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This is very neat. A thing that's a little crazymaking in all of these maps though: one of the most important things you're looking at in a zoning map is the distinction between single-family lots (exclusively for detached houses) and multi-family lots. You have to zoom in to the single-neighborhood level to see that distinction here (between paler green and darker green), and it's subtle.
It's nowhere nearly as bad as my neighboring municipality's zoning map, though:
https://www.oak-park.us/sites/default/files/zoning/2021-02-2...
I'm convinced this map was colored specifically to obscure that distinction.
The links to zoning variance documents in the planned development (red) zones are a really nice touch!
Oak Park has a history behind the zoning. Not a pleasant one.
So does all of Chicago.
You don't want to get me started on this.
The phrasing I liked the best was ”the area colored pale green are reserved for families who qualify for a seven-digit mortage”
I would bet 90% of the properties in the pale green section of the linked map are worth much less than $1M (technically the bar would be $1.25M for a $1M mortgage at 20% down since it would be a jumbo).
In Zillow, choosing recently sold houses only within last 60 days shows mostly $300k to $600k detached single family houses, with a few $1M+ houses in the northeast section (I-90/94 seems to be the demarcation of most $1M+ homes).
Are you sure it’s not just that there isn’t enough gradients to tell?
Within 1 block of my house there are townhomes, a mansion, single family homes, 2 parks, mid rises, a hotel, real commercial, a high rise, an sro and a school.
The commercial, parks and hotel are accurately represented but only 1 set of townhouses are otherwise. And that’s the set that takes up a whole block.
Otherwise the mixed blocks all come up as single family. Which might just be a fidelity problem.
Is it possible that many of those uses predate the current zoning? There are numerous buildings in Chicago that would not be permitted by their current zoning.
Oh, the data is good, I just think there has to be a better color scheme for the residential areas (it needs to be green to fit the SimCity aesthetic, but there must be something else you can do).
What would you want more of our of that map? It looks like a lot of zoning maps I have seen but I can't think of any way to improve them other than consistency and a better viewing medium (not PDF)
What's wrong with your neighborhood’s zoning?
The originally submitted title ('Chicago zoning in the style of SimCity' or words to that effect) was much more informative.
To be fair, this is a great web site, but the it doesn't look like SimCity 2000 at all apart from some icons here and there. I'm glad that SimCity inspired the web site's creators, but nowhere near to call the web site "SimCity style". Maybe I'm missing something?
There's some code in there for a helicopter so I assume that there are some easter eggs that would bring a more SimCity vibe to the whole thing.
Wait, so commercial zones are supposed to be only in strips and around street, and industrial zones are not actually far away from residential? Guess I always played SC2000 wrong back in the days.
Putting industrial far away from your residential is a classic mistake that causes all kinds of traffic problems, but also the industrial in a real city is going to mostly be relatively innocuous. It’ll be car dealerships, car repair, machine shops, furniture making, data centers, warehouses, etc, etc. In Sim City industrial was always giant factories with belching smokestacks, steel foundries, chemical plants, coal gas, and so on.
The trick was to use railway and no roads!
You want to keep your industrial zones away from nice residential ones. It's fine for the paupers to be breathing in zinc.
Here’s the GitHub repo [1] for those who are code-curious.
Wow this is amazing. Clicking on zones is also more informative than I expected. Massive kudos. Also, it's nice touch to let me turn on SimCity music. Fantastic all around.
Pretty nice website of chicagos zoning
Fyi there’s an initiative to create a nationwide (USA) zoning map https://www.zoningatlas.org/
Very cool visualization! A meta comment here is that you look at the shapes of the zoning districts and they make no real sense, except that they were applied as the best fit to whatever happened to be on each lot at the time the codes was adopted. It’s sad how much our local governments main job is to try and freeze everything in place and prevent change.
If you look at the north and south sides where there are large swathes of green residential neighborhoods, you can see they are regularly divided by blue commercial corridors along the cardinal directions. Chicago's grid design was adapted from the original Northwest Ordinance, which divided the land into square mile sections. Those blue strips are one mile apart, and in denser neighborhoods an additional blue strip exists midway at the half mile mark. This organizing principle is what made Chicago a city of neighborhoods, since each section or quarter section is bounded by commercial thoroughfares on each side, and the neighborhood turns inward. The section line and half section line thoroughfares are wider roads which permit more traffic volume. I think it's a good compromise between facilitating traffic flow and also isolating it from the contained neighborhoods where the bulk of people live.
As far as freezing the zoning in place, that's not really true as downtown areas were once like the neighborhoods and were subsequently upzoned as density and desirability increased. The original zoning plan is intact in the neighborhoods because there just hasn't been a desire or need to upzone them (yet). Chicago is known as a relatively pro-development city which is flexible on things other cities are inflexible on.
>look at the shapes of the zoning districts and they make no real sense
???
Commercial zoning aligns with the major streets of the grid, per design.
Industrial zones along the Chicago River, where barges can access, and rail lines.
Residential everywhere else.
What doesn't make sense?
The zoning makes a lot of sense. The place where white people live is zoned to have nice, single-family houses with a huge yard that takes up a ton of space and is given outsized say in local politics. The place where black people live is zoned to be as underfunded and crowded as possible on the other side of the highway.
Mission accomplished for the local governments who decided how zoning should work.
It’s sad how much our local governments main job is to try and freeze everything in place and prevent change.
That's not really what the local government's main job is supposed to be. Local government is supposed to be a venue for regular people to participate in the kinds of everyday decisions that affect their lives. But then it ends up mainly representing local property owners and developers who are its most interested (in the sense of stake or investment, not curiosity) constituents. It is these special interests who try their hardest, not necessarily to prevent change, but to protect and grow their investments.
> It’s sad how much our local governments main job is to try and freeze everything in place and prevent change.
I wish we had mixed zoning outside the rare cities like NYC: it would offer at least one scalable option to reduce urban sprawl - say when lots are demolished.
https://gisapps.chicago.gov/mapchicago/ has more information. Your city probably also has a GIS page - just look up "gis <city>" and you will probably find it.
In general, that link does have more information. But if one wants to learn about how individual blocks or areas are zoned, the OP's site (https://secondcityzoning.org) is much easier to use and seems to offer more information, too.
A Reddit post by me:
>A Detroit News columnist playing the city-management computer game SimCity "found that Godzilla attacking the city in the 1972 Detroit scenario caused less destruction than the mayoralty of Coleman Young". <https://www.reddit.com/r/Detroit/comments/3r3dtl/a_detroit_n...>
That's not really fair; he was mayor from the early 1970s all the way into the 1990s, a period that captured the peak of panic selling and white flight (not just in Detroit but across the midwest) and the deindustrialization and hollowing-out of the Detroit auto industry.
I've built something kind of similar to this for the UK which shows prices of post codes, so you can see what are the cheap / expensive areas in a town or city.
Where's the Disasters menu?
I think I found Godzilla!
Dunno, but it looks like someone built an arcology at Marina City.
Search button doesn't work for me on mobile safari. Using the find me link does, but hard to tell if the map was centered around my address or not.
I thought so too but there just wasn’t a visual indication that it did anything. The map definitely moved.
"the color scheme: green for residential, blue for commercial and yellow for industrial."
Meanwhile, a boatload of the map is red.
This is something I've been meaning to do with my city to show how bad residential zoning is. Kudos to whoever made this.
Jokes on us, the mayor set all of the budgets to 50% and the transportation manager was right: we regret it.
Dismiss petitioner
Why are all the `y`s missing from the text in Chrome but not in Safari?
wow, impressive. Colors could be better, but overall, it's pretty informative and cool.
As a Chicagoan, i approve
Political take: even if many people would like mixed zoning in dense urban centers (with commerce at the street level, and housing above), the familiarity of zoning from games like SimCity makes mixed zoning less legible.
Laws mandating parking space and accessibility requirements add to the problem to make it unfixable: any relaxation (allowing mixed zoning at time t) could create future legal and social problems (not enough street parking at time t+N)
Zoning in other countries is easy to visualize, even though it's completely alien to the Sim City ways: I recall being disappointed in the first game, and SC2000, because there was no way to make my home city. Residential zoning? My hometown doesn't have such designation at all, apartment buildings have commercial underneath in almost all cases, and office buildings and apartments end up sharing walls.
Not that Sim City ever took traffic or parking even remotely seriously: Even in modern city builders, nobody attempts to represent the amount of space dedicated to surface lots in the US, because it'd look awful. It's always a fun exercise to, go to Google Maps, take a picture of the downtown of, say, St Louis, and then coloring every surface parking, or multi-level building solely dedicated to housing cars for commuters and sports events attendees: It's well over 30% of the surface area. Then people wonder why the city is dead after 5 pm
That is because American zoning is often use-prescriptive.
Japanese zoning is pretty easy to visualize because all zoning types are defined by intensity level, where high intensity zones also allow all lower intensity uses. So rather than a series of venn diagrams, the structure is more like a pyramid.
How does "not enough street parking" creating legal problems? Most of the north side of Chicago is mixed-use, medium-density, and street-parking reliant; it works fine (these are some of the most valuable and economically vital in the city).
cities: skylines 2 has mixed zones and it's easy to visualise. Just a matter of picking a new colour.