Rural Economic Conference: Session 5

EVELYN GEORGE: Welcome to Newton. I'm excited to see some of you again from yesterday. For those of you who did not meet me, I am Evelyn George, Mayor of Newton.

Let's take our seats. There are beverages that you can enjoy here, and the restrooms are through that door.

We're thrilled that you're here to experience our authentic small town charm, see some of our surprising big city amenities, and learn more about our housing challenges and successes. It was well over a century that Maytag had its headquarters here. And during this time, Maytag grew from into a Fortune 500 company with its international corporate headquarters and Maytag brand laundry and dishwasher manufacturing facilities here in Newton. Biggest employer not only in Newton, but in the county and the surrounding area.

When Whirlpool acquired Maytag and announced the closing of Newton operations in 2006, which I can't believe that's almost been 20 years ago-- and I was a 20-year employee of Maytag at that time-- the news reports were grim. And let me tell you, the attitude and the forecast here was pretty troubling.

Newton leaders, along with the county and state stakeholders, however, quickly got to work. They attracted new employers, diversified our local job market, and made huge strides in reducing our unemployment. Newton was even able to essentially maintain our local population level around 15,000. And that was amazing as well.

But not everything was rosy. Yes, a housing study was commissioned in 2012. And what was the conclusion of that? Newton is dying.

What? We have all these jobs. What do you mean? We had no single-family housing building permits issued the year before. We had no new subdivisions platted for almost 20 years. The last new apartment complex was now decades old. Dilapidated buildings and homes were blighting otherwise stable neighborhoods. We focused so much on jobs we didn't even notice our housing.

At this time, we had three younger citizens-- and I don't see our Iowa State students here this morning. They stepped up and they said, you know what? Newton's a lot more than Maytag Corporation. We chose Newton to live and to raise our families, and we need to stop grieving and move forward.

So this council had the guts to support a bold $3.65 million housing initiative. And believe me, that was huge for a city our size at that time. And we took a comprehensive approach to developing all types and all prices of housing.

Our results, 120 new homes, over 100 blighted structures demolished, providing infill lots, new apartments for all various populations. We've revived the vibrancy in our downtown. We became a Main Street Community 10 years ago. We've increased curb appeal throughout the city, increased our population by almost 3%, which we were doing cartwheels, you guys. And most importantly, we have optimism for our future.

Later today, you'll hear from Erin Chambers, the city's community development director. So I'll let her tell you more of that story. But in the meantime, we greatly appreciate your interest and your willingness to come here and learn more about our housing issues in Newton, Iowa.

[APPLAUSE]

SUSAN BRADBURY: Well, good morning. Well, good morning. My name is Susan Bradbury. I am Professor and Interim Chair of the Department of Community Regional Planning at Iowa State University.

Before we get started this morning, I just want to say that it's been my privilege to serve on the rural steering committee. And I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and their staff for shining a light on the issues and challenges facing our small towns and rural communities throughout the region. These rural communities serve an important and critical function within the US economy, and it is gratifying to meet and hear from so many of you who are out there every day doing the day to day work and making a difference in these very special places.

I believe that yesterday's sessions provided a perfect introduction for this session. And just as a reminder, the session is entitled "The Historical Perspectives on Zoning and Land Use." I'm going to introduce our three panelists, but before I do so, I just want to outline how this panel is going to work.

So each panelist will have 10 minutes in order to make their presentation. Then we're going to have one or two questions for the panelists, and then we're going to open it up for discussion from the audience. Our three panelists in order of their presentations-- and I do want to mention that I'm going to give them a very brief bio just so that because of the limited amounts of time.

So our first presenter is going to be Carlton Basmajian. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Community and Regional Planning at Iowa State University. So he's one of my colleagues. He is a historian, and he writes about the history of cities and planning.

Our second presenter is Gary Taylor, who is also one of my colleagues. He is a professor and extension specialist. He is also a lawyer in terms of training, and he works with citizens and government officials on land use planning and land use law.

And our third presenter is Scott Hanson. He is a senior planner with Crawford, Murphy, & Tilly. He is a champion of good community planning, and he focuses on working with municipalities so that they understand the positive impact of planning and the impact that it can have on their communities. So Carlton, how would you like to come up and get started?

[APPLAUSE]

CARLTON BASMAJIAN: There we go. All right. So I've got 10 minutes to give you a brief history of zoning, which would normally take me about two weeks. So we're going to go very quick. And this is going to be sort of a broad scale overview of zoning as a concept, a little bit about its deep history, more about its more recent history, and trying--

The goal here is to just give you a sense of where this came from and what it can and can't do, because I think zoning right now is a little bit of a hot topic in the media. It's probably been given a lot more freight than it actually deserves as a tool. And so maybe this will demystify that just a little bit.

So I want to spend just a minute talking about the way back and the history of zoning. And here, you have to think of zoning as not called zoning, but as land preservation, which is essentially zoning is just a term for land use regulation. This is something that goes way back in time. It goes deeper than this slide.

We could say that zoning probably goes back to the beginning of cities themselves, a way of allocating where land should be built into the very earliest settlements. But in terms of North America and thinking about where we are now, there is an interesting tie to the colonial period.

So zoning, if you want to call it that, has been something that has been utilized in colonial America, right? Colonia cities utilized a form of zoning in terms of allocating resources. This on the left is an image of-- plan of Savannah, Georgia, which is, of course, one of the old and justly famously beautiful colonial cities. It's a great example of how, in fact, land on this map I'm pointing to, these lots right here were designated in the plan before the city was built as serving particular purposes. So things like churches, things like public buildings were allocated in planning documents at the very beginning of these cities being designed and built. So this is an old concept.

And the quote on the right is actually from something called the Law of the Indies, which was a Spanish colonial document that determined systematically how Spanish colonial cities would be designed and built. This is just two little snippets from that. But there was in this document a form of zoning determining where uses would be placed throughout the Spanish colonial empire. So this is to say, it is a very old process. It is a very old phenomenon.

It gets pointed in the US, particularly in the 19th century. And that is because of what happened to US cities, which is they became intense, far more intense than they had ever been before. They became bigger, they became more diverse. They became more complicated. They became more dangerous in many ways, especially in terms of public health. But they also became more congested. And most importantly, perhaps, they became more dense.

So cities grew to a density that humans had never really experienced before during this period. And so the idea of zoning and tightly regulating land use is tied to this kind of urban context. And these are photographs, for those of you that don't recognize, these are all photographs of your home city of Chicago from various-- this is right after the fire leading up to about 1910. This is the Loop, by the way. Traffic jams predate cars.

But the point is that this is the sort of context in which modern zoning, as we know it, was developed. So it is, I should point out, in the context of a small town discussion, a very urban phenomenon to start. It is seen as a solution or a tool to deal with urban, particularly urban issues in the 19th century.

There's a confounding piece of this, too, though, which gets at the sort of reputation that zoning has now, which is that during this period, not only was zoning seen as a tool to deal with intensely urban places. It was also seen as a tool to deal with the changing socio-demographics of the city as well.

So there is an element of race, class, ethnicity in the very early conception of zoning. So when you think about a city like Chicago, right, not only is it getting physically denser, it's getting socially denser, and it's getting more socially complex and diverse. And so the reaction-- if you want to call zoning as part of the reaction-- is also dealing with that. So when we look back at the earliest regulations that are now sort of classified as zoning history, we look at California, we look at Washington and Richmond, we look at Los Angeles, and particularly, we look in the South. And we see that zoning was used for multiple purposes.

It was in some cases used to regulate where different groups of people live. In California, it was Chinese owned laundry. The perception was or the belief was that if they regulated the location of laundries, they could also regulate the location of Chinese households. The assumption was that the Chinese owners lived next to or above the laundries cooperative. So there's a dual purpose, kind of two sides that are going on here in this early zoning period.

The same in the South, where zoning was used explicitly to reinforce racial segregation in the beginning, the early era of Jim Crow. So zoning was part of the Jim Crow, Jim Crow tools. Southern cities like Baltimore, which is the very first to do this, were also dealing with some of the intensification issues as well. So it's not just-- it's not purely about race. Most of it is mixed in. It's part of what makes zoning kind of complicated is the mixture of things that are happening.

Just an example too to show, I pulled up Newton. This is a Sanborn fire map. And I won't get too deep into this, but this is a 1911 map which shows the kind of mixture of landscape that existed in downtown Newton. This is not too far from where we're sitting, in fact. Railroad is up here. And it's meant to show the variability of the city fabric at the time when zoning was meaningfully used. So this is the context for the moment.

The city is mixed up. Even small places like Newton are mixed up. You have different setbacks, you have different uses mixed together. You have all kinds of sort of what I would call interesting characteristics of the city that zoning ultimately takes care of, makes this kind of [INAUDIBLE] simply impossible.

So in the big history of zoning, the key document is that 1916 [INAUDIBLE]. New York City is the first city to adopt a comprehensive zoning ordinance in the United States. While these other cities have frozen, New York adopts a zoning ordinance that looks like what modern zoning [INAUDIBLE]. It zones the entire city, every square inch of the five boroughs.

No city in the US had ever done this before. It operates very simply. It has three zones of use-- residents, business, and everything else. It establishes height districts, and it establishes area districts, meaning how much of the lot can be built.

This is a complicated story. I usually spend an entire lecture talking about this, so we're not going to get any further in it. But suffice it to say, New York is a key piece, because it is the first modern zoning ordinance. And virtually every zoning ordinance since in the United States derives from this. This is like the mother ordinance, you might say, of all future ordinances in the US.

In the aftermath of the '16-- New York's passage in '16, we get a move fairly quickly to make zoning a national phenomenon. So the federal government steps in. In 1924, the Department of Commerce, which was run at the time by Herbert Hoover-- Iowa's sort of president, the only one-- a series of enabling acts and model legislation is passing, basically pushed out into the states. And states, local governments are told you need to do this. This is best practices.

It's never mandated. It's never a federal law. It's more of a federal nudge. And we know the federal nudge can be very powerful.

And so beginning then, in the 1920s, in the aftermath, especially through this, really, the bulk of the 20th century, basically every state in the United States made zoning legal, and virtually every city in the United States adopts some form of general ordinance. There are a few places still, and a few places in this state, indeed, that don't have zoning, but for the most part, about 90%, 95% of the population, I think, is somewhere now that is zoned.

And this is the, now what we call, Euclidean zoning, that relates to the famous Supreme Court case, the 1926 [INAUDIBLE] the first Supreme Court test of zoning as a legal doctrine. It made it legal. We get this Euclidean zoning, which dominates the United States. And all of it is, as I said, kind of related to the old New York Ordinance of 1916.

And so this is my last slide. So the effect of all this, I think in terms of pictures and how this sort of structures land use-- this is Ames, by the way, a neighborhood in Ames pre-zoning, a neighborhood in Ames post-zoning.

The way the shift happened is that this kind of ragged, somewhat unkempt style of land use development, where you have a mixture of uses, different lot shapes, different setbacks, different size structures, is replaced with this, which is the conformity that we all know.

And this is the target. It has been in the media so much in the last few years. This is the kind of stuff that has been targeted, where zoning is seen as a straitjacket, and it simply limits development to very, very specific kinds.

And my point here, if you want to put a bigger point on this, is that this is the kind of outcome, but it is part of a much bigger process that has happened. And so even this is not necessarily the only outcome that could have come from this. Zoning board can [INAUDIBLE], and probably [INAUDIBLE].

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

[APPLAUSE]

GARY TAYLOR: Well, Carlton and Susan and I were joking that normally 10 slides would be two hours for us, but here we are, 10 minutes.

I'm going to change direction a little bit. I'm going to jump off from where Carlton started, just to say that Iowa adopted the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act back in the 1920s. A lot of states have revised it, gone in and made substantial changes, to the Zoning Enabling Act to keep up with modern times, to streamline development processes, application processes, to mandate some types of development, to prohibit other types of development, to promote density and housing, so on and so forth.

We're still dealing-- if you look at the standard at chapter 414 of the Iowa Code, you will see that it looks substantially similar to the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act. We have made very few changes. We've added a little thing here, taken a little thing-- taken away a little thing somewhere else, but largely, it's the same as it was in the 1920s.

And it provides a framework for the process of zoning, it provides a framework for the uniformity of zoning, but it doesn't get into the specifics of how a city should or should not develop. And this is where we jump in. This is where I change direction completely.

A lot of what you're hearing in the media is zoning is to blame for our lack of housing. It's too rigid. It focuses too much on single-family residences.

We have state legislatures across the country that have gone in and mandated, overridden local zoning on things like single-family development. You have to have-- you have to allow duplexes or triplexes in places that used to be exclusively single family.

So there's been this movement across the country to override local zoning, which brings up the question in Iowa, do we need to do that?

Iowa Finance Authority decided to put some money into a project and contract with us, to take a look at what's going on in local zoning around Iowa. And so that's what this project is about. I'm going to tell you a little bit about the project, and where we are at with it.

We only got started in May so I feel like we've done-- made some pretty good progress since May. I'm going to try to figure out how I go forward with this. There we go.

Our timeline is October of next year, so we've got about a year to finish this up. I'm going to tell you what the project's about, and a little bit of where we're at so far.

I always want to start with the project team because I don't think the students ever get enough credit in these projects. Everybody here, except the guy at the top of the left-hand column, has worked really hard on this.

These are our study cities. These were our criteria. We've got the largest 250 cities in Iowa. We have all of the cities that are in an MSA county that aren't already included in the largest 250 cities. So we have some really tiny cities in MSA counties that are part of this study because we wanted to see, as the urban areas expand or don't expand, does the zoning look different in a community of 600 people?

The largest city in every county, if they aren't already included in number one, that was so we could add two cities that didn't meet either of the first two criteria, just so that we had somebody from every county-- just so we had a city from every county. And those two cities are roughly 1,000 in population, just under 1,000.

So the largest 250 cities takes us to a population threshold of around 1,075, if that gives you any idea. For those of you who are not from Iowa, we have 936 cities in Iowa right now.

This is the project. We're developing an inventory and an analysis of local zoning codes. So we're collecting the codes, the texts.

We're also collecting maps-- zoning maps. If they have a GIS layer for that map, thank God, please send us, OK? Because otherwise, what we are having to do is take a PDF of the map, which there are way more of than you would think, and literally, geocode it. This is why we've got undergraduates whose eyes are kind of bloodshot, drawing lines, re-creating these maps for GIS purposes.

We're also collecting a lot of non-zoning-related data. And this is what I'm going to have to talk about at this point of the project, because we're still in the collection mode of the zoning texts and zoning codes. But we're collecting data on things that we think are having an impact on the development of housing in Iowa that may or may not have a relationship to zoning.

At the end of all this, we are going to have an online map-- an online interactive map, so you can go to Newton, and you can hover over Newton, and you can get detailed statistics about zoning in Newton. And then you can hover over each zoning district in Newton and say, this is what's allowed, this is what's not allowed, here are minimum lot sizes, and so on and so forth.

There's a similar project that's being run out of Cornell. Cornell, the Zoning Atlas. We have had back and forth conversations with them.

We didn't feel like the data that they were collecting, the amount of data that they were collecting necessarily would feed into the objectives of the IFA project as much as just us going our own way. We're not trying to be rogue, but we just thought, OK, we have a limited budget, we have a limited amount of time, we don't need a lot of this stuff, so we're narrowing our focus to some things that I'm going to show you here in a second.

So this is the breakdown of our cities. 254 of them are over 1,000, 31 of them have a population between 500 and 1,000, and 45 of them are below 500. So that adds up to 330. I don't think we're going to get to 330 because I think, as we are finding, as we knew already, but as we are confirming, we're not going to find zoning in many of the cities under 500, and we're not going to find zoning in a lot of cities from 500 to 1,000. So I'm guessing we're going to end up somewhere around 250, 260 cities in this study area.

And this is our progress of collection as of September 30. We've got 217 zoning texts, so we're not doing too bad there. We have encoded them into our database-- we have encoded 197 of them into our database.

We've collected 171 PDF zoning maps. Those are the ones that are giving our kids the bloodshot eyes.

We've got 74 GIS data layers-- data layers for 74 GIS cities. We're really trying to bump that number up because that's what's eating up all of our time, is geocoding the 171 PDF map submissions.

So we're coding them primarily looking at housing, housing attributes. The number of housing units, is it exclusive, single-family, What are some of the dimensional standards related to lot size, how much of the land is dedicated to exclusive single-family, how much is allowable for duplex, triplex, so on and so forth.

And so you'll see, this is basically, our coding system. This is basically, when we're looking at the zoning codes, this is what we're coding into our database.

So at the end, we will be able to aggregate. We'll be able to aggregate statistics from the city, and say 75% of the land that is dedicated to residential development is exclusive single family, and so on and so forth. And then we'll be able to aggregate it across cities as well.

We know that the zoning does not capture all of the factors that are affecting housing development in a community, so we're looking at other factors-- we're looking at other things, too. And here's just some statistics that we've got.

About 71% of the housing in Iowa is owner-occupied versus the rest that is renter-occupied. Currently, there's a vacancy rate all over the state as of the '22 data of about 9%-- 9.8%. We're above average when it comes to home ownership rate versus the national average by a good 10 percentage points.

This is the change in median rent is blue, change in median house value is orange, and change in income is the green line. So you can see that up until about 2020, everything was growing roughly at the same rate, the same rate of change. And then in 2021, you started to see the housing prices skyrocket relative to income and relative to rental values.

These are the two different trend lines. The blue line is how the median home value has grown, courtesy of Zillow. The orange line is how it would have grown if it had grown at the rate of inflation over that same time period. So you can see that the median housing value far outpaced the rate of inflation over the last five-- four or five years. It's got some estimates on there, too. And these have been some years of pretty hefty inflation rates as well, so you can see that the housing prices are really shooting up.

We have older homes in Iowa than we have across the country. 12% in the US are homes built before 1940. That's 23% in Iowa. So nearly a quarter of our housing stock was built before 1940. I'm going to skip these.

So as we start to look at this data, we're going to break it down into some typologies. We're going to look at the core cities, at the 11 MSA core cities specifically. Then we are going to look at all of the cities within the MSA that have growth rates above the average for that MSA.

We're going to take the rest of them in the MSA that have growth rates below that average. We're just trying to tease out what are the differences in the zoning. OK? Are there differences in the way these communities have zoned? We're going to break it out in terms of housing prices. How is that reflected in the housing crisis?

We're looking at micropolitan cities. And then the rest of them, 130 of our 330, which will probably end up to look more like 100, are the rural cities.

So the last thing I want to leave you with is how the permitting-- is the permitting of structures since 2010, in Iowa. To explain this, the pink is single-family detached housing permits. The yellow is number of units in not single-family structures, so duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes. That's what we're focused on there. Duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes. And then we're calling the blue multifamily, which is five units and up in a single structure.

And so this is the average across Iowa. This is how it breaks down in our five typologies right now. The micropolitan cities are at the top. MSA cities growth above average. MSA cities growth below average. Core cities and rural cities.

So you can see, there's a big difference in the number-- in the percentage of units that are permitted in core cities that are in multifamily units versus rural cities. That's where the most-- that's where a dramatic change is.

This one is going to be interesting, too. This is MSA cities growth below average. That's almost all single-family detached. And so we're going to have to dig into that more, whether that is what zoning allows or that is what people are wanting to build. They could build more, but they're choosing not to.

So this is part of what we will be digging into. You will be able to find our stuff online, as you Google Iowa State University Extension, Iowa Zoning Guide. We're going to start to put up some of this stuff after the first of the year.

So yeah. I just thought that was going to take an hour. I didn't know what [INAUDIBLE]. All right. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]

SCOTT HANSON: Good morning, everybody. Again, my name is Scott Hanson. I'm from Crawford, Murphy, & Tilly. And thanks to my esteemed co-presenters on that.

Gary, that's really fascinating. I can't wait to hear more about that. And Carlton, you really set the stage here for some of what I'm going to cover as well, the history of zoning. And also, yesterday, we covered quite a bit about some of the topics.

So 20 slides in 10 minutes, let's see if we can do it. Everybody strapped in, ready to go?

So I do comprehensive plans for communities. We call them rural communities, those generally under 15,000. I have recently, this past year, completed a comprehensive plan for a city of 375 people.

So what do I hear as a consultant for these communities, in terms of what are the values or the needs in these small towns? And these are some of the outcomes. Overwhelmingly, small town feel and sense of community is something I hear a lot. That's almost like a standard answer when you ask the community, what do you like about your city or the town that you live in?

They also really like the safety and security, the low crime, and the ability to go right next door and get a cup of flour if they need to, or a couple eggs. So neighborly support when there's a need. The cultural heritage, being able to go to local festivals or to see historic buildings, like the one we're in this morning.

Self-sufficiency and independence. That's, I think, ingrained into a lot of these rural communities because of the characteristics of the agricultural economy that's around them. It's that hard work, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, independence. That's a tenet of rural America.

Finally, quality of life amenities and access to the natural environment. So you may be a little away from the hospital, but your ability to access nature, to go out hunting or fishing or just go out for a walk along the country road, those are a number of the other items that residents really love.

And we'll just push this green button to go. All right. Thank you.

So how can the planning toolbox support those five tenants, in terms of promoting those values? And I'm going to cover three areas-- support local businesses, which we've talked a lot about yesterday, promote housing diversity, and establish conditions for job creation.

So I apologize if this text is a little bit small, but as you look at downtown, that is your commercial hub for your community. You may have a highway running nearby your community, but really, the downtown serves a unique and creative way and an important way for communities to build and to have a commercial node that's the center of life in the community.

So if there's vacant space, read that as opportunity. And I know that's a challenge to get some of those spaces developed, because you have to meet the zoning codes and building codes, but these spaces are where local businesses can be homegrown.

Downtown is also the living room for your community. So this is a place where the community gathers and you socialize. You have events together, and you have fun, and you bring your families there.

So creating an environment that will make residents and visitors want to linger in that space.

So when you come to the festival, you have-- your child has their face painted, and then you wander off to the local restaurant or to the-- off to the place to get a snow cone or an ice cream cone and just spend some time. That's one of the-- again, going back to that first slide-- that's one of the tenants of what people love most about being in small towns.

One way to take advantage of that is pop-up retail. So again, referring to-- I briefly referred to a place to get a snow cone. This is probably a seasonal-type use. Maybe they operate out of a small kiosk that's downtown, but there's all kinds of different pop-up retail opportunities.

One of the communities I work with, they have a truck that comes in, and they have-- you can go in and look for vintage clothing.

There's also bookstores that are mobile, and of course, the iconic food truck.

Protect and repurpose destroyed buildings with character and history. And if your community doesn't have design guidelines for those historic structures, I encourage you to adopt them. They don't have to be in your code, but when someone comes to town-- and we'll see a slide on this in just a moment-- wants to build something that's not in keeping with the way your downtown has traditionally developed, you're going to subtract from that character of your downtown.

Also, this map's here for another community I work with down in the Springfield, Missouri area. So I call them breadcrumbs that lead visitors downtown. So you've got this road, this big highway running through or nearby or around your community, and they're going to use the gas, food, lodging. You're not going to go more than a quarter mile away from that interchange unless you have the breadcrumbs to bring them downtown and give them a reason to be there.

The best way to do that is wayfinding signs. But if you have the ability, zone-- on the top side, you see where we've planned for an area that's close to the highway for gas, food, lodging type uses. And then as we go to the lower slide, we've got the plan to create a town center area for these types of uses so that people can gather, walk around, and have a different experience than what you might see in an automobile-focused area.

And then finally, consider adopting zoning codes that support an active downtown area. Outdoor dining and merchandise displays, sometimes some communities require the business showing that it has insurance, or there's some sort of commitment to put away the furniture or bring everything inside every night. Those are pretty easy things to accomplish to encourage walking downtown.

Another way to support local businesses, community as a regional hub. So people are coming to these regional small towns, and a lot of these small towns need to find ways to support agribusiness. And I won't go through all of these, but I think you know what I mean, is that a lot of these have grain silos and large trucks that need to be able to accommodate it, and these are uses that have been there a long time, and they need to be accommodated.

Also, ask yourself, what drives tourism in your rural community? In this case, in Hamel, Illinois, they have a Route 66 that goes through it. I'd be willing to bet that your community probably has some sort of roadway that leads to someplace else.

Talking to some of my colleagues from Michigan, up near South Haven, you've got this major road along the lake there, and what can you do to take advantage to get people to come into your town?

Community as a regional hub for commerce. Don't forget to interact with your local agencies, your state agencies, your county governments, and your local township governments.

We talked quite a bit yesterday about housing diversity, but one thing I wanted to add, and we really didn't talk too much about is senior housing, and how important it is to be able to retain the people who have raised their families and been in your community for 40 or 50 years.

They've paid their taxes, they've raised their children, they have the house that they've taken care of for decades, and now they're being asked to move out of that town and go to some large community that they've never been to. They don't know where to get their favorite cup of coffee or their favorite restaurants anymore. So find ways to do age-friendly communities and supportive services for those. One community that I worked with, they adopted a universal design principles, and they have a target for at least 5% of the homes that are built to adhere to universal design, which means that you can live in place in that home.

Also, we talked quite a bit about multifamily housing, but one thing I wanted to mention is accessory dwelling units. Gary noted that overwhelmingly, single-family residential and single-family residential, that's owned by an owner-- not somebody who lives in California or Texas or whatever, they live there-- so why not allow for accessory dwelling units out back?

Because the owner is right there on site, if something's going wrong, then they can just walk back there and say, please pick up your beer cans off the lawn here. You're not allowed to do that. The landlord is literally right there.

So in terms of accessory dwelling units, if your community is at a 40% rental rate, maybe accessory dwelling units might be worth more of a policy discussion. But when home-ownership is 80% and more, a lot of times an accessory dwelling unit, the so-called mother-in-law house, or the She Shed out back, where someone can live, a child or whatever, is perfectly reasonable and something to consider.

Very quickly, job creation. Identify the industries at the core of your regional economy. All this is available through an economic development study through the US Census. I won't go into this too much, but go for the low-hanging fruit, and don't work too hard, because your community or your county probably are good at something. In this case, Springfield, Missouri, is already really good at providing health care and logistics, so why go against the grain of that?

And then try to attract to your community that low-hanging fruit. Find out what those businesses need in order to draw those employers.

In interest of time, we're going to move through this very quickly, but we talked about some of the economic development tools yesterday. Don't forget about business development districts and overlay zoning districts.

Protect and maintain the community character. So these are the next steps for you, five next steps. Protect and maintain the community character. The best way to do that is to adopt a comprehensive plan. We've done this several times throughout the last two days.

How will the community character be protected and preserved in the future? I can't wait till we do our walking tour to learn how Newberry did that.

Also, I don't want to pick on Dollar General, but do keep in mind, this is an important use in many rural communities. But look how different the frontage of these buildings look. This is a pretty basic Dollar General, but look on the other side, and they've accommodated the local community's requirements in regards to the brick buildings.

So adjust your zoning code and building setback appearances to be in line with the local values that you have. Not based on suburban values necessarily, but within reasonable limits in regards to the corporate mandate. They want to come to your town. They've done the study. So it's just a question of asking them to make some adjustments.

The next one is retain infrastructure capacity. All communities need to do this. Very important. When you allocate water or sanitary sewer to a use, you need to know that the pie is only so big, and you can't grow forever. So have a capital improvements plan on hand, and also adopt growth-- consider adopting growth boundaries.

And in your [INAUDIBLE], commit to adding a capital improvements plan, a future land use map, and setting service area boundaries. And service area boundaries are not to-- the purpose is not to limit-- is not to limit growth or to stop it. It's to phase growth over time.

I'm going to move past this slide, but afterwards, while we're walking around Newberry, I'd love to talk to you about growth boundaries, and how they might be effective for your rural community.

Protect and maintain the community here, down this, right-sizing your zoning regulations. I talk to a lot of staff, often the mayor's in charge of fielding calls of [INAUDIBLE] or not, but I have a lot of communities that someone wears a lot of hats. They have to do code updates. They have to pull garage sale signs from the right-of-way.

They have to issue building permits. They have a lot of responsibilities. So you have to right-size your code because if you're adopting a code that has too many regulations, it's not going to be enforced.

The next one is probably, most importantly, be prepared before development arrives. Now's the time to prepare for growth, when you don't have Dollar General sitting across from the mayor and the Board of Aldermen saying, "If you don't approve this, we're not coming."

Now's the time, before they're here, to look at design guidelines, housing mix targets, open space targets, and landscape screening requirements. And again, those can all be addressed in your comprehensive plan.

Here's what we did in one community. We had a visual preference survey about what they preferred this Jimmy John's to look like, and they preferred number three, because that was more in keeping with their community character.

And then, finally, know the tools in the planning toolbox that the state authorizes you to do. In Illinois, we have the ability to control subdivisions within 1.5 miles. In all likelihood, your state does that, as well. So know what those are allowed to do, and plan for those extraterritorial areas that you can eventually annex into your community.

So a lot of ideas very quickly. Can't wait to visit with you throughout the rest of the day as we walk around Newberry. But please, come up and speak with me. I have some cards as well, I'm happy to share with you. And thank you for your time and attention.

[APPLAUSE]

SUSAN BRADBURY: Well, I'm just going to ask one question to our panelists, and you should be able to share, or I think you might each have a microphone. So we've been hearing a lot-- well, first of all, you learned a lot about zoning today. Probably more than you wanted to, perhaps.

But we've been hearing a lot in the popular press that one of the reasons why our rural communities are having problems with housing and also with attracting employers has a lot to do with our zoning regulations. But I think we've been hearing that that may not necessarily be the case. So I would like each of our panelists, if they could, tell us, what other barriers do you think are rural communities facing beyond just the zoning or the land use regulations?

CARLTON BASMAJIAN: What other barriers? Like--

SUSAN BRADBURY: Well, what other things might be hindering?

CARLTON BASMAJIAN: Well, let me say up front, it's not zoning. I mean, let me see. If I speak from the hat I wear, teaching the young people, so I spent a lot of time around 18 to 24-year-olds, pretty much every day of my life, I would say the problems are much deeper than any sort of regulatory environment, in terms of rural development, economic development.

What I hear from kids, and this is not related to what I said at all, but what I hear from kids is-- these are kids at Iowa State, which is a school that ostensibly should produce people that want to stay in Iowa. They don't. And what I hear from them is "I want to go to the city." And it's because of what they perceive as opportunities, economics-- less economic, maybe, than social.

And I think this is-- I hate to bring this up, but this is a thorny, real issue for rural development in this country, and it has been for long. This is not new. This goes back to the-- if you look back at the Country Life Commission, which was written in 1906, the exact same argument was made about the problems of rural life for young people. So we've been talking about this for 120 years at minimum.

And I think, the trick is to figure out, how to make a cultural environment in a rural place or a small city that appeals to somebody who's 22 years old. And that's tricky. This is tricky.

I'll give you one quick story. I don't want to take the whole time. I did a studio four years, three-- five years ago, in a town called Conrad, Iowa. It is north of Marshalltown. It's about 2,000 people.

Went through the process-- I had 24 kids in the class, went through the whole process. At the end, we wrote a new comp plan for them. We did a presentation like this in their community center.

30 people showed up. One of them stood up and looked at the kids, and he said, "What could we do to get you to want to live here?" So most of them looked at the floor, but one kid, who grew up 10 miles away, stood up and said, "Nothing." And I was amazed at her bluntness, but I appreciated it, because I think what she was communicating was, this is a bigger problem than what we have in this room right here.

So I think, not to be such a downer, but I don't know that zoning is really the conversation we need to be having at all. Personally, I've studied zoning [INAUDIBLE]. I don't-- I don't see it as a barrier. That's a different issue.

Maybe we can make this more popular.

GARY TAYLOR: Official position of Iowa State University. I can't disagree with that. I can't disagree with that.

Having said that, setting that over-- aside, let's just assume for the moment that we aren't after that 18- to 22- year-olds. We're after the families that-- our new families that want to come back to the smaller community.

They've got family-- they've got family there.

We talk a lot in this state about drawing the people back once they've gone out and had their fun in Minneapolis or Denver or Chicago or whatever the case may be. Still, I semi-reserve judgment on whether it is zoning. I have my serious doubts whether it's zoning.

My experience after 20 years in this state- did I say that, 20 years?-- 20 years in this state is that if a development wants to happen, the city will make it happen. Cities, the rural communities are so desperate for the housing development, are so desperate for these types of development that if it takes a change in zoning, it will happen. Whatever it takes, they will make it happen.

I don't think it is a zoning barrier. Where you find the barriers, currently, are in mortgage rates. They're in cost of construction. They are in a lack of contractors working in rural areas.

There was a big drainage-- there was a big loss in contractors after 2008, 2009 that have never come back to the rural areas. The ones that stayed contractors moved to Des Moines. They moved to Des Moines. The costs of doing business in Des Moines aren't nearly what they are to build out in rural areas because the demand is so much greater.

You're upside down. You're upside down in rural areas because you don't have wage scales that pay for the cost to develop housing in the rural areas. The average weekly wages aren't enough to support a mortgage for what it costs to build a house in a rural area.

So we've got-- there are a lot of places-- I'm a downer, too. You're going to have to-- you got a lot on your plate here, too. I don't think it's zoning. There.

SCOTT HANSON: I'll continue with the theme, but I'll try not to be a [INAUDIBLE]. So I think two things. I agree with my colleagues that zoning is not necessarily the issue.

I think Gary said it right, is that you can change the zoning, no problem. It's providing the infrastructure. And infrastructure is a lot of things. It's water, it's access to sanitary sewer, it's roadways that are designed properly. And who's going to pay for the extension of those? The development of [INAUDIBLE] help you pay for that. Rural communities often can't afford that unless they do a lot of advanced planning.

And another key piece of infrastructure that was mentioned yesterday, but I can highlight more, is especially post-COVID, access to broadband is needed to work from home or in a third space, whether it's a coffee shop or a library, is really critical. You don't have to drive downtown anymore to the big city and commute for 30 minutes. You can be at home or in your favorite coffee shop, but if you don't have broadband access, that's a real detriment to drawing not just employees and new residents, but also businesses who really rely on that, as well.

I don't have a solution for that. Unfortunately, I didn't get to speak with the speaker who-- I don't see her here this morning-- she had some really good insights about how to draw broadband services to your community. Hopefully, I can email her and get some more insight.

I would say those three things. Infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure.

EVELYN GEORGE: OK, I think we'll go ahead and open it up for questions.

AUDIENCE: Speaking of infrastructure, Gary, the zoning, mapping project that you're doing, are you planning to map infrastructure as well, as part of that project?

GARY TAYLOR: We are not. We are strictly looking at the zoning codes. There were a lot of different ways we could have headed off into other directions. This is what I-- this is what IFA wanted to look at.

I think there are other codes that we could have looked at as well, building codes, some of the other stuff. But no, we are not doing that.

AUDIENCE:       So on the same topic, I have two questions. One of them is, are you utilizing any of the GIS mapping from your Public Works Departments to help expedite your process? Because some of them have their own GIS. And then secondly, is this a one and done? Are you going to do this as a snapshot in time, or is this going to become a perpetual program that you continue to update, that will-- each year your class will take a look at the zoning again, and do any updates?

GARY TAYLOR: We are getting the GIS data from wherever they will give it to us from. So if they direct us to the Public Works Department, and they're the ones that have the zoning layer, that's where we're going. It's just wherever-- whoever's got it, please, just send it to us. That's our plea when we reach out to the communities.

Right now, it's a snapshot in time. IFA is-- IFA is considering whether to carry it on through funding to update some of the stuff, but as of today, it is-- the project is going to be a snapshot in time.

AUDIENCE:       In Illinois, your slide suggests that-- it was noted that within 1 mile of the boundaries of the city's boundaries they can establish planning zoning. Is that just the future? Is it automatic? And how the township itself [INAUDIBLE] in the state of Michigan, where we have [INAUDIBLE].

SCOTT HANSON: Great question.

AUDIENCE:       [INAUDIBLE]

SCOTT HANSON: Yeah. So in Illinois, it's a mile and a half planning boundary, but it's only in regard to subdivisions. So if a subdivision is taking place within that mile and a half boundary, the subdivision goes to the city, and they can decide whether they will review that subdivision. The zoning is still under the purview of the county. So that means it needs to be an intergovernmental coordination between the two municipalities-- between the county and the municipality, in terms of deciding that.

And really, again, going back to infrastructure, is that that's the-- the litmus test is, is the municipality planning to serve that area in the future? If it's a way out, a mile and a half out, sometimes the city will decide to waive that. We're never going to serve that area with water or sanitary sewer. So usually, that's the but if closer in, say, a quarter mile, it's, like, that's in our annexation area, so they will choose to process that subdivision. [INAUDIBLE].

AUDIENCE: OK. I don't have a question. I just have a comment. So I work for Rural Development in the state of Illinois, and I don't know if everybody knows the kind of things that we do at Rural Development, but we're rural communities. So we are working on water. We're working on bringing in broadband. We're working on bringing in solar. We're working on helping businesses in small communities.

My big issue that I have in the state of Illinois is broadband, because I believe, like you, that if you don't have broadband, you don't have anything. Broadband is the basics for education. You don't have a good school, families aren't going to move in there.

It's the part about having economic development in your small communities. You can bring in new families if they know that they can work in their small communities by using broadband. Plus, you've got the economic development part of that also.

So to me, broadband is like the big thing. If you're not from the state of Illinois-- if you are, come talk to me, but if you're not, just go to the website, look for your state Rural Development. They have offices throughout the state, and they're going to be able to come in and help your communities on what their needs are.

And sometimes Rural Development's not the one that is going to be able to completely fund the whole project. We have grants, we have low-interest loans, but we're going to be able to work with other agencies within the federal government and the state government to piece together what communities might need to fund a project, because we know these small communities cannot afford to put in a lot of the infrastructure that they might need to grow.

So it's just a comment, and it's just a way for all of you to be able to think about another resource.

AUDIENCE:I was building population pyramids, and I found a city in Nebraska, where I live, that is predominantly young, single men who work at a manufacturing facility in that town. And their housing needs are really different because they're typically not buying a lot of property. Even though predominantly most of the homes in that area are single-family homes, they typically can't afford those. They're not really interested in buying those.

The local community doesn't necessarily want to build apartments because they're worried that, well, in part, if the manufacturer closes, those people-- those jobs are lost, then they'll end up with an apartment that nobody really wants to live in. In these kinds of really unique situations, do you all have any advice or any perspectives you can provide on, that again, pretty unique situation in terms of overall population?

GARY TAYLOR: Yeah, I don't know that that's terribly unique. I think we have-- I think we have cities in Iowa that are facing-- that could have the same issues. Influxes of populations to Tyson plants, to meatpacking plants. It would make sense to build multifamily housing in these places if you see it as a way to transition into more permanent home- ownership to keep folks around.

Cities have had different approaches to dealing with that since some cities have been resistant to that because of the issues that you alluded to, this perception that it's bringing the wrong people in. Other cities have been super receptive to it because they recognize that this is the workforce that's keeping the place going right now.

I think it's education. But I think it's education about what are the jobs that-- So we talked about the workers in the packing plant. At the same time, we're talking about the same wage scale as the teachers, as the nurses. These are the people that are keeping the communities going that people don't necessarily associate with multifamily apartment living.

I think it's a conversation about just having a broad range of housing options and not just focusing on the apartment aspect. Have a conversation about the broad range of housing options that are necessary to serve the broad range of income wage scales that you can have in your community.

SUSAN BRADBURY: I'll just make a very quick comment on that, and that is to really utilize whatever space you have for housing. And so, it's like going back to your downtown and looking about what's-- like, are there apartment options over the stores, and things like that, because so often, in the historic downtown, those are properties that have been overlooked, and haven't been utilized for a long period of time. But maybe converting those, getting those back to something that's more palatable than actually building like a new apartment complex.

SCOTT HANSON: I would just quickly say, we always joke, there's nothing new under the sun in zoning. So in your case, it sounds like you perceive that as quite unique. But just off the top of my head, it occurred to me that what do communities with large military personnel, what do they do with that issue?

Of course, the military is becoming more females. Traditionally, it's been a male profession. So look at those communities. I'm thinking about community in the St. Louis area, O'Fallon, Illinois, and they have a lot of housing sort of similar to that. The military staff, as you know, they tend to move a lot. So how do they address that? So I would say that there's a parallel between maybe what military installations are doing and in this case here that you mentioned in Nebraska.

AUDIENCE: So this is a question about the history of zoning. It seems like the narrative now is very much like single-family zoning has failed. It's causing all these issues, but it's kind of been the norm for about 100 years. Can you talk a little bit about the historical argument for this type of zoning? Why is that our norm?

CARLTON BASMAJIAN: Why single-family was privileged? Is that kind of the question you're asking historically?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

CARLTON BASMAJIAN: That's a good question. Combination of things. I think, partly cultural, because the US is-- let me say this for everybody in the audience. The US is somewhat unique in the world in prioritizing detached, single-family housing above all other forms, because single-family can also include attached housing. Townhomes, row houses, for instance, are single-family houses.

And that origin story is a little bit murky. The work that's been done on this is basically argued that the US has this sort of strange cultural context, whereby the single-family detached home is sort of almost baked into the culture. It's not really. But this is-- I mean, maybe not-- this is the argument being made about this, and that, that got translated into code itself early on.

And the very first city to do this was actually Berkeley, California, believe it or not. Berkeley pioneered zoning codes where single-family houses were protected and privileged over every other form of development. That was then adopted, along with the kind of New York-style zoning, as the standard for zoning across the country. So this is a bit of an American phenomenon, and maybe it does have some cultural bearing in terms of the preference Americans have for a particular style of housing.

I think, though, the other thing to remember, though, is that many zoning codes don't actually privilege single- family housing as much as is often reported. There are many single-family housing codes in this country that actually allow duplexes to be built. Nobody talks about that.

But we have to be careful, when we talk about this stuff, that the breadth of our brush stroke is not too wide, because you can-- once you actually start to look at the code itself, you start to realize, there's a little more fluidity here than we recognize. But because of perhaps the economics of building houses, it made more sense to build single-family detached because it was more valuable. And so you made more money by building and selling them than you would building and selling detached houses or duplexes. Yeah.

GARY TAYLOR: Yeah, I want to echo that because I'm going to say that-- I'm going to say that what I'm about to tell you is still anecdotal because I haven't looked at every zoning code of the 217 that we've collected so far. But I have been a little surprised to find the number of codes in small communities that do just that. That by right, you can build single-family detached, you can build duplex up to a triplex.

So it's not a matter of a zoning code that is restricting that type of development. It's a matter of choice of the market, but that is what is getting built.

Again, I'm going to call it anecdotal because I-- the other thing that you find too is you've got pretty strong councils of government in this state, and the councils of government are like regional planning agencies. They all do local planning to various degrees, but they help local communities. A lot of them write zoning codes for local communities.

They all have, I don't want to say a template, but they have a starting point. They have a starting point with, OK, this is the code that we're starting with. We'll talk with the community. We will make changes here and there.

But there is a commonality that you will see within-- that I am detecting within regional councils of government's codes, a lot of them, like if you are in a particular region, if the community is in a particular region, you will find the similarity that those codes all allow duplexes by right, the same way they allow single-family, and so on and so forth. And so you've got, essentially, in this state, many different templates of zoning that are being used as starting points for writing zoning codes for the local community.

SCOTT HANSON: I'll just wrap up because I know we're almost done here.

Martin, thank you. Just very quickly, I would say, look to Minneapolis, who recently, I recall, I was shown the details, but I think they outlawed or they changed the requirement for single-family residential, and they kind of deconstructed that. They're kind of being sued for that right now. So you can we will watch that. But I know there's a movement nationwide to put limitations on single-family residential [INAUDIBLE] multifamily in the city zoning.

In addition, completely opposite side of the coin is extreme for Missouri. Yes, single-family residences continue to dominate. They're looking at reducing lot sizes, which stunned me, because I think in planning for over 20 years, and it's always been minimum lot sizes is 12,000 square feet, 11,000 square feet.

Now developers are coming to planners and say, we want to reduce the lot size. We want to go to 8,000 square feet. That's amazing, so that we can get more housing, more units per acre. Instead of just being two and a half or three per acre, we can put up to maybe five. That's a good thing.

So I think part of this is it's the time to address the housing crisis that we're experiencing [INAUDIBLE], and it's happening in the Midwest and Central Missouri [INAUDIBLE].

SPEAKER: All right. Let's give a nice round of applause to our panel.

[APPLAUSE]