Ryan Daly
2/1/2010
It is one of a homeowner’s worst nightmares: The neighbor moves in to your charming pre-war neighborhood and decides to build a second story to his home that blocks the sun from your property. Or, worse still, someone buys the vacant lot next door and builds something so abhorent, so out of place, that it ruins the character of the street.But what can you do? As City of Tulsa Preservation Planner Amanda DeCort pointed out, “if you own the lot, you can do pretty much anything the law will allow you to do.” “Really, historic preservation overlay zoning is the only tool that we have,” DeCort said. “While you can’t keep an owner from tearing down a house, you can at least somewhat control what goes up in its place.” The problem is that many old neighborhoods already have existing infill that, while not destroying the character of the neighborhood, make it ineligible for designation as historic. The solution, she said, is a combination of things, one of which is a change of zoning. Euclidean zoning, the system currently employed in Tulsa, is focused on the separation of uses. For instance, residential areas need to be separated from industrial uses. The problem, DeCort said, is that Euclidean zoning doesn’t dictate what a new structure has to look like. Form-based zoning, however, is more concerned with the feel of the neighborhood. Set backs, building materials and architectural styles are examined in form-based zoning. “Form-based zoning and historical neighborhoods kind of go hand in hand,” DeCort said. It also makes it easier to create mixed-use developments, she said. The problem, though, is that some will see form-based code as the government regulating taste. “We have to be careful to do something that isn’t subjective,” she said. “But if we are careful, we can come up with a clear-cut set of guidelines. We just have to make sure everybody knows what the rules are.”
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Aerospace
