The standardized record of zoning law

For each locality, the adopted zoning ordinance is located and retrieved from wherever it actually lives — a municipal code host, a county website, a scanned PDF. Each chapter is OCR’d, converted to structured markdown, and read by a language model that fills in a fixed schema: one row per zoning district, one row per general provision, and one row per discrete requirement found in the prose.

3,931 chapters have been read so far — 255.9M characters of adopted code — yielding 1,944 districts, 40,199 general provisions and 170,998 extracted standards.

A district is a zone the ordinance names — R-1, B-2, an overlay — with whatever dimensional standards the code states for it: lot minimums, setbacks, height caps, density limits, and its permitted, conditional, accessory and prohibited use lists.

A general provision is a rule that binds every district rather than one. Most of an ordinance is this: sign regulations, parking ratios, floodplain requirements, fence heights.

A standard is a single requirement lifted out of either, stored with its value, unit and the clause it came from — so a question like “which localities cap fence height at six feet” is one query rather than a hundred PDF searches.

It is not the ordinance. It is a reading of one, done by machine, and machines misread. Every district, provision and standard carries the section it came from and the exact sentence it was drawn from, precisely so you can check it. Rows the extractor was unsure of are flagged for review and say so on the page.

It is not a map. zoneoptics tells you what a district requires; it does not tell you which district a given parcel is in. That is a separate question, answered by the locality’s official zoning map.

It is not current by definition. Ordinances are amended continuously. Each record shows when it was last updated and links to the source chapter. Before you rely on any of it — for a purchase, a permit, or a filing — confirm against the adopted code.

The locality roster is nationwide: 17,523 zoning jurisdictions across 51 states, enumerated so the scope of the work is visible. Ordinances have been read for 235 of them. The coverage page breaks that down state by state, and a locality page always says which side of that line it falls on.

zoneoptics is one of three systems built on the same warehouse. landrecords.us publishes the nationwide parcel layer; landstats.com builds apps and analytics on it. Parcels answer where; zoning answers what may be built there.

Every list and detail page has a JSON equivalent under /api — /api/districts, /api/localities, /api/standards, /api/statutes and /api/search. They take the same query parameters as the pages and return the same rows. The tables behind them are documented, with live row counts, on the schema page.