Open Zoning

To take on the crucial challenge of decoding zoning, the Urban Tech Hub and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design – Laboratory for Values in the Built Environment joined forces to develop “Open Zoning” – a pioneering initiative designed to redefine how we access and comprehend local zoning policies.

The growing housing shortage in the United States underscores an urgent need for new mechanisms to increase the nation’s housing supply. At the heart of this crisis lies a puzzle: zoning.

Zoning codes are critical infrastructure shaping our cities; however, their intricate legal language is challenging for small-scale builders and housing advocates to decipher where and what they can build in their community. Fortunately, a growing number of cities, like Minneapolis, are pioneering efforts to write new policies that nurture more equitable housing development, especially focused on closing the “missing middle” housing gap. However, these revised policies, although well- intentioned, remain a persistent puzzle for non- experts to solve.

Despite great strides in zoning reform, the key challenge is decoding zoning – translating zoning policies into formats accessible to small- scale builders and housing advocates, sparking bottom-up action to combat our national housing shortage.

Open Zoning democratizes zoning codes, transforming them into legible, actionable data to spark a bottom-up response to the housing crisis.

The research team developed a tool that translates zoning codes into an open-source, machine-readable data standard, the first of its kind. This novel system known as our “Feed Specification”, employs algorithms to instantly decode the zoning puzzle, equipping small-scale builders – instrumental in closing the missing middle housing gap – with actionable zoning data.