Over the last decade, many large cities across the United States have gone through the process of
re-writing their zoning and subdivision codes to better fit modern development practices. Major
cities that are currently undergoing or have recently completed this process include Los Angeles,
Washington D.C., Memphis, and Denver.
Locally, North Carolina’s capital city of Raleigh completed a zoning and development code
update last year. Like many other cities, Raleigh chose to bundle their updated codes into one
document, termed a unified development ordinance (UDO). In brief, a unified development
ordinance is a comprehensive document that contains all of a municipality’s land use and
development regulations; it is structured to enhance public understanding of the development
process, ease bureaucratic challenges, and reduce overall redundancies.
As a case study of that process, this paper seeks to document and learn lessons from the Raleigh
UDO’s creation, adoption and initial implementation efforts. It is divided into three general
sections. The first part documents historical changes in Raleigh which led to the UDO’s creation
and gives contextual relevance to its various elements. The second part of this paper uses source
documents, articles written about the UDO, and interviews with key stakeholders in order to
chronicle the code-creation process. This is particularly useful because stakeholders were
interviewed almost one-year removed from the ordinance adoption and thus have some of the
benefits of hindsight. Finally, the third section will provide an in-depth overview of the new
codes and stakeholder views of the changes contained in them. Discussion following that will
focus on lessons learned and potential obstacles for the City regarding future implementation.
In terms of goals for this paper, it is hoped that it will serve as an important historical record of
the code-creation process and provide insight into stakeholder reactions to it. In addition, in a
tangible sense the lessons learned from this process can inform the work of other cities who find
themselves in a similar position of re-writing their codes. The lessons may be particularly useful
for cities using the same consultants as Raleigh since those consultants are fairly prolific in
assisting cities nationwide in code re-writing overhauls.