Upzoning in the City of Rochester
Examining the newly proposed zoning laws for the City of Rochester.
What are zoning codes?
Zoning codes regulate what land may be used for. There are two broad categories of zoning codes: residential and non-residential. Residential means that you can build houses on the land while non-residential is restricted to things like parks and commercial centers.
Residential areas can further be disaggregated into Single-Family-only and Not Single-Family-only. Single-family-only zoning restricts land use, and only allows for detached houses that house one family. This type of zoning limits the development of affordable housing.
Prior Research
For the past year, Professor Stu Jordan, Evon Mahesh, and I collected and coded zoning for the City of Rochester and all 30 towns and villages in Monroe County. For each city, town, and village zoning district in the county, we identified whether that district only permitted single-family homes, allowed for non-single-family housing, or permitted no residential uses whatsoever. Once the data collection was complete, we created a shapefile to visually represent the amount of land that is zoned for single-family-only using GIS software.
Using data from the county, we mapped the location of shopping centers and bus routes. We then ran two buffer analyses to identify areas in Monroe County that are currently zoned for single-family-only use and are either .25 miles away from a bus stop and a shopping center. We overlaid these two buffer analyses to map areas that are walkable to critical amenities and currently single-family-only zoned. These areas are highlighted in orange on our map. We argue that the orange areas should be zoned for multi-family housing to allow for affordable housing development in walking proximity of important amenities
Baseline Map
Comparing Recommendations for Upzoning
Upzoning is a term used to describe changes to a zoning code made to increase the amount of development allowed in the future.
The City of Rochester is currenlty updating its' zoning codes to align regulations with the Rochester 2034 Comprehensive Plan. The plan is known as the Zoning Alignment Project (ZAP) and serves as the City’s blueprint for the next 15 years, and establishes a series of policies and priorities to guide growth and development into the future. The proposed zoning codes are focused on growth, equity, and sustainability.
The following map shows the proposed zoning codes for the city.
ArcGIS Web Application
Method
With the permission of the City Planners, I was able to access the shapefile for the ZAP map. I then overlaid the ZAP data on the preexisting maps to see if the spots that we identified for upzoning are being rezoned to multi-family housing in the ZAP plan.
First, I filtered the "Zoning Codes" layer that Evon and I built so that it only showed the City of Rochester.
Next, I added the data from ZAP. I filtered the data so that it only showed areas that allow for multi-family households because I am interested in seeing where they are expanding multi-family housing.
Finally, I ran an analysis to find where our recommendations for upzoning intersected with the areas that are being recommended for upzoning according to ZAP.
The areas in red are the product of this analysis. The red spots are areas that are being rezoned to multi-family housing according to ZAP that fall within the areas that we have identified as places that should be upzoned.
As you can see, almost every area in red is encompassed by an orange circle, which are the areas we identified as potential places for reform.
Although we did not influence the decision of the city planners, this analysis confirms that the places we sugessted should be rezoned are in fact being rezoned for the new comprehensive plan.
We sent this map to the city planners to show that the areas that they are choosing to upzone are within close proximity to a bus stop and a shopping center and make for great locations for mulit-family housing.
Conclusion
Running this analysis validated the work and time that we put into this project and confirmed that our methods for finding areas that would be ideal for multi-family housing. We hope that our map will be used to advocate for the rezoning of other areas throughout the suburbs in Monroe County.
