Cities shouldn’t be regulating things like temporary seating, siding finishes, or whether a building houses an attorney or an accountant. They should never mandate parking. They should obsess about how buildings address each other: that it opens onto the street, complements neighboring structures in scale and character, and respects the humans who traverse past it. This is not a call for deregulation as much as a new approach. Many cities are replacing the use-based codes they adopted to facilitate post-war development patterns with form-based codes that come closer to dealing with issues
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