Land Use & Zoning

Land Use & Zoning Planning for Housing, Redevelopment, and Walkable Places

Studio Davis provides land use and zoning planning services for communities working to align local codes with housing, redevelopment, mobility, and placemaking goals. We help cities evaluate how zoning and development standards affect what can be built, how sites function, and whether local policy supports the outcomes a community says it wants.

Our work focuses on practical code updates, policy analysis, and implementation guidance. We are especially interested in the places where zoning, parking, access, design standards, and development feasibility interact, because those details often determine whether good planning ideas can actually become real projects.

A Practical Approach to Land Use and Zoning

Zoning codes are not abstract policy documents. They shape buildings, parking lots, sidewalks, frontages, driveways, housing costs, redevelopment choices, and the feel of a street. Studio Davis approaches land use and zoning work with attention to both the written code and the physical places those rules produce.

Our work helps communities identify where regulations support adopted goals and where they quietly work against them. That may include parking requirements that make housing harder to build, site design standards that fail to support walkability, unclear redevelopment rules, or code language that makes implementation harder than it needs to be.

Our Land Use & Zoning Services

• Zoning and Development Code Audits
  Review of zoning and development standards to identify barriers, inconsistencies, outdated requirements, and opportunities for targeted reform.
• Parking Reform and Code Updates
  Updates to parking requirements, parking maximums, design standards, shared parking rules, and related provisions to support housing, redevelopment, and walkable development.
• Housing-Supportive Code Reform
  Analysis and recommendations to help communities align zoning and development standards with housing production, affordability, and infill goals.
• Redevelopment-Focused Zoning Review
  Evaluation of how local standards affect reuse, infill, adaptive redevelopment, mixed-use development, and investment in existing districts.
• Site Planning and Development Standards
  Review and refinement of standards related to access, circulation, building placement, frontage conditions, pedestrian connections, and parking design.
• Policy Implementation Support
  Assistance translating state mandates, adopted plans, housing goals, climate policies, or local priorities into workable code language and implementation steps.
• Public Engagement for Code Changes
  Support for explaining technical code issues in plain language so staff, elected officials, stakeholders, and the public can understand the tradeoffs.
• Planning Memos, Ordinance Concepts, and Draft Code Language
  Clear written products that help communities move from diagnosis to decision, including audit memos, policy options, code concepts, and draft amendments.

Experience Across Diverse Communities

Studio Davis has supported land use and zoning work in communities facing a familiar problem: adopted goals for housing, walkability, redevelopment, or climate action are often easier to state than to implement. The code is where those goals either become possible or get tangled in details.

Our work is especially useful for cities that need targeted, practical code help rather than a full rewrite. We help communities understand which standards matter most, what is politically and administratively feasible, and how to sequence changes so progress does not depend on solving every problem at once.

Selected Project Experience