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This article is part of The Rooftop, a blog and multimedia series from �鶹������ý’s Future of Land and Housing program. Featuring insights from experts across diverse fields, the series is a home for bold ideas to improve housing in the United States and globally.

�鶹������ý’s Sabiha Zainulbhai sits down with urban planners Nathan Law and Dave Schaab in Fort Wayne and Allen County to discuss how regional coordination and a comprehensive plan has helped advance housing reform in Indiana. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sabiha Zainulbhai: Welcome to The Rooftop. My name is Sabiha Zainulbhai and I’m the Deputy Director of �鶹������ý’s Future of Land and Housing program. Our program hosts a contributor-led housing blog series called The Rooftop. The Rooftop is a forum for people to share innovative ideas that address the housing affordability crisis–that’s ideas big or small, public or private, well-trodden or experimental. 

Today, I am joined by Nathan Law and Dave Schaab from the City of Fort Wayne’s Planning and Policy Department and Department of Planning Services, respectively. The City of Fort Wayne in Indiana is one of the fastest growing areas of the state. Both Nathan and Dave had a significant hand in major projects related to the “” Comprehensive Plan. All in Alan is an award-winning joint comprehensive plan with Fort Wayne, Allen County, and four smaller municipalities, and it’s lauded for its innovative multi-jurisdictional approach. So we’re really excited to talk to Nathan and Dave today about what that process has been like and what they’ve been able to accomplish thus far. 

So before we dive in, Nathan, maybe I can turn it over to you to just explain to our audience, what is a comprehensive plan and why is it so important? 

Nathan Law: Yeah, so a comprehensive plan for us is a community-wide, long-range plan that guides– we always call it a guidebook, it’s guidance. It’s not necessarily legal law, but it does guide groups like our planning commission when they’re considering things like re-zonings or large-scale development in our community. For us, we’ve put that together, this is our second one we’ve put together as a full community effectively. We have our primary city that I work for, the city of Fort Wayne. We also have our county, and we have four smaller towns and cities that we all work together on. So the comprehensive plan ties directly in with our zoning ordinance, guiding how that should be growing and how we as a community should be growing for the next 10 to 20 years. 

Sabiha: I know that the All-In Allen comprehensive plan has an explicit goal of reducing barriers to housing. And so to orient the audience, I’ll turn to you, Dave, to kick us off. Can you share a little bit more about what the joint comprehensive plan has been able to accomplish thus far? 

Dave Schaab: Yeah, definitely. It was a very good process, and during the process, we actually found some low-hanging fruit items that we could actually implement right away. For example, we reduced our single-family dwelling square footage from 950 square feet to 700 square feet, which means less than 1 percent of our houses are now under that 700 square foot requirement, which is really important for us. 

And we also added zero lot line standards to the zoning ordinance. And when I say zero lot line—that’s townhouses, townhomes, attached single family, those kinds of developments. And then afterwards, once the comprehensive plan was approved, we began a housing options workgroup between Nathan’s department and my own. We’ve actually been able to approve two different phases of improvements to the zoning ordinance.

Phase one addressed accessory dwelling units, specifically detached accessory dwelling units in Fort Wayne. We moved them from a use variance to a special use, which is a lot easier of a legal test to meet. And in Allen County and the smaller jurisdictions, we were able to permit freestanding accessory dwelling units outright. And that’s just an administrative process. We were also able to reduce the corner lot setbacks in that phase one. 

And in phase two, we were able to permit zero lot line units in every residential zoning district. We have up to two connected units in R1 now permitted outright. And in R2 and R3 and our multiple family zoning districts, there are an unlimited amount of connected zero lot line single family housing units. [Editor’s Note: R1 (single family residential), R2 (two family residential), and R3 (multiple family residential) refer to residential zoning districts to manage development and density in ]. We were also able to reduce lot width and lot size in our phase two amendment.

Sabiha: Yeah, thank you so much for walking us through that. So Nathan, Dave has just shared a little bit more about some of the changes to the actual ordinance. I was hoping we could turn it to you to talk about some of the projects that have encouraged housing development. 

Nathan: Yeah, I think a lot of what we’re doing with encouraging development is really going along with the changes to our ordinance. So we as the city own a good number of vacant parcels that were part of blight elimination programs or similar programs in the past. And when we started this process, we actually owned over 600 parcels throughout the city that used to be housing and weren’t anymore. So we’ve gone through some processes to figure out how to get those back into housing, and how to start encouraging housing development in all these lots. So the changes to the zoning ordinance that Dave was mentioning related to lot width size and size of structure have made it easier to redevelop some of these more urban, historically small parcels that we have. 

And so we’ve come up with a few programs related to that that we’re really excited about. We have the “” program where we actually accept applications from small-scale developers here in our community—developers who are interested in building one to three lots worth of housing. And we review those applications and we award a series of prime parcels we own to those developers to help them get going. And as part of that, we have some incentive money that we’ve received from entities such as the state who have given us funding to work on development of housing. And so we can help them with things like utility and tap fees and things like that that just remove those tiny barriers to housing that make it harder for a small scale developer to come in and do these spot developments. So we had one really great cohort last year. Most of those properties are actually under construction right now. We’ve helped guide them through what construction looks like, and we’re really excited to be working with these individuals. 

And kind of connected and in addition to that, we realized that the cost of coming up with a house design is a huge barrier for a lot of people, especially when you’re trying to work with these smaller lots that have maybe some restrictions to them with what you’re even able to do with them. So we are actually working right now on developing a housing catalog, where we have an architect who’s looking at the parcels we own.

They’re actually going through and designing houses that fit them, multiple different houses that can work on these different lots. And the advantage of that is we will be providing these to the applicants and to others who might want to build on our lots as free and available architectural designs. And one of the things we’ve also done as part of this process is work with our building department who manages the zoning to pre-approve these so that a huge part of the barrier to starting to build a house is already done for people. 

Sabiha: Yeah, that’s super exciting! Now that we’ve talked about some of the changes that have come about or some of the programs that you all are implementing, I’m wondering if you can share a little bit more about Fort Wayne and Allen County’s governance structure. And how that can sometimes make planning challenging and talk a little more about how you’ve managed those challenges in this process. 

Dave: Yeah, like we said at the beginning, Nathan and I are in different departments. He’s in a long-range planning department and I’m in the short-range planning department. And I’m in a joint land use department with its own governing board—half of it’s made up of Fort Wayne, half of it is Allen County members. And my department manages six different jurisdictions. Which means that when we do these amendments, we generally start off with Fort Wayne and Allen County because those are our largest jurisdictions. 

And then the year after that, we reach out to the four smaller jurisdictions and we take care of them and we implement the housing improvements to their zoning jurisdictions. So it becomes a multi-year process, unfortunately. But communication is very key—making sure that we’re in communication with all of our jurisdictions and making sure we’re making the improvements and the zoning ordinance updates that they want to see for their municipalities. 

Sabiha: It’s definitely a unique structure, but I’m sure it’s something that a lot of places across the country can relate to. So having successfully shepherded some of these housing changes, I’m curious to hear a little bit more about what lessons or words of wisdom you might have for other cities or counties who either have a similar governance structure or just require a lot of city-county collaboration in order to push through any type of housing change. 

Nathan: Yeah, so having our unified joint land use department has its advantages. The primary advantage that’s always talked about is when a developer comes to build housing, no matter where they’re building in our county, they kind of expect the same ordinance and restrictions, you know what are they working with? That’s kind of the big advantage for us, but it does come with some drawbacks and lessons we’ve learned. 

The biggest one is patience. Like Dave mentioned, we have a process we’ve learned. It takes several years usually for us to get through these ordinance changes. Keeping it as synced as we can takes time. 

And then at the same time, we have to be flexible. You heard earlier Dave mention, for accessory dwelling units, we were able to bring that to special uses inside the city of Fort Wayne, and for Allen County and our four smaller jurisdictions, it’s permitted use by right. And that was actually a change made because of what we heard. We heard that that didn’t work quite right for each community. So we have this unified board that does our best to make it so that you can expect to find the same thing throughout, but occasionally there’s just things that we see as being necessary to ensure protections for individual communities. So I joke a lot of times that we’re 99% the same for our zoning ordinance and our building policies and stuff. But there are times where you’ll see it flex a little bit and you have to be willing to kind of roll with those as they occur. 

And then I think the last thing, like just really the last tip, is to find your champions and keep supporting them as much as they support you. You might not expect some of your champions. Your normal champions might be housing policy advocates who are on your council, your community members, your big neighborhood leaders, are probably some of your people.

But you’re going to get some unexpected ones. I think the one that surprised us the most, and I think one that cities and jurisdictions throughout the country can even use is AARP. They very much enjoy advocating for housing for all access. And the work we are doing here with housing really is advocating for that same goal. So they’ve actually written letters of support. They’ve showed up at our meetings to support us at city council, at county council commission. Sometimes you get unexpected champions and I think you just got to be able to roll with it and take their support, and be able to support them at the same time. 

Sabiha: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for that. So given all you’ve been able to accomplish during this time, I’m curious to hear what you hope to accomplish next through the planning process and further the goals that are in All In Allen. 

Dave: We’re actually gearing up for phase three right now. We are hoping to kind of tackle the cottage courtyard housing or the pocket neighborhood housing-type development, where you’re going into these existing lots and you’re making a more dense, planned development. And we’re also looking at compact housing. Tiny homes I think are probably the most normalized version of this—these 700 square feet and smaller-type developments, where we’re seeing these subdivisions wanting to come in. So how can we make the process easier for these types of developments to occur? 

Nathan: So from the city’s perspective, I mentioned earlier we had really great success with our cohort one of a LOT to LOVE—and I get to use that phrase now, cohort one, because applications just closed this past week for cohort two. So we’re currently reviewing those applications and we’re super excited to see another cohort go through with this plan. A few of them might even be able to use our housing catalog pre-approved designs. We’re working to try and get those done in time for that cohort to use. 

And then I’ll bring up the housing catalog again because it’s almost the ‘what have we managed to accomplish at the same time of what are we doing still?’ The housing catalog itself is a continuation because in the catalog, we have zero lot line, town-home style designs. We have detached accessory dwelling unit designs. So, we’re kind of taking that like, ‘hey, yo, we got this approved finally. It’s much easier to build here. There’s less red tape, less bureaucracy around it. Here’s a design.’ We’re continuing on from our own thing into different programs, trying to encourage the path of each one to continue building on itself. 

Sabiha: That’s really exciting. And we’re excited to follow along and see that progress. It seems like it could be a great model for other jurisdictions as well. 

Well, thank you so much, Nathan and Dave, for sharing your experiences and bringing the knowledge that you’ve learned throughout this process from Fort Wayne to the rest of us. It was a pleasure to speak with you both today. 

Dave: Thank you so much for having us. 

Editor’s note: The views expressed in the articles on The Rooftop are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policy positions of �鶹������ý.