Rethink Zoning Laws? Author Argues Rules Impair Upward Mobility

by Beth Kassab | Sep 19, 2025 | City Commission, Election, News, Uncategorized, Zoning and Development

Rethink Zoning Laws? Author Argues Rules Impair Upward Mobility

The Winter Park Chamber offered a zoning history lesson at its annual Outlook luncheon and set the stage for a contested city commission race with Michael Carolan likely to run against Elizabeth Ingram

Sept. 19, 2025

By Beth Kassab

Winter Park Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Betsy Gardner called on city leaders and residents to rethink zoning laws that she says have protected anti-development interests and blunted the opportunities for new housing in Winter Park.

Gardner said the city’s desire to remake Fairbanks Avenue near Interstate 4, now part of the Community Redevelopment Agency, is Winter Park’s next chance to prevent more strip centers and encourage the kind of growth that will attract families and new residents.

“This conversation about land use is also a conversation about who gets to belong,” she said, though she added, “We do not support the replication of the density we see in Maitland.”

Yoni Appelbaum, pictured above, spoke at a lunch hosted by the Winter Park Chamber of Commerce on Friday.

Gardner’s remarks came at the chamber’s annual Outlook lunch, which explores topics related to economic development. This year’s keynote speaker was Yoni Appelbaum, who wrote, “Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.”

Appelbaum, also deputy executive editor of The Atlantic and a historian, discussed how Americans “invented a profound human freedom” known as upward mobility. For more than a century, people were free to move beyond the station in life they were born into and toward prosperous city centers with jobs, social currency and a solid supply of housing stock.

That meant families moved many times, each time upgrading the kind of home they lived in.

But that’s not the case today, he said, as housing is often unaffordable and hard to come by in the places considered most desirable because of proximity to jobs and lifestyle amenities. (Case in point: Winter Park, where the median housing price is $700,000 or more, according to some sources.)

“Americans have stopped moving to the most prosperous places. People now move away from those places and to where the housing is cheap,” Appelbaum said. “Many have the sense that something has gone wrong in their lives .. that some element of the American promise has been broken.”

That’s the kind of loss of community and disenfranchisement credited with sweeping President Donald Trump into office and remaking the focus of the Republican Party.

Appelbaum stayed away from politics in his talk, but said the root of that shift dates back to the beginnings of zoning laws that came about as a way for those already settled in a place — mostly rich and white homeowners — to keep out others who were new and different.

He pointed to early laws in Modesto, CA that segregated Chinese laundry workers into what ultimately became known as “Chinatown” because white homeowners did not like that the workers were also living in their places of business. In 1885, Modesto outlawed laundry facilities “except within that part of the city which lies west of the railroad track and south of G Street,” the book reads.

And zoning laws, often dictating where certain types of businesses could operate, were born.

Later came height caps on buildings in New York City to drive up prices and push sweatshops farther to the outskirts. And historic preservation laws in Charleston, S.C. that he says served to stunt the city economically in the name of preserving a past that depended on enslaved people.

“What I find useful about the past is the ability to imagine different presents and different futures,” he said. “I am not here to tell you to abandon historic preservation or abandon zoning. What I do want for us to all think about is what we’re all after.”

In one passage of his book he discusses how he can see three large apartment buildings going up out his own window that will combine to a couple thousand new units, including more than a fifth described as “affordable.”

“Like all new developments, it leaves a good deal to be desired,” he wrote. “The architecture strikes me as blandly corporate. Local regulations, historic preservation and participatory planning have combined to limit the development on the site to just a fraction of what it might have held … Although I have little affection for cookie-cutter six-story apartment buildings, I don’t want to repeat Veiller’s error of mistaking my own aesthetic judgments for the public good.”

Those apartments, he noted, will mean upward mobility for some families.

Gardner said what happens in the Fairbanks corridor is up to residents and called on attendees — which included Mayor Sheila DeCiccio and commissioners Craig Russell, Marty Sullivan and Warren Lindsey along with city administrators — to use their power in the voting booth in March when two city commission seats are on the ballot.

At a recent workshop commissioners discussed potential rule changes, including lowering transportation impact fees, to encourage development. There appeared to be support for “quality, mixed-use development with a multi-family, workforce housing component, and to develop a comprehensive approach with the Planning and Zoning Board and Economic Development Advisory Board,” according to minutes of the meeting.

In a brief interview after the program, Gardner told the Voice that many people “lost trust” in the public process after the original development guidelines for the Orange Avenue Overlay were overturned, in part by DeCiccio and Sullivan.

Asked who she would support in the March election, she introduced attorney Michael Carolan, chairman of the real estate department at Winderweedle, Haines, Ward and Woodman, as a candidate for Seat 1 on the commission to replace Sullivan, who is retiring after two terms.

Carolan, who was chairman of the chamber board in 2020 and has also served on the board of the Coalition for the Homeless in Central Florida, said he plans to run but has not yet made it official by turning in paperwork to the city clerk.

Elizabeth Ingram is also seeking Sullivan’s seat and officially launched her campaign this week with an email to residents that said she is committed to “protect the qualities that make Winter Park special — its historic charm and small-town character, parks and recreation, and strong sense of community — while planning responsibly for the future.”

The trained opera singer currently serves on the Public Art Advisory Board and led the Dommerich Elementary Parent Teacher Association and is the only person who has officially opened a campaign account so far.

Russell, who serves in Seat 2, has said he plans to seek re-election.

The official qualifying period for the election runs from Dec. 1 to Dec. 8.

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