Created by Yaromir Steiner, Founder / CEO on August 04, 2011
The following article was featured in the May 2000 convention issue of Retail Traffic Magazine. The content is as applicable today as it was the day I wrote it more than 11 years ago.
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While communities today search for ways to reconnect and create focal points, the planning and development philosophies of the early 1900s have sparked discussion on ways to reinvent municipal zoning that allows for the "innovation" of mixed-use developments that answer the cry to bring a village-type atmosphere back to our neighborhoods. As we often find, the lessons of the future will be garnered from the past.
It may surprise many of us to learn that strict municipal zoning is a relatively new phenomenon, established in the 1920s, after the rise of the American city as a hub of manufacturing and commerce and immigration.
The crucible of modern zoning, however, is not Philadelphia or Boston or New York, but much smaller Euclid, Ohio, a first-ring suburb of present-day Cleveland, on the shore of Lake Erie. It is fitting for the city named for the Greek mathematician who founded the modern science of geometry, the marking off and defining of spaces. In Euclid, during the mid-1920s, city leaders squared off against Ambler Realty Co. over a zoning code adopted in 1922 and based on New York's 1916 zoning code, the nation's first.
Six use classifications were established, ranging from single family to industrial, along with specifics relating to building heights, setbacks and other zoning details familiar today. As the result of the new zones, Ambler now found about half of its 68-acre property zoned residential. The firm sued Euclid, claiming the "ordinance attempts to restrict and control the lawful uses of appellee's land, so as to confiscate and destroy a great part of its value," for Ambler had earmarked the property for industrial development.
The case reached the Supreme Court, which in a ruling of great importance to the real estate industry (Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365 [1926]), sustained Euclid's position and its right to establish the zoning districts. It was a victory for the concept of home rule as it falls within the province of police powers, as well as the principle of confining social, civic and economic activity to distinct zones or locations.
Read the entire article here: http://retailtrafficmag.com/mag/retail_solving_suburban_zoning/