I am hearing from an increasing number of people trying to figure out how to make the place where they live and work better. Sometimes this follows a vacation or business travel to a place that has built some protected bikeways, a walk down a tree lined street fronted with gorgeous four-plexes with two story porches, or a stay in a sunny apartment over someone’s garage, Folks return home and start to ask why can’t we have that here in our neighborhood? The benefits seem so obvious, right?

Typically ,there are local regulation that prohibit the cool thing you saw in some slightly more progressive place. The town has street standards from the 1970’s applied to the entire municipality and those street standards don’t allow protected bikeways, or on-street parking. The zoning regulations for 3/4 of the town does not allow Accessory Dwelling Units lADUs) like that apartment over the garage. The same zoning does not allow anything but a single unit home, even along a transit line with frequent service, so a four-plex on that vacant corner lot is out of the question.

Where did these rules come from? Why are they so…… dumb? What can we do about it? Poke around on the town’s website and you can find the community’s Comprehensive Plan (planner’s slang: Comp. Plan). The Comp Plan is full of all manner of great ideas, goals, and policies to make the place better and a maybe even a Work Plan for how to change the local regulations to make those great policies legal, and how to pay for things like on-street parking and protected bikeways. Unfortunately, many communities never get around to implementing the goals and policies they spent a lot of time and money putting into the Comp Plan. There are probably a number of reasons for this failure, but what do you do if your town is stuck with goals that can’t get implemented?

If the regulations are in the way, the zoning code and street standards, you should probably change those. Better regulations don't just happen. Any significant change in what is on the books typically brings out lots of folks convinced that the change can only make things worse, the change will be too expensive, or the change will bring the wrong sort of people and reduce their property values. In order to change the rules you have to get good information into the hands of lots of people and build trust. Take senior staff, elected officials, and neighborhood activists on field trips to see well executed places where people are building/rebuilding walkable neighborhoods. Learn what is in your Comprehensive plan, your LCI study and your local zoning code right now. Know the current rules of the game. figure out what rules stand in the way of reasonable things that could be done in your town.

A change in the current rules and procedures that clears the way to deliver on the goals and policies of the Comp Plan adopted by the city council should get support and be adopted without too much fuss, right? Nope. Adjust your expectations. Recognize that this is going to take a while. Identify the early, relatively easy things to fix with a simple text amendment that could help create momentum. Figure out a strategy with near term and long term goals for the rules that need to change. Some bigger moves may have to wait for a comprehensive overhaul of the rules following the next Comp Plan update in two years. At least that’s what the city staff will probably tell you. Press for changes along the way anyway. Build political capital. Build trust by sharing accessible information about the benefits of the goals the rules are obstructing.

People tend to resist change, particularly change they don’t understand or change that is proposed by someone they don’t know, don’t like or don’t trust.

Don’t assume that your town’s current regulations were handed down by capable wise professionals who could see the future. A lot of frustrating rules were adopted to prevent some terrible thing from happening, and, but the rules were written in a way that prevents a number of good things from happening. You are not questioning the motivation of the folks who wrote the regulation, just the affect the rules have on your community now.

Dig in and learn. I know someone who diagnosed why her dryer wasn’t working by watching a couple of YouTube video. She figured it out, bought a part online and fixed it. Most folks find appliance repair quite intimidating, but it ain’t magic. Your local zoning regulations aren’t magic either. If you can figure out a way to put in the work, you can change the things that are holding your town back, mired in resignation and apathy.

Don’t go it alone. Find your people. Find other folks on your local social media willing to meet for coffee and work together. Research the rules in those other places with the cool stuff you want to do in your town. Start a community development book club. Build a constituency that is clearly not going away and will need to be engaged by the city staff and elected officials. Have as many conversations as you can outside of the official on-cable-TV public meetings. Avoid embarrassing people with information you figure they really should know if they are going to be good at their job…(nobody likes that.) It will be a grind, but with time and effort you can make a difference. It’s not so different from fixing your dryer.; Intimidating and confusing at first, but if you take it a step at a time, you can get to a good outcome.