A recent post that grabbed my attention in the Urbanophile was actually a re-post from another blog: Daniel Hertz’s Chicago-based City Notes. The piece is called “Zoning: Its Just Insane”, and it presents some fascinating maps illustrating the domination of Chicago by land zoned for single-family homes, those most infamous perpetrators of sprawl.
Red is used to show single-family zoning in Daniel Hertz’s Chicago Zoning Map. Source: http://danielhertz.wordpress.com/2014/01/27/zoning-its-just-insane/
In fact, Hertz’s intention with the maps is to make the point that Chicago’s ‘insane’ zoning laws make it virtually impossible to develop anything but single-family homes in most of the Windy City’s neighborhoods.
The maps inspired me to put something together for our own community. However, instead of mapping zoning (the way land is regulated to be used for in the future), I thought it’d be best to first look at land-use (the present, on-the-ground societal use of space).
I used 2013 county land-use data. Other than explaining that single-family use is depicted in yellow and multi-family in orange, I’ll let the image speak its own thousand or so odd words.
Residential Land-Use in Miami-Dade County, Florida — 2013. Source: Matthew Toro.
Go ahead . . . let that sink in for a while.
We’ll take a closer look at land zoning — which, with all its nuances and myriad sub-classes, is admittedly trickier to map — later next week. Things always get a bit more complicated when we consider what our county and city planners have prescribed for the future of the land.
Happy Spring Miami!
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What struck me of Miami is how low income areas along the Metrorail route (north of Civic Center) have such low density.
Matthew, you should put the existing and most recent proposed Metrorail expansions with half-mile station radii on top of that, it would be a near-textbook example of how NOT to build a rapid transit system:(.