By Tim Tielman

Chances are, if you live in the City of Buffalo, there is a vacant lot in your neighborhood where a house or residential/commercial building used to stand. There are over 7,000 such lots in the city. The city itself owns almost 2,000 of them. Both totals increase annually. Virtually all are between 25 and 30 feet wide and 100 to 150 feet deep. Yet, the city zoning code specifies, for no reason other than urban conditions obtaining 100 years ago, that lots for R(esidential)-1 zones be 50' wide and R-2 lots be 40' wide. This renders all narrower lots forever vacant without special dispensation. This policy drives up the costs of homeownership, depresses the pool of potential owners, harms preservation districts, increases the city’s cost of services and decreases the tax base. This Dr. Kevorkianesque code could be turned around, however, with a well-worded sentence or two.

What was built
All this is happening at a time when urban planning has come full circle in the United States: From outright hostility toward all things urban, to an appreciation of the physical and social characteristics of the early 20th century city and town. New towns and developments are adopting 30-foot wide lots as the building block of a “New Urbanism.“ There are still a lot of examples of good ol’ Paleo-urbanism around to show the way.

Take Parkdale Avenue on the city’s West Side. It is a resolutely working class street, the dividing line between census tracts that, to the east, contain Richmond and Elmwood Avenues and, to the west, Grant Street, the game but always crowded lane of bakeries, meat markets, delis, Sausage Factories, and Cozy Nooks. The houses are close together and close to the street. On its run from Forest Avenue to Lafayette Avenue and beyond, Parkdale’s houses bear witness to the Tin Men and other No Maintenance Men–aluminum, vinyl, composition, and asphalt siding contractors–having blown through. An aesthete would sneer. A snowplow driver would curse at the cars parked in the street. Residents obviously like it, though: In the section most densely packed of all – 14-foot-wide houses on 20- and 22-foot lots – five out of six houses were owner occupied. The sixth has long been converted to a double and is absentee owned.

The residents enjoy what all single-unit house owners have, except on a smaller, easier to handle scale suitable to their circumstances. The density of households, in turn, supports a classic and bustling corner grocery, the elusive Holy Grail of neighborhood planners everywhere. The crosstown Delavan Avenue bus stops right at the corner, linking up with a dozen bus routes and the Metrorail. The 25' lot width allows for the on-street parking of one car in front of each one-unit house.

Here is what the city enjoys: 120 feet of frontage, $283,000 in assessed value, or over $2350 per foot on this one side of the street. It also enjoys the stability of owner-occupied housing and an occupied corner commercial building. The NFTA enjoys an efficient service area, as do utility companies, the U.S. Postal Service, and Fuller Brush salesmen.

Anne V. Moudon, in Platting versus Planning, Housing at the Household Scale in the journal Landscape, says,“The individual lot has proved an excellent tool in the hands of residents for maintaining, adapting, and modifying their immediate surroundings in simple and personally rewarding ways. We have lost the small scale afforded by individual lots.
“Old-fashioned neighborhoods may be developed either incrementally by different people or by one organization,“ Moudon continues, “They are always cared for, however, directly by resident families on a plot-by-plot basis.“ Large lots, Moudon says, usually require sophisticated and expensive organization to maintain

Jumping to conclusions
Parkdale is indistinguishable from hundreds of other blocks in the city. Some do well, some do not. Whenever such a neighborhood declined, people pointed to physical characteristics as causing or accelerating dereliction. Came the time to rebuild, the conventional wisdom was that no one wants to live in such narrow houses on such narrow lots. Certainly bankers and planners cannot imagine it.

The city argues, with its zoning code and new construction program, that people want to live on 50-foot lots and that that is financially good for the city. Let’s take a quick look.

Brand new houses the city has built on Lemon Street in the Fruit Belt, for example, are on spacious, suburban style 45- and 50-foot lots, cost $60,000 (plus a $20,000 government subsidy to the builder), yet have assessments of $40,000 to $42,000, or $800 per foot of frontage – one-third the assessment on 90-year-old, 14-foot-wide houses on Parkdale.

The Lemon Streeters are also getting a non-walkable neighborhood incapable of supporting mass transit or convenience retail and requiring an automobile (a cost-of-living “surcharge” of about $5,000 per year per car, about what the house itself costs); the city is getting one-third the tax revenue, and taxpayers fork over what amounts to a $20,000 payoff to the developer to build the houses.

Meanwhile, two formerly magnificent Second Empire-style commercial buildings which bracket the corner are doomed to demolition, because the population density of the rebuilt neighborhood will never approach what came before.

This type of redevelopment has been successful in establishing that people will buy Cheektowaga-style housing in the inner city, and that, if the money passed along is enough, Cheektowaga-style developers will be happy to build these houses. That said, it is time to move beyond its limitations and break the shackles of counterproductive zoning.

The economic advantages of traditional Buffalo neighborhoods with 30-foot lots occupied by doubles and the occasional triple are even greater than the Parkdale single-units. Taking that 120-foot strip of pavement, one has at least 8 households splitting the tax load (renters, of course, pay taxes indirectly through rent). On Lemon Street, that is down to two households and part of a third. All in all, the city’s zoning requires up to a 75% reduction in household density – 75% fewer households to pay for services.

Let’s do some quick math: A 400 foot stretch of street with doubles on 25-foot lots would have 64 households in 1940. With 4.2 people per household (the average size then), that’s 269 people. The block is bulldozed, and is rebuilt as single-family housing according to the zoning law in force now: 16 households, the current 2.3 people per household: 39 people. An 85% reduction in population. This is a recipe for disaster.

How can a corner store survive? How can a public transit system survive?

What was the purpose of such zoning? Ease overcrowding? Demographics has done that faster than any planner could have dreamed. Fire safety? The United States has fewer fire deaths today than it had 70 years ago, with twice the population. Disease? Streets are paved. Garbage is picked up. People have air conditioning. Wonder drugs are old hat. There is no public purpose– health, safety, or tax revenue – for requiring large lot zoning.

What’s left is zoning that works to exclude everyone without the means or inclination to own and maintain a single family home on a grassy plain in the central city.

Who wants small-lot, close-in housing?
Who are these people being denied the housing they want because of zoning based on the abstract maximizing of real estate value rather than addressing real human needs and behavior? It is the people who by choice or condition actually do live in close-in neighborhoods:

1. “cosmopolites”;
2. the unmarried or childless (temporary or permanent);
3. “ethnic villagers”;
4. the “deprived”;
5. the “trapped” and downward[ly] mobile.

The classifications are those of Herbert Gans, a sociologist who has studied urban populations and government urban policy for 40 years.

One notes the absence of well-off families as close-in residents. According to the 1990 Census of Housing, only 20% of owner-occupied housing in the entire city includes children under 18. Yet 80% of existing housing units are designed for traditional families (Working Dad, stay at home Mom, and two or more kids – only 6% of American households today), in other words, a world populated by the Cleavers, Eddie Haskell, and The Beav. And the city continues to build more.

The Cleaver Era is over. It is time to ditch the old dogma. The very simplest way is to simply “grandfather” all existing lots by including them in the definition of “lots of record.” Failing that, such language can be inserted in zoning overlays for various neighborhoods. This would be especially important in close-in historic districts, where the gapped-tooth look erodes what are the districts’ largest selling points.

Once that is done, we can turn our attention to the finer points of code’s parking requirements. But don’t get me started.