Tulsa Zoning: February 2008 Archives

Candidates for the two midtown Tulsa City Council Districts, 4 and 9, will present their views on neighborhood issues tonight, Feb. 25th, at 7:00 p.m., at All Souls Unitarian Church, 30th & Peoria. Doors open at 6:30. I expect you'll hear a number of questions about infill and zoning issues, such as neighborhood conservation districts and teardowns.

The forum is sponsored by Brookside Neighborhood Association, PreserveMidtown, Coalition of Historic Neighborhoods, and the South Peoria Neighborhood Connection Foundation.

My column in this week's Urban Tulsa Weekly is about two aspects of city planning: the planning failure that resulted in a jail and homeless services being located right between revitalizing older neighborhoods and an arts and entertainment district, and the need for a land-use planning tool like neighborhood conservation districts to permit infill while protecting the character of our older neighborhoods. You can read more about the idea on the Preserve Midtown website.

In my column, I mention the notion of using lawsuits instead of zoning to regulate land use. This idea was proposed in "Beyond Zoning: Land Use Controls in the Digital Economy," a 1998 paper by John A. Charles, Environmental Policy Director for Cascade Policy Institute. It sounds appealing in theory, but I think it would be a practical disaster, as I point out in the column.

Also in this week's UTW, Kent Morlan, who both resides and owns a business downtown, points out the waste in the way downtown streets have been rebuilt. I like the idea of reopening closed streets and turning one-way streets into two-way streets, but the massive use of concrete pavers and other streetscaping has overcomplicated what should have been a simple idea.