issue at a glance: Green zoning

Most people never think about zoning until a bulldozer shows up next door. But zoning is the quiet framework that decides what can be built where – and right now, Kalamazoo's zoning has a blind spot. The City has categories for residential, commercial, and industrial land, but nothing designed to protect the green and ecologically sensitive places that so many residents value. Parks, preserves, and natural areas sit in whatever zone they happened to land in, often "Residential," which leaves them no better protected than a buildable lot.

Green zoning fixes that. It means creating dedicated zoning districts – a Conservation District for ecologically sensitive land like the Asylum Lake Preserve and areas near our watersheds, and a Green Space District for publicly used parks and recreation land. Instead of neighbors fighting to defend these places one proposal at a time, dedicated districts flip the burden: protection becomes the default, and any development has to justify itself against it. It gives planners a tool to protect land proactively, before a controversial project is ever on the table.

This matters for Kalamazoo now more than ever. As development pressure grows around sensitive areas, and as the City rewrites its long-term plans through Imagine Kalamazoo 2035, we have a rare window to build real protection into the framework – rather than leaving our green spaces to be defended case by case, year after year. Communities across the country already use tools like these, and even here in Michigan, Ann Arbor's voter-approved Greenbelt Program shows what's possible when a city decides these lands are worth protecting. Kalamazoo can lead among Michigan cities in doing the same through zoning.

There's real momentum behind this. On August 19, 2026 the City's Environmental Concerns Committee voted unanimously to recommend that the City Commission move forward with both districts – advancing a proposal ALPA brought to the City. Read what happened and what comes next below.