Episode 10: The Connecticut Case: Sara Bronin on Zoning Reform and Desegregation in the Nutmeg State

The Sustainable City

Law and urban planning professor and advocate Sara Bronin founded Desegregate CT to transform Connecticut’s zoning laws from tools for racial exclusion to instruments of social change and sustainability. Widely viewed as the poster child of the “suburban state,” whose old, industrial cities and communities of color have suffered decades of neglect and disinvestment, Connecticut is wising up. Bronin thinks her state can teach the rest of us something useful, even visionary, about how to build sustainable, equitable communities through land use and zoning reform.

Sara Bronin is a Mexican-American architect and attorney whose interdisciplinary research focuses on how law and policy can foster more equitable, sustainable, well-designed and connected places. As a leading voice on historic preservation law and related land use practices, Bronin was recently nominated by the Biden administration to chair the U.S. Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. Bronin has written over two dozen articles on renewable energy, climate change, housing, urban planning, transportation, real estate development, and federalism. Her forthcoming book, Key to the City (W.W. Norton Press), will explore how zoning rules rule our lives. Through the Legal Constructs Lab, she created the National Zoning Atlas to translate and standardize tens of thousands of zoning codes across the country. She has advised the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Sustainable Development Code, has served on the board of Latinos in Heritage Conservation, and founded Desegregate Connecticut. Bronin holds a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School, a master of science from the University of Oxford (Rhodes Scholar), as well as a B.Arch. and B.A. from the University of Texas–Austin.