25 Small City Housing • Feature • Zone Allentown creating a diversity that resists easy categorization. These areas form an important patchwork within the city, where variation itself is the defining characteristic. Much of this complexity stemmed from the fact that large portions of Allentown were built before zoning existed at all. “Particularly in the older, central parts of the city,” says Jennifer, “you have things like manufacturing plants that were early employers, surrounded by neighborhoods of people who walked to work.” In these areas, building types fold into communities differently. City staff identified industrial sites next to residential buildings and commercial uses on the corners of residential blocks. Under the city’s previous use-based zoning code, many of these buildings were technically nonconforming. The building type study reframed these “irregularities” not as anomalies, but as evidence of how the city developed to meet the needs of residents at the time. That reframing shaped the logic of Zone Allentown. Rather than starting with abstract land-use categories, the new code grounded its regulations in the physical reality of the city – how buildings sit on their lots, how they meet the street, and how they relate to their neighbors. In many cases, this meant permitting building types that already existed but had –Melissa Velez It’s interesting to see the transition from the historic districts to the Urban Rowhouse, and then transitioning into the Suburban Rowhouse going through time and seeing how things have changed in the city.
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