Fall Speaker Series: Using the New Performance Zoning with Lane Kendig

There are four forms of zoning used to implement comprehensive plans, Euclidian, conditional, performance, and form based codes. The first two have been around for near 100 years. Only one was structured to meet specific planning goals and allow developers to work with the restraints of the site and meet diverse planning goals, performance zoning. The first performance zoning abandoned the land use/density metrics where each residential district permitted a single housing type and use minimum lot size and width to created density for a ordinance where all uses were permitted in each zoning district, with metrics of maximum density and minimum open space providing for intensity and diverse community characters. The presentation will cover efficiency, sustainability and natural resources, affordable housing, community character, and nuisance protection, transportation, and administration elements of plans. It will demonstrate that this is a far superior way to implement plans.

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Mr. Kendig is the founder Kendig Keast Collaborative (formerly Lane Kendig, inc.), Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. Mr. Kendig has worked throughout the United States and in Saipan, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. He has a bachelors of architecture from the University of Michigan 1962 and a masters in City and Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1968. From 1962-1965 he served in the U.S. Navy aboard a destroyer and as an advisor to the Vietnamese Navy.

He began work with the Bucks County Planning Commission, Bucks County PA and rose the position of Chief of Local Planning providing consulting services to the 54 local jurisdictions. The local planning section review over 800 subdivisions and other local plans per year. While there he developed a crude geographic information system (1000×1000 foot grid with information  coded in 9ths of a cell) used for a natural resources and park and recreation plans. He authored Performance Zoning, Bucks County Planning Commission 1973. He wrote six performance zoning ordinances, including one for six municipalities a strategy to permit boroughs and rural townships share a single ordinance and meet the Pennsylvania exclusionary housing challenges by providing a single ordinance where the boroughs provided dense housing types with sewers and townships without sewers to zone for low densities compatible with on site septic systems and private wells. A strategy accepted in litigation by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

In 1975 he became the director of planning for Lake County, IL. The department provided planning, zoning, and subdivision services for the county and managed its community development and economic development commissions. In 1980 a new and updated Performance Zoning was published by the American Planning Association.

In 1983 he formed Lane Kendig, inc. In that capacity he has written more than 50 codes and plans ranging from small communities to large cities.  That work including plans and codes for the Florida Keys; Teton County and Jackson Hole, WY; protecting the Chesapeake Bay with innovative zoning for Queen Anne’s County, MD; and a model land development code to protect Florida’s springs. Many of his clients over the years have been special places such as Nantucket and Provincetown, MA;  Loudoun County, VA; Flagstaff, AZ; Door County, WI; and Guilford, CT. Mr. Kendig also designed over 45 developments ranging from small residential subdivisions to a super regional mall and has been an expert witness in many zoning suits, state and federal. He is the author of four Planning Advisory reports including Traffic Sheds and To Big Boring, and Ugly.

Since retiring in 2009 he has written three books, Community Character and A Guide to Planning for Community Character, Island Press 1980, and Using the New Performance Zoning, 2019. He has continued to testify in litigation.