Form Based Zoning

Planning, as an occupation, and planners have fads. The latest is "form based zoning." Albuquerque got an introduction Saturday morning when about 150 people, a good many of them planner types, attended a three-hour "form based code presentation." City Councillor Issac Benton, an architect who hates cars, led the pitch. (Benton's city Web site {www.cabq.gov/council} has this line, "He does not support continuing to design Albuquerque around a perceived need to accommodate more and more cars." 

Form based zoning seems to mean that building shapes and arrangement are dictated by the zoning code rather than developer, designer and market inspiration. One of the eight "basic principles" listed on a handout is "sustainability," a term overused and turned into convenient mush. Here sustainability means, "Gives developers and neighborhoods the opportunity to create something that fits with our times and our values." Small problem: Values and times change. But that doesn't matter because a form based system would be parallel to the existing zoning code. "Walkability," which apparently means walking to the corner grocery (necessarily small, with limited inventory and higher prices), seems a thread through it all.

Bob Feinberg, an Albuquerque commercial real estate broker, attended and, in starting the comment period, made points no one wanted to hear. Feinberg discovered, by asking for a show of hands, that four people had walked to the meeting. None of the slides touting success of the form based approach were of cities with any relation to Albuquerque, he said. This brought memories of the mid-80s Festival marketplace that was supposed to save Albuquerque's downtown. The Festival Marketplace glories were also promoted by analogy to other cities, only one of which, Dallas, was between the Mississippi River and the West Coast. 

None of the expensive condominiums have sold in the former First National Bank in downtown Albuquerque, Feinberg said. Albuquerque's "downtown is not a success. It is a dismal failure," he said.

Feinberg talked too long for Councillor Benton who told him to stop.