St. Louis County introduces new sustainable, more walk- and transit-friendly development code
Yesterday's St. Louis Post-Dispatch has and extended interview with Glenn Powers, St Louis County's Director of Planning.
St Louis County has just released a new, more flexible development code that they hope will encourage more sustainable development and lead to more compact, walkable, transit-friendly mixed-used development. 
St. Louis County
This is a welcome development for St. Louis County--which is the the part of the state that very most should be a compact, walkable, bicycleable, transit-friendly area, yet fails to live up to its potential.
Earlier this summer, St. Louis County made some of the most significant changes to its zoning codes since it began regulating land use.As part of a package of “sustainable” code changes, it’s now easier to put solar panels on your house or a wind turbine on your property. The county cut by 20 percent the number of parking spaces required for retail developments and added landscaping requirements to reduce stormwater pollution.But to St. Louis County Planning Director Glenn Powers, the biggest change was the passage of new “form-based” codes that will give developers more flexibility, and hopefully, lead to the building of denser, pedestrian-friendly communities. . . .What form-based code says is, build it kind of to look like this, but build it to be multiple-use. Put different things — put commercial and workplaces and residential — in close proximity. Make it more walkable, make it pedestrian scale. . . .The other potential is along MetroLink lines and stations. Transit-oriented development. You do mixed uses, you do more vertical, pedestrian scale where you can live work and play, and then you can move out of that area on the train. . . .
One of the biggest factors contributing to making Missouri communities unfriendly for cycling and walking, is our land-use choices. Big sprawled communities make bicycling and walking less appealing and create an auto-dependent culture.
Research shows that one-third of Americans want to live in compact walkable neighborhoods, one-third want to live in low-density suburbs, and one-third are undecided--they could go either way, depending.
But a good 90% of our housing stock is in sprawled, auto-dependent neighborhoods.
It's good to see our cities and counties taking some positive steps to move this trend in the right direction. We could be building 50% or more of our new housing stock as compact, walkable, bicyclable, transit-friendly neighborhoods, and still not be meeting the existing demand for such housing.
The improvement zoning policy joins St. Louis County's recently passed Complete Streets Policy as positive moves for the County in improving its walkability and bicycleability.
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