Above, Sara Bronin
Global tensions and economic pressures pushed builder sentiment lower this past September, but a new platform may offer respite for developers, researchers and property owners.
Land Use Labs—a zoning data and services company—launched early last week with six data products aimed at providing accurate zoning information.
Founder Sara Bronin, a George Washington University law professor, spoke with RISMedia about her company’s mission and goals.
“Land Use Labs is the licensing arm of the National Zoning Atlas (NZA), which for the last five years has been digitizing information about the nation’s zoning code one code at a time,” she says. “It turns out that reviewing 1.4 million pages of zoning codes is quite a big lift requiring a large and top-notch team. We’ve set up Land Use Labs so that we can continue to power that team, expand the map and keep the map updated.”
The National Zoning Atlas—which launched in early 2024—is a free, public resource that allows users to view U.S. zoning information by location, consolidating and digitizing local zoning codes into one interactive map.
“We started the National Zoning Atlas on a philanthropic model where we solicited grants from various entities to help us build different geographies on the map,” explains Bronin.
The National Zoning Atlas is available for the public to access, but Bronin notes that more in-depth research and reports are needed for a topic as intricate as zoning.
“As we grew, we realized there were some places in the country that were not likely to have philanthropic support,” she adds. “We also realized that some of our earliest completed geographies had grown stale because zoning codes change. We set up Land Use Labs to fill that funding gap and to enable us to deliver data to third parties, so that they could use it to inform planning, advocacy and analysis.”
Getting in the zone
With the help of her team, Bronin states that they’ve ensured the accuracy of their zoning data and products through various systems, all reliant on human-power.
“Our strategy to update zoning codes has been to keep track of major city updates on a regular basis, to do full state sweeps where we know there has been activity at the state level and to input updates as we receive them from local planners or others. That strategy has served us pretty well to date to ensure that our data is updated,” she says.
The task Bronin and her team set out to accomplish involves sifting through dense, complicated zoning data to standardize them in ways in which they are accessible (and coherent) for anybody to access.
When asked whether her team utilizes AI systems or tools, Bronin points to a recent law review article she published—“Keeping AI in its Zone”—where she critiques claims made by commercial data providers and scholars that AI can be used to reliably decipher zoning codes.
“Even the NZA team, arguably the country’s leading experts on zoning code interpretation, has been unable to train AI models to deliver results that match or exceed the accuracy and completeness of our own,” Bronin stated in the article.
“Why not keep AI in its zone? There is no need to force AI to pursue hopeless tasks: AI has plenty of capacity to expand our understanding of zoning…” Bronin added. “By honestly acknowledging AI’s limitations, we can redirect our energy to harnessing AI’s actual capacity to help us understand zoning, the hidden power that shapes our lives.”
At Land Use Labs, Bronin claims that they are “100% reliant” on people to extract regulatory information from zoning codes.
“We’ve compared our data to the couple of zoning data providers which are operating today in the market, and there is no question in my mind that our data is more detailed, more nuanced, more layered and more accurate.”
Wares for sale
With its launch, Land Use Labs offers six products to address zoning questions posed by developers, lenders, researchers, public agencies and property owners.
“Overall, across our six products, we are trying to deliver different types of information to the development and real estate sector, to property owners, to researchers and planners, as well as those who might be interested in assessing risks at scale, including insurance and financial services companies,” Bronin comments.
According to a release, Land Use Labs’ products are as follows:
- Parcel reports: On-demand PDFs for any covered address, summarizing the zoning district, allowed uses and dimensional requirements (such as setbacks, height limits and parking minimums) for due diligence, conformity checks and quick lookups on a single property.
- Zoning API: A REST endpoint that returns the full set of zoning regulations for any covered address or coordinate pair as structured JSON. Ideal for site selection at scale, underwriting, automated feasibility and building zoning capabilities into existing platforms.
- Zoning districts: Geographic Information System (GIS) layers showing how each base and overlay district regulates uses, structures and lots, rule by rule, enabling regulatory comparisons, zoning reform and map display.
- Zoning slices: GIS layers displaying the true regulatory outcome where base and overlay districts combine, with one definitive set of rules per polygon. Essential for site selection, scenario planning, highly accurate spatial statistics and data pipelines.
- Zoning tables: Summary statistics on zoning, land cover, housing and demographic characteristics at the jurisdiction, county, census tract or block group level. Designed for cross-geography comparisons, housing research and reform advocacy.
- Zoning rasters: A standardized 30-by-30-meter grid of residential and nonresidential land use classifications, supporting environmental analysis, land use modeling and integration with other geospatial data.
Parcel reports are available for $250 each, while zoning districts, slices, tables and rasters can be priced and ordered online. The release notes that zoning APIs are priced by usage volume.
“Our product range right now encompasses reports for zoning on specific parcels, an API that identifies full regulatory information when you input an address and GIS layers that communicate information about zoning districts—as well as a proprietary product called Zoning Slices, which shows regulatory outcomes,” Bronin continues. “Researchers might be most interested in our zoning rosters or our zoning tables, which aggregate and summarize information about zoning at various geographic scales.”
Future of zoning
Various factors have placed pressure on agencies and organizations to address the issue of housing affordability and availability. Recently, the notes from the latest Federal Reserve meeting reveal that the rate hike—which now ranges from 3.75% to 4%—was necessary in the face of geopolitical tensions and AI rollouts.
“They noted that ongoing geopolitical developments, which had pushed up prices for crude oil and refined fuel products, and surging AI-related investments were contributing to inflation pressures,” the minutes stated.
As such, Bronin feels that Land Use Labs is a much-needed resource for real estate players.
“I think many people across the real estate industry have realized that there is a big gap in the availability of comprehensive and accurate information about zoning,” she says. “It’s very cool that my team of highly skilled analysts is able to now share their expertise and their keen eye for detail with so many public and private entities who can use this information in their own businesses.”
Land Use Labs also supplied foundational zoning statistics for the Let America Build campaign, and is a founding participant.
“Our data is helping the Let America Build campaign to make the case that our zoning rules around the country are broken,” Bronin asserts. “They are thwarting the very housing that we need to meet people’s needs in communities across the country.”
Although Land Use Labs has launched and has many products available, Bronin notes that there is always more work to be done in zoning, as codes change just as much as people do.
“So far, Land Use Labs data has covered areas where 70% of the American population lives, and our data reveals that 94% of residentially zoned land allows for single-family housing by right, while only 12% permits multifamily housing by right,” Bronin concludes. “We only have those statistics because we have painstakingly digitized, mapped, and extracted information about tens of thousands of zoning districts across the country. I believe that our data is making a very clear case that the way we zone for multifamily housing, accessory dwelling units and missing middle housing, is deeply problematic and is hindering our ability as a country to address the chronic housing shortage.”
For more information about Land Use Labs and the products they offer, click here.
