South Bend and others

South Bend: Where the Code Stress Test Began

The Challenge

South Bend's zoning code was written after the city's housing stock already existed. The traditional building types that defined its neighborhoods were largely illegal to replicate. A developer building infill in the Near Northwest neighborhood needed 36 variances just to put seven houses back where seven houses used to be, at a cost of $12,000 passed directly to homebuyers. The code had over 500 permitted land uses, was last updated in 2004, and embedded suburban assumptions — large lots, deep setbacks — into a city with an urban fabric.

The Approach

Planners, developers, and architects sat down with real South Bend lots and tried to build missing middle housing on them. They created site plans, ran pro formas, and walked through the permitting process step by step. At each step, participants documented where the code broke down: where setbacks didn't match existing lot sizes, where use restrictions blocked housing types the neighborhood already had, where parking requirements made small projects infeasible. The findings were compiled into an annotated report with specific reform recommendations.

What the Stress Test Delivers

The stress test ends with an annotated report, but its real value is what happens in the room. When planners sit down with a hypothetical project on a real lot and discover they can't make their own code work, the case for reform stops being theoretical. In South Bend, Director of Planning Tim Corcoran and his team took those findings and led a comprehensive code reform with their own consultants over the following years. The same diagnostic was applied in Kalamazoo and Overland Park. Each city ran its own process and built its own pre-approved program afterward. Our role began and ended with the stress test itself.

What Followed in South Bend

Where the Stress Test Led

• South Bend's planning team led a full code reform, consolidating over 500 land uses down to 65 and adopting a form-based code.
• The same diagnostic methodology was subsequently applied in Kalamazoo and Overland Park, tailored to each city's code and development context.

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