Zoning For Urban Agriculture
A Guide For Updating Your City’s Laws To Support Healthy Food Production And Access
The Healthy Food Project
2020
Excerpt:
This resource summarizes zoning laws that promote and support agriculture in urban municipalities and highlights examples of strategies from around the country. Additionally, the resource furthers the Healthy Food Policy Project’s goal of identifying local policy options that support access to healthy food.1 In order to provide the most current understanding of the national landscape and allow for comparison of practices and identification of potential barriers, this resource focuses specifically on urban agriculture zoning laws that local governments have passed within the last ten years (2009-2019).
Cities and other municipalities usually have a number of individual zoning laws that make up a larger collection of laws. These individual zoning laws are sometimes called ordinances. However, it should be noted that when an entire group of zoning laws are enacted at the same time, the entire collection is sometimes also referred to as a single ordinance. For consistency in this resource we will refer to a city’s collection of zoning laws as its zoning code and the individual provisions within that collection as zoning laws. Zoning codes are often contained as subsections, chapters, or titles within larger city codes that contain other collections of law related to other areas of municipal governance.
This guide includes an overview of the authority of local governments to develop zoning designations, zoning’s influence on urban agriculture practices, an analysis of suggested practices and equity considerations, as well as an overview of the zoning law amendment process. This resource is intended to be used by planners, local policy makers, and food policy councils and is aimed at cities that have not yet taken an in-depth look into their zoning codes. These cities may benefit from including the types of laws suggested below in their zoning codes to encourage urban agriculture activities. However, it is important to note that there are many cities innovating in ways that are not covered in this resource and that it does not intend to be a fully comprehensive list of the most innovative examples, but rather it can serve as a foundation for cities to start from when looking at improving their zoning laws for urban agriculture.
