Zoning resources / Code Lineage Report
How much New York is in your zoning code?
Most American zoning codes descend from New York City’s 1916 Building Zone Resolution. Send us your code and ZoneCo will trace its lineage: which of the resolution’s seventeen hallmarks your code copied, adapted, replaced, or left behind. It’s free.
How it works
Send us your code
Tell us who you are and which community the code belongs to, then upload it as a PDF or paste a link. Today’s code works, and so does a historic ordinance.
We trace its lineage
We read your code against seventeen hallmarks of the 1916 resolution, from its overlay maps and street-width height rule to its board of appeals and protest petition.
You get a report
We email you a PDF, usually within five business days: your New York inheritance score, a finding for every hallmark with the section and wording it comes from, and the provisions that came from somewhere else.
Get your Code Lineage Report
All fields marked * are required. Your report is sent only to you.
Questions? Call (513) 235-3470.
What the report traces
New York adopted the nation’s first comprehensive zoning ordinance in 1916. Within seventeen years, more than 1,200 communities in all 48 states had followed, most of them borrowing New York’s framework, vocabulary, and administration, whether or not it suited them. The report scores your code on seventeen hallmarks of the 1916 resolution in five groups:
- Framework: overlay district maps, maps adopted by reference, the 1916 vocabulary
- Use districts: residence, business, and unrestricted districts; the cumulative use pyramid
- Height and setback: height tied to street width, setbacks above the street wall, towers
- Yards and courts: yards and courts sized by building height, required rear yards
- Administration: nonconforming uses, the board of appeals, protest petitions, the minimum-requirements clause
Copied hallmarks count fully, adapted ones count half, and the hallmarks central to New York’s scheme count double. See how it works on Glen Ellyn, Illinois’ 1923 ordinance in our interactive comparison.
Knowing where a rule came from is the first step to deciding whether it still belongs. A zoning diagnostic takes the next step: it tests every part of your code against your plan and the places you actually have.