Wu to overhaul Boston's arcane zoning code

Boston's Mayor Wu has proposed a wholesale overhaul of the city's complex zoning bylaws. She announced it a Chamber of Commerce speech, signaling that she believes the changes will be helpful to business. The news was reported in the Boston Globe.Rather that the current neighborhood-based model, the new zoning will focus on "squares and streets," making mixed-use hubs along main corridors near transit - sometimes straddling two neighborhood.The BPDA will look at reforming zoning by-laws so that fewer projects would require a variance and would instead be granted by right.A Cornell professor who consulted on the review and will work on the revision called Boston's current zoning "bloated, outdated, inconsistent and inequitable" and says Boston's code - at 4,000+ pages long - is too much. Nashville's zoning bylaw is 349 pages long and Portland, Oregon's is 1,830 pages.Neighborhood groups and individual owners are concerned. Right now they can kill a project they don't like or at least stall it with complaints to the Development Review Board. With more uses provided by-right, they will lose that veto power and with it, the power to have a say in how their neighborhood develops.