27 Small City Housing • Feature • Zone Allentown traditional neighborhood development overlay, and searched for patterns on the map – filling in gaps, smoothing blocks, and making the pattern more predictable from street to street.” This process helped determine where different “uses” made sense and how building types should be regulated by reading the city’s broader development patterns, rather than forcing uniformity. On average, a single zoning district allows for four of the fourteen building types, but in the city’s denser, mixed-use core that number increases to as many as seven. This enables entire blocks to share a district while still accommodating a wide range of forms. As Jennifer adds, “while we did decrease the intensity of some allowable uses within neighborhoods, we also created more consistency in the allowable uses throughout various zoning districts when along the mixed use corridors.” Along these commercial corridors, nodes with strong storefronts, offices and continuous streetwalls were intentionally preserved to support the density and variety that residents value. In this way, the team iterated on the study to thoughtfully align building types within use categories to allow for irregular patterns to remain while creating coherent, flexible blocks that were legible to residents and developers. Aspirational Development As the team revised the initial drafts based on existing building types and urban form, they also began to consider how the new code could allow for different kinds of aspirational development throughout the city. How could Zone Allentown support the City’s recently developed housing plan? How could the code reinforce the City’s Recompete plan, Allentown Works, designed to encourage job creation in Allentown through targeted place-based investments? Trevor explains, “When we were working on the code and iterating, we were trying to translate the current code into a form-based context. But in that translation, we were making amendments where necessary to meet the city’s objectives in Vision 2030, the housing plan, the parks plan. My mind goes first to the density calculations.” One of the core intentions of Zone Allentown, he continues, was “really pointing growth to our corridors and letting that growth happen.” Along commercial and mixeduse corridors, the team deliberately adjusted density allowances, allowing more housing than existing building types alone might have supported. These changes aligned the zoning code with broader municipal goals to expand housing supply, make jobs more accessible, and reinforce the walkable urban form.
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