Open Zoning

A collaboration between the Harvard GSD Urban Stack Lab x Cornell Tech Jacobs Urban Tech Hub, Open Zoning is empowering the nation with actionable zoning knowledge, bypassing the current exclusionary system and setting the foundation for a new way forward in the bottom-up fight against the housing crisis. Zoning is the gatekeeper of all development -- and it's contributing to the housing crisis. Its complexity and inaccessibility are insurmountable barriers for thousands of small developers who build an essential tier of equitable and severely under-provided housing, ‘missing middle’ housing. But – it doesn’t have to stay this way. Open Zoning is building the infrastructure to transform zoning codes into legible, actionable data for everyone. The core of this effort is the Open Zoning Feed Specification (OZFS), a revolutionary national data standard for machine-readable zoning information that will leverage the power of open-source communities to fuel a national, open-sourced database of zoning information for missing middle housing, the Open Zoning Database. These novel technologies are driving the development of the Open Zoning Platform, a first-of-its-kind, open platform for visually displayed zoning information, effectively empowering the nation with actionable zoning knowledge.