Green growth gambit

Albuquerque's new "form-based codes" could offer city planners another model for denser, more pedestrian-friendly growth.

Conceptual sketch from the Volcano Heights sector plan on the ABQ city website

ALBUQUERQUE -- Depending on whom you talk to, five new zoning codes currently being considered by Albuquerque’s Environmental Planning Commission are either a positive step forward, toward less sprawl and more transit-oriented development, or they’re potentially a Trojan horse that will allow developers to more easily deviate from existing neighborhood sector plans.

The new codes are called “form-based,” which is a wonky way to describe a new way of regulating how the city develops.

Instead of focusing on how land can be used, as traditional zoning does, form-based zones regulate the form and type of a building, and how it relates to the street and the surrounding neighborhood in general.

The idea is that the encouragement of a certain type of built environment will create mixed-use, pedestrian friendly and transit oriented development, which Albuquerque’s long-range plans call for.

City Councilor Isaac Benton characterizes it as the reorganization of development practices in a way that gives pedestrians priority. The codes are meant to ensure street-scapes that encourage people to walk down them, with a priority on safety.

Parking and garages are in the back of buildings rather than the front, with windows and doorways facing the street. Height restrictions and minimum lot requirements are loosened up, with the hope that resulting increases in density will make mass transit more viable.

They also allow mixed uses, such as residences built above commercial space, so that people can live near services and employment. “We don’t currently have a mixed-use zone,” Benton told the Independent, “and this is an attempt to address that.”

The five zones have been carefully designed, Benton said, to ensure that new development fits well with the surrounding environment. They each have intent and eligibility requirements, and particular care has been taken to ensure that the codes are sensitive to residential neighborhoods.

When new development is adjacent to residential areas, for instance, there are requirements for fitting the building at a certain angle that maintains solar light. There are also very specific requirements about how buildings would be “stepped down” if they are taller than their surroundings in lower-density neighborhoods.

Several Albuquerque sector plans already incorporate form based codes. If approved, the five codes under review would be stand alone codes inserted into the city’s zone atlas. They wouldn’t be “mapped” to any specific area of the city, which means they wouldn’t be mandatory.

Instead, they’d be available for use in new or updated sector plans, or for individual property owners to use. In order to use them on individual projects, a developer would have to go through the normal development review process for justifying a zone change.

Green Zones? or a Trojan Horse?

Some view the proposed “form based” codes as “green zoning” of sorts.

“Having green building codes is great, but if we really want to develop sustainably we need to go further. Things that make a community “green” are mass transit and pedestrian activity, and the ideal thing in an urban area is to build at a density that promotes these things,” Louis Kolker, of the Greater Albuquerque Housing Partnership, told the Independent.

According to Kolker, the form-based codes will make it easier to create affordable housing because they allow for greater density than current zoning. There aren’t any restrictions on density in the codes, with the idea being that the size of a building itself regulates density.

Greater density, Kolker said, will also improve the financial feasibility of redevelopment in general in neglected areas, many with outdated commercial strips.

But a major caveat comes from some of Albuquerque’s oldest neighborhoods, many of which are highly organized with residents who have spent many years planning for and improving their neighborhoods.

Jessie Sais, a longtime activist with the Wells Park neighborhood just north of downtown, says the new zones pose a threat to the long term vision found in her neighborhood’s sector plan.

“We’ve spent hundreds of hours as a community developing our sector plan,” Sais told the Independent. “And we think these form-based codes will give developers a way to circumvent the rules laid out in our plan.”

Sais and other community activists believe that the codes once adopted will have the city’s stamp of approval, and therefore make it much easier for developers to get zone changes approved for their projects.

Vicente Quevedo, organizer with the Sawmill Community Land Trust, which is located just west of Wells Park, echoed these sentiments.

“The form-based codes may create an easier route for developers to get exemptions from the zoning allowed in our sector plan because by adopting the new codes, the city will have given the codes an official endorsement of sorts,” Quevedo said.

Quevedo said that despite these concerns he believes the form-based codes could be very good for the city, saying that much of what the codes describe has been implemented by the Sawmill Community Land Trust. But, he said, a lot more community education needs to happen about how the codes work in order to make sure neighborhood residents can effectively participate in the development review process.

“Without real outreach and education about how the codes work,” he said, “neighborhood associations that are largely volunteer based will be at a disadvantage.”

Developers versus the neighbors

The development review process can often be a contentious affair, as the recent battle between the Sheffield Partners development group and the Silver Hills Neighborhood Association illustrated.

In that case, a developer wanted to build a four story multi-unit condo on a small parking lot on Gold Street, in the Silver Hills neighborhood across from UNM. Because the project would require a zone change, the developer held several community meetings and as a result of community feedback reduced the size of the building.

But not by enough. The neighborhood association and the developer reached an impasse and moved into the next phase of the development process: getting approval from the EPC. Both sides marshaled support from different neighbors and made passionate claims to back up their respective positions.

The neighbors said the building was simply too big – that it would dwarf the neighborhood and create a traffic nightmare. The developer said the project was a trailblazer in terms of fulfilling the City’s planned growth strategy: a fully LEED certified multi-unit building located just a block off one of the busiest sections of Central Avenue.

In the end, both the EPC and the City Council agreed with the neighbors and rejected the project due to its size. At the city council meeting, Benton called it a "watershed case."

The contentiousness of the process was evident. The neighbors had been in a pitched battle to stop the development for almost a year and the developer was frustrated that he couldn’t build his project after spending a lot of money trying to get it off the ground.

Benton told the Independent that the new form-based codes would go a long way toward alleviating that kind of scenario.

“Currently, property owners apply for special use permits, based on an idea stemming from what the planned growth strategy calls for. There’s nothing that fits that idea in the current zoning atlas, so they’re starting from zero every time,” he told the Independent. “Developers spend a ton of money, and neighborhoods can’t picture what’s going on.”

With the new zones in place, developers would go in from the beginning with an idea of what a desirable, context-specific project would look like, Benton said, and would not propose a building in the first place that is totally out of scale with a neighborhood.

While his point is well-taken, it also in some ways bolsters the points made by Sais and Quevedo.

Just because the codes are in the zoning atlas doesn’t mean they’re always appropriate. But the very fact that the codes are officially adopted by the city may signal to official bodies like the EPC that if a project is eligible for a particular code it must be worthy of approval despite what the neighborhood sector plan says.

In this way, while the codes aren’t a “plan” they carry a lot of planning weight.

Claudia Isaac, professor of planning at UNM, told the Independent that the codes could be a very good thing for Albuquerque, because they could lead to more mixed use, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods.

But, she said, the real question is about process. The danger is that the codes will come to be used in a top-down fashion in which they’re imposed on neighborhoods, rather than through a bottom up planning process.

“In order to make it work the city has to remain committed to its long-tradition of community-based sector planning so that all the goals of a neighborhood are met,” Isaac said. “The use of form-based codes should stem from a substantive community based sector planning process.”


The form-based codes are currently being heard by the Environmental Planning Commission. The first hearing was on August 14, and the second will be September 11. The codes were first introduced in November 2007, and have since gone through multiple iterations of public comment and modification. This process is ongoing -- the codes, explanatory context, and a public comment form can be found on the city's Web site.

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