Performance Zoning for Better Cities: A Q&A with Adam Lubinsky

This article is part of The Rooftop, a blog and multimedia series from New America’s Future of Land and Housing program. Featuring insights from experts across diverse fields, the series is a home for bold ideas to improve housing in the United States and globally.

New America’s Helen Bonnyman sat down with Adam Lubinsky, an architecture professor of practice and principal and partner at the New York-based studio WXY, to discuss how a specific kind of zoning can help address the housing crisis. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Helen Bonnyman: Hi, welcome to The Rooftop. My name is Helen Bonnyman, and I’m a policy associate with New America’s Future of Land and Housing Program. We host The Rooftop as a housing blog and multimedia series shaped entirely by its contributors. It’s a forum for people across the housing sector to share innovative ideas, big or small in scale, public or private, well-trodden or experimental, that can address the housing affordability crisis.

Today I’m joined by Adam Lubinsky, an associate professor of professional practice at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and the interim director of the Masters in Real Estate Development Program. He is also a principal and partner at WXY, a New York-based architecture and planning studio globally recognized for its innovative approach to city-making. Adam focuses on processes of urban change that involve master plans, pre-development for real estate projects, and feasibility studies for institutional and public agency-led projects. He has helped to facilitate several New York City policy and planning frameworks, including neighborhood rezonings and industrial development plans. To start things off, Adam, could you talk a little bit about: Why do we need to change the way that we approach zoning?

Adam Lubinsky: Sure. Thanks Helen. And it’s great to be here. A lot of people are focused on zoning these days as one of the reasons why we don’t have enough housing. That is definitely true. There are lots of reasons why we don’t have enough housing. And that’s one of them. Costs of construction, challenges of accessing financing—there are a lot of other reasons. When we hear people talking about changing zoning, it’s often focused on getting rid of single-family zoning or just allowing developers to build bigger buildings.

And I want to talk about how we get there. That’s really the challenge. You know, there have been places like Minneapolis, where they’ve eliminated single-family zoning, but it hasn’t resulted in an enormous increase in new homes. There's been some increase, but what's happened there is actually the growth has been the larger-scale multifamily housing. What I’m really focused on: The issue with zoning isn’t that it’s just restrictive. It’s that it’s not really responsive to places. And so, how do we get zoning to be really responsive to particular places?

“The issue with zoning isn’t that it’s just restrictive. It’s that it’s not really responsive to places.”

When I think of New York City, they applied the zoning that we have today 65 years ago. And that zoning was applied across the whole city, set out very basic guidance about where land uses could go, what different kinds of housing, what scales could get built, and where the parking could fit in. But it was really kind of universalized across the entire city. And it wasn’t really related directly to each place—the character of each place, but also the market conditions of each place. And so again, what I’m really focused on is thinking about: How can we make zoning something that produces more housing, but does it in a way where it’s being responsive to places?

I’ll talk a lot about New York City, because that’s where I’m based. In New York, we spent a lot of time getting something called mandatory inclusionary housing approved, which means that you could build more housing, but you had to do 25 to 30 percent affordable housing when you did that. That was really important. The challenge, though, is that New York City is very different in different areas of the city. And so you have places where they’ve rezoned the neighborhood, but there’s no real ability, based on the local market conditions, to do that 25 to 30 percent affordable housing. And then there are other places which are higher income where you could do more than 25 to 30 percent affordable housing. And so again, this idea that we want a kind of zoning that’s responsive to places is really, really critical.

Bonnyman: That makes a lot of sense. So today we’re going to be talking about this idea of performance zoning. And I’m hoping you could tell us: What is performance zoning? And how could it address the housing crisis that we’re finding ourselves in today?

Lubinsky: So the idea with performance zoning is that it controls the effects of zoning, and it’s focused on the outcomes, not just vague principles on land use and density. It’s really a simple concept. Performance zoning focuses on a scoring framework that’s tied to what we want to see in a place. So in order to do that, we have to focus first on what items are measurable. What are we measuring when we talk about a scoring framework? Second, we’re talking about a framework. So things are flexible. A developer can propose a mix of uses, different heights that can meet different aspects of the scoring framework. So you can have two developments that meet the scoring framework and succeed, but look very different or have very different uses within them. Third, it’s a framework that’s accountable and responsive. The idea that contexts change, you know, whether the traffic is increasing, or someone’s built a supermarket next door, allows the performance zoning to change with time. That’s something that our static zoning doesn’t really allow.

So one thing that I want to talk about is we want to see certain outcomes in a place. And we’ll need to talk about who the “we” is in this situation. And I really look at it, and I’ll talk about it in a particular example, that the “we” is who is living in that area, but also the “we” is the wider city and the needs of the city. And the “we” is also the developers. They clearly are the ones who are building things, so they need to have a say in this.

I could talk a little bit about performance zoning and where it comes from, and what some examples of it are. It’s a concept that’s really been around for almost 50 years. There was a planner who’s written the book called Performance Zoning, Lane Kendig, and there’s a planning practice tied to his work. Much of their work was initially focused in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. And what they were interested in wasn’t so much about lots of housing, but creating performance zoning that was focused on measurable environmental impacts, like stormwater. So the idea with performance zoning, again, is it’s really focused on the needs of those different contexts. There’s been some interesting work done recently by Tim Love, who’s at a firm in Boston called Utile, and he's very focused on suburban areas. There, the issues about being responsive to place are really about the character of homes and buildings in suburban contexts, where there’s a lot of sensitivity around that.

But there are also examples where kinds of performance zoning [are] really tied to the local market conditions. I moved to London in late 2003, and in 2004, London launched something called the London Plan, where developments had a kind of explicit development appraisal that was tied to the local economics. And that allowed them to negotiate the density, and the height, and the kind of costs that were involved. So that kind of very explicit response to key measurable impacts was really important for looking at the performance of those sites. So those are some examples. And New York City has tried performance zoning in a way. In the ’70s and the ’80s, they had a performance zoning there, which was tied to something called the Housing Quality Program. And it had a scoring framework associated with it. So this is not an entirely new concept.

Bonnyman: Thank you. That’s really interesting. And I think you covered it, but just to tack on, could you add maybe one more sentence about, at a really basic level, how is performance zoning as a process different from more traditional forms of zoning that are left over from the twentieth century?

Lubinsky: I think it is important for a city to be able to identify an area that needs to change. And that is sort of the beginning of what we often call a rezoning process. That's still something that needs to happen—we still need planners to come forward and say, “we need to change here.” The question is how we do that. And so from a process perspective, that first step is really, “okay, what are the local needs that are associated with the place being rezoned?” And that really should have three perspectives: the local perspective, the city perspective, and the developer perspective.

“When I taught my studio at Columbia, the idea wasn’t to create one set score that was required, but actually to balance the scores between what local folks are looking for, what the city is looking for, and what developers need to make something happen.”

So [in] that first step, local folks identify the kind of amenities and uses that they’re really focused on. They focus on the environmental and infrastructure issues that they’re concerned with. The city will focus on the needs that they are most concerned with: affordable homes, job creation, zero carbon, carbon mitigation; and developers will focus on the needs that they have: market rate housing, viable commercial uses. After that step, there’s a need to value and score those different needs. This is something that I’ve been testing with a studio that I’ve been teaching at Columbia. That valuation process is really looking at uses and the rents or sales associated per square foot, and how we begin to score those different things. So building heights, at a certain point, they may have a negative score associated with it.

So that first step is establishing the needs. The second step is about doing the valuation and scoring. And then the third is finalizing that scoring framework so people can create scenarios. That scenario building process is really critical. And that can be done in person with workshops, it can be done through a website, and that gives developers a chance to see what a successful scoring framework looks like. When I taught my studio at Columbia, the idea wasn’t to create one set score that was required, but actually to balance the scores between what local folks are looking for, what the city is looking for, and what developers need to make something happen.

Bonnyman: Yeah, this is so fascinating. And that does kind of lead us into my next question, which is—I wanted to talk about the political implications of performance zoning. Whose interest does it prioritize and how is that different from traditional zoning practices?

Lubinsky: That’s a great question. Right now we have a process that really doesn’t bring people in. And so, before we talk about performance zoning prioritizes, we need to think about who’s being prioritized now. Right now, in New York City, our zoning code is more than 3,000 pages. It’s unbelievably complex, and has very little to do with those kinds of local needs or local market conditions. So the current process doesn’t prioritize local people. And when the city goes to change zoning, it essentially creates a pretty well-baked proposal, either internally within the city planning organization, or a developer comes forward. And so when the public gets involved, it’s pretty late in the process, in a way.

The idea with [performance zoning] is really to bring people in—with a set time frame, we don’t want to slow things down—to create a scoring framework that allows people in, to express their needs. And what I found is that when people really see the kinds of benefits they can get—childcare built into a scheme, or a supermarket built into something, or something that relates to the local culture and community—that people will allow for a bit of extra density. And that was shown when we tested our studio. We had a site in Harlem, we tested it out with members of a land use committee on the community board, and they were really interested in that trade-off. And so, you know, who does this prioritize? It really prioritizes local people, but it also prioritizes the city interests, and it also makes very transparent what developer needs are, and it works to really de-risk the process for them as well.

Bonnyman: That’s really fascinating. So my final question, then, is: Hearing all the benefits that performance zoning can bring to a community and to various actors within that city, I’m curious how can more localities move towards adopting performance zoning?

Lubinsky: I think the best way is really through doing pilots. You know, we have a way of looking at zoning [where] we think of it as something that needs to be done across an entire city or municipality. And I think instead this is something that really needs to be tested in certain key places. What I focus on is higher-density areas that have a mix of uses and a mix of incomes. And so the process that I’m describing, I think would be great to test out in an area where you want to rezone a commercial corridor, [where] you want to look at the mix of different kinds of uses that could come into a place. So that’s really the key, to try it out, to get buy-in from local people. This is a way to involve, to get people excited about understanding the underlying financial viability, the constraints involved there, so they can really see what it takes to get something built, but get something built that they want to see.

Bonnyman: That sounds so exciting. I hope to see more of that in my neighborhood in DC someday. Well, thank you so much for chatting, Adam. I really loved getting to learn more about this, and your contribution to The Rooftop is much appreciated. Thanks so much for being here.

Lubinsky: Great. It’s been fantastic to be a part of this. I hope I see it in your neighborhood in DC as well.