Baytown, Texas

Neighborhood Protection Ordinance
   

For the City of Baytown, Duncan Associates drafted the community’s first zoning ordinance. Learning from Houston’s many failed efforts to adopt zoning, the Baytown code was not designed as a “typical” zoning ordinance. Rather, it took a simple and straight-forward approach toward its principal objective: protecting the investment that residents have in their homes, while not discouraging economic development.One local resident described the ordinance as one “that tiptoes, rather than tramples on private property rights.”  Most of the city was

zoned MU or Mixed Use, which permits all types of uses and essentially allows new development to play by the same rules that applied before zoning.  Only when nonresidential or multi-family uses occur next to single-family residential areas, do the new standards apply in the MU district.  And those new standards are not overly restrictive.  The Baytown-style approach takes zoning back to its historical roots, to a time when the term “zoning”

didn't conjure up images of over-regulation and bureaucratic red-tape.  The Baytown referendum was held on May 8,1995 and a clear majority of the voters supported zoning.  The success of the referendum was attributed to several factors, including the involvement of local residents, strong support by the local newspaper, and simplicity of the ordinance. An interesting epilogue to the Baytown story is that, after the code was adopted, the number of building permits  

issued in Baytown was among the highest in the Houston area. The code won the Texas APA Current Planning Award.
 

Period:    July 1993 - January 1995               Contact:    Mary Chambers
Team:      Duncan Associates                                         former Planning Director
               Rudnick & Wolfe                                            281.309.3201
               Llewellyn-Davies Sahni