Doing Public Participation Better

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There is a growing awareness that the approach to public participation in land use and zoning processes is flawed. When public participation goes wrong, it often overrepresents certain viewpoints and voices and ignores important policy priorities. Participants in public processes are predictably nonrepresentative of their larger communities. They tend to be well-off, older homeowners more opposed to new housing production than the average resident.

Because planners must advance policy goals (set out in zoning and planning ordinances and state constitutions and zoning and environmental laws) that are often not priorities for the people who most commonly testify in the public hearing process, local decision-makers may be tempted to ignore those policy goals. When this happens, it makes housing more scarce and less affordable and generally preserves an inequitable status quo.

This issue of Zoning Practice recounts some key flaws of typical public participation processes and, more importantly, proposes some solutions. Some of the proposals described here can be adopted and implemented by city, town, and county staff and commissioners, without the need for drawn-out fights for new state-enabling legislation. Other solutions will require changes to state-enabling legislation that would better advance the goals of public participation, equal treatment, and transparency.

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