Building a house in a modern city entails a host of regulations and codes, making the process laborious and costly. Andrés Duany, a founding principal at Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ) and co-founder of Congress for the New Urbanism, is advocating for cities to rethink policies and ordinances to allow more flexibility with the Lean Urbanism initiative. One sub-agenda of Lean Urbanism is “pink codes,” overlays of existing codes that create the possibility of bypassing building codes within certain thresholds.
“The Lean Urbanism initiative seeks to spin the clock back to a time when codes weren’t so restrictive so today’s young people–who bring real energy and innovation–can act,” Duany says. “Today’s codes and regulations add tremendous expense, so only major corporations and large developers can afford to build. Pink codes would level the playing field so that the small contractor and individual can work in cities.”
Pink codes are specifically aimed at small-scale buildings such as homes, duplexes, and some one-story businesses. In many suburbs, people are still allowed to build one and two-family houses without intense regulation. Duany argues that the same should be true for cities. “Individually, houses may seem small scale, but collectively it has a very large impact,” he asserts.
John Norquist, president and CEO of Congress for the New Urbanism and ECOHOME’s Vision 2020 Sustainable Communities chair, notes that bad regulations developed from narrow perspectives or specialties that focused on solutions to fix their problem without regard for how it affects others. “Across the nation, 33 states adopt virtually everything the International Code Council (ICC) puts forth, and many special interests lobby the ICC to get their agenda included. This resulted in codes and regulations that get in the way of better development,” Norquist says.
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