognize certain benefits from planning done well, they remain concerned that planners will have an attitude of "we know what's best for you" and that their neighborhoods will be designed from the outside with theri input being only perfunctory or according to ideas that they will find somewhat alien.

I have been able to make the public meetings, and while I still think caution is necessary, the direction that has been taken seems to be quite promising. The last meeting in which Bill Kramer from the Planning Commission began a presentation of the code as it is and how it got that way, I thought was particulalry helpful. Most community group people come to understand zoning piecemeal, from the particular issues they face. I think this kind of more general presentation, albeit probably in a compressed form because of time constriants, might be really helpful when the commission goes out to the neighborhoods. I can tell you that people in my group actually commented that the booklets put together for the presentation, which gave details, schematics, and examples of each code designation, were a rare example of their tax dollars actually being used wisely.

On the process more generally, it seems to me that one idea that should inform all their thinking is that we live in a city built for 2+ million and an industrial economy but with a current population of 1.4 million and an ????? economy. It's often said that the Chinese ideograph is the same for danger and opportunity, and while the loss of population creates many problems, it also may allow for a truly creative redesign of the city that will produce a more humane, liveable, and sustainable place, which will then also be more likely to retain current residents and even attract new ones. It would be sad indeed if the new zoning code did not seek to incorporate this kind of vision.

Matt - enjoyed the article in Sunday's paper. I have chaired our civic group's zoning committee since 1998 and wonder what you think of the makeup of the ZCC? From what I've seen, zoning issues typically pit well-heeled applicants against everyday citizens who lack the knowledge or resources to effectively combat inharmonious land uses. The ZCC is dominated by developers and lawyers, the two professional segments whose livelihoods will be directly impacted by this proposed "overhaul." Given the deep pockets of billboard industry, casino industry and telecom companies, I fear that a new code will end up giving communities less of a say, especially if it does not recognize the uniqueness of many city neighborhoods and comes up with a "blanket" approach. Where have the public meetings been held? I do not recall announcements about public zoning reform meetings.

Lou Iatarola, Tacony Civic Assoc.

There's no "zoning overlay" concept in Philadelphia that I can see. In other words, no act of Council can approve a grassroots movement by a neighborhood to create a commercial corridor of a certain height with mandatory first floor shops. This just has to evolve over time.

The problem with that is that there are examples of owners who get property from the RDA who never had any intention of following the de facto overlay that the neighbors will enforce even if it means going to court to do it.

Or, the group of antis will block the approval of the use of an industrial site as commercial, tangling the thing up.

The problem with that is you end up in both cases with vacant lots and low property taxes.

Let me give you two good examples. Odunde the festival group wants to build a senior apartment building in an area where the community organically renewed itself as a first floor commercial district (South St and Grays Ferry area) with apartments on top. Think Grace, the bar, across the street.

But the RDA, knowing that the ZBA would not allow no first floor commercial, gave the group vacant lots anyway, after taking them from a private owner. Now the lots and the Odunde office are vacant. It's unkempt, overgrown, trashy, and the office is boarded up.

The group resists the idea that a senior housing project could house more people at less cost to the south, outside of the commercial corridor.

Without a clear zoning overlay, the precedent didn't get through to Odunde that their plans for low income senior housing on a commercial corridor would mean high taxes for them, high costs, limited height, and a first floor commercial establishment.

They took this as an anti-Odunde campaign. It's not, but the lack of zoning clarity (courage) caused this to be just a set of vacant lots in one of the most vibrant corners of South St., 23rd and South.

Hopefully, Odunde will sell their parcel, or be allowed to sell it, and use the money to build a larger complex that is not just 15 or so tiny apartments over an unrentable space on the first floor.

How can the zoning code be made to enforce timely appropriate uses that the city is trying to do from decades old ideas that have come and gone? How can the ZBA cause the RDA to have projects that fit the surrounding area as it is currently used?

I think the zoning code should be allowed to fine for nonbuiding after the plans are submitted after a reasonable time, and that time should be no more than two years.

There are just tons of projects from the low income housing boom that never got off the ground that are still vacant after several years. Mostly the reason is that the city wants to defy the zoning for some reason to allow "affordable housing" builders to do some project that offends the scale or use in the area.

This is just a huge problem in the city -- and the papers seem to not want to be too critical of these well-intentioned but stalled projects that create blight for years at a time.

Where the zoning code stifles development and where "antis" use it to fight commercial development, is found in the example of an industrial parcel that the owners want to have the zoning changed to commercial to use.

Meanwhile, the community can fight the conversion of industrial to commercial to stall a use that that changes their ideas of what the neighborhood should be.

I've been to community meetings where people oppose the industrial to commercial change to prevent what they call "Asian grocery stores" from coming in.

This is just a grocery store like any other you see on Washington Ave. But certain people in the community didn't want "them asians coming this far west" and pointed out "they got east of Broad, and they ain't happy."

Then people complained that if the vacant industrial site, which had been a candy factory was changed to commercial, then the "industry couldn't come back, and they was good jobs."

I'm flabbergasted at the racism, and pointed it out. I also pointed out that an industrial site that has been vacant since the 1970s is not going to "come back" as an industrial use such as a factory.

I had to do a tutorial on NAFTA, it seemed.

Sorry to sound cynical, but this owner could have been obliged to comply with clear zoning requirements that would have satisfied most of the residents, such as signage, with a clear citizen complaint forum such as one online requesting an inspection, and we would have had something the same people claim they need -- more grocery stores.

I could walk to a different grocery store than the one I usually go to and get inexpensive staples, fresh fruit and veggies, etc.

But the zoning code was so squidgey, people were afraid the "asians" would have "all asian language" signs, and would be able to do "anything" on parking, trash, etc.

Trying to explain that the owner has to comply with zoning was not persuasive, because they felt that the zoning was too vague, and too easily manipulated.

Result? Large vacant factory sits vacant that would have been providing jobs and property taxes for schools and police.

Here's where an overlay of industrial zoning having expedited conversion to commercial makes the most sense.

What other kinds of solutions do other cities use?

Rich -

Sorry about the late response.

Your worry about "Satanic Verses" being written into the new code is on my mind as well, though I have a hard time imagining exactly how they would read. The city very much wants to encourage developers to build here and make their fortunes. At the same time, developers haven't come out against the idea of design controls demanded by the citizenry, and they're begging for predictability. In my naive moments, I think they'll have to work pretty hard to avoid a win-win scenario for both sides here.

I speak only of the code re-write, however.

When it comes to the second part - actually mapping this code on actual parcels - we're asking another question entirely.

During mapping, citizens of each neighborhood will have to take a strong hand with planners assigned to map their area. They should be ready for a battle if need be, because it's during mapping that we could witness the up-zoning of whole areas, allowing developers to move forward with vast plans freed from any review by the ZBA.

(Then again: If the city also institutes tight design controls as it reforms zoning, some of those big up-zoned projects could be quite nice - just what our recovering city needs.)

And like you, I too was slightly surprised at what appears to be a very low number of "real" community representatives on the Z.C.C. I frankly don't know the whole story behind the appointments, and we're still waiting on five more appointees from the mayor. My position is wait-and-see.

I would only urge you to keep on coming to the meetings with eyes peeled. And feel free to help me brainstorm Satanic Verses to watch for.

k so i went onto google and searched "great expectations answers" cuz i have questions on it and then this sight said to click here and it said "ask your questions on great expectations here and get answers" so here i am asking questions so here i go....

1. Why did Pip lie to Uncle Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe about the time he spent with Estella and Miss Havisham?

2. In what way did each visit to Miss Havisham’s affect Pip’s innocence and ignorance?

3. How did Pip’s new fortune affect Pip’s attitude toward other people and his surroundings?

4. How did Jaggers and Wemmick separate their personal matters from their professional matters?

5. Was Biddy right to say the things she did to Pip? Explain why or why not.

k so yeah those are my questions so if u could answer them like ur site says u will that would be fabulous thanks!

is lakeland zoned to keep a pig for a pet