CodeNEXT—the rewrite of the city’s land development code—may be headed for an organizational overhaul after city staff this week proposed eliminating transect zones in an effort to make the code less confusing. “It would involve a lot of work [by] the consultants,” said Jerry Rusthoven, assistant director of the planning and zoning department. “The map would have to change, all of the names of the zones would change. It’s an awful lot of work, [but] it’s not starting over.”
Goodbye, T-Zones
Transect zones, one of the hallmarks in the first draft of CodeNEXT, are form-based zones—a tool created to allow leniency in what structures in a zone are used for and strictness on the “form” or physical character of those structures. These zones aimed to create neighborhoods mixed with commercial development and a wider variety of residential uses while maintaining a standard neighborhood look. They contrasted with the more standard “use-based” zones in the code, which had opposite priorities. However, transect zones, which were concentrated in the city’s urban core, turned out to be controversial. Many people voiced concerns that CodeNEXT, while it was supposed to simplify the land development code, only created more confusion by essentially laying out two separate codes— a transect code and a use-based code.“It would involve a lot of work [by] the consultants. The map would have to change, all of the names of the zones would change. It’s an awful lot of work, [but] it’s not starting over.” —Jerry Rusthoven, assistant director of the Austin Planning and Zoning Department“We’ve heard a lot of criticism that people feel we have two codes,” Rusthoven said. “We are looking at combining them into a single spectrum of zones that would still maintain some zones having more form-based controls and others having less.” The second draft, due out in August, will still have zones reflective of transect zones and use-based zones, but the names will be unified and easier to discern, as the change would deal primarily with nomenclature.
