VIDEO: City Prepares to Overhaul Its Zoning Code
Date Posted: March 31, 2025
Posted In: Discussion, Ideas, News,
From St. Louis Magazine: Zoning reform isn’t just a hot topic with urban-policy nerds right now. It’s also likely to stir up some “big feelings” in St. Louis soon, as one city official recently put it.
The city is gearing up to overhaul its zoning code, which is widely seen as outdated and needlessly cumbersome. A rough timeline was laid out at a planning commission meeting this month by Code Studio, the Austin, Texas–based firm that the city contracted with to facilitate the process for $1 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds. They’re contemplating a public kickoff in May or June, followed by about a year’s worth of incremental steps and public engagement toward a new draft code in June 2026.
Code Studio said its goals include “user-friendliness,” “removing barriers to good development,” and trying to “bake in” more “form-based standards.” (Those standards could include, for example, tighter limits on surface parking lots, which are pretty meh to walk past.) The idea is to flesh out the city’s newly adopted strategic land use plan.
It may get fraught because zoning doesn’t just affect how a street feels to visitors. If you own a home, the new code will dictate what types of other residences can be built near that asset—likely your largest asset—and those variables can, in turn, drastically affect its value. Plus the code will dictate what you can and cannot do with the property. Says the unnamed city official, “It’s fully changing people’s property rights.”
Why It Matters: Although the decisions made over the next year will not instantly remake the city, over time, they will indeed. Says Miriam Keller of the city’s Planning and Urban Design Agency, “If we don’t do this, we won’t have tools to create the places that people said we need to be a competitive and thriving city.”
What’s Next: In addition to the ARPA funds, Keller says up to $750,000 from a recent federal grant will support the zoning overhaul. Code Studio, meanwhile, plans to officially kick off the public process in May or June. —Nicholas Phillips