ZUS can help you create places that people love.
Zack Urban Solutions, Inc. is an urban planning consulting firm that offers a variety of services to municipalities, non-profit organizations, and developers who want to create walkable, fun, and equitable places. Our goal is to help our clients develop a vision and make it a reality. Planning is awesome, but implementation of the plan is the key to making great places, and implementation is our specialty. 
Zack Urban Solutions uses a pragmatic approach to create cities that are beloved yet functional, exciting yet convenient, and prosperous yet equitable. We can help you create a vision that is bold and innovative and which can actually be implemented. Zack Urban Solutions has over two decades of experience in local government and public policy. We know what it takes to create plans that won’t look beautiful and then just sit on a shelf; we create programs that are actionable and that work.
Dan Zack, the founder, president, and principal planner of Zack Urban Solutions, has worked in the field of urban planning for 26 years (23 of which were in local government) and has dealt with a wide range of projects in that time. He has experience with planning efforts in small Central Valley farming communities, mid-sized wealthy Silicon Valley cities, and large metropolitan areas. He has worked on transportation plans, regional housing need allocation plans, citywide general plans, historic preservation plans, downtown revitalization plans, streetscape designs, development agreements, and parking management plans. He has written hundreds of pages of adopted zoning codes and has rezoned well over 100,000 parcels of land. He has processed and overseen the planning entitlements of numerous development projects of every type, including thousands of units of housing. Finally, he knows how to work with the community, get their feedback, and rally them around a vision: He has participated in countless public outreach events and has made hundreds of presentations to city councils, planning commissions, community groups, news outlets, and professional organizations.
ZUS operates on the guiding principle that well-designed cities can improve our lives in dramatic ways. Good city planning can make it easy to drive shorter distances, or make some trips on foot or by bike, resulting in fewer miles driven per person, which reduces local air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions and also results in fewer traffic deaths and injuries; it can make cities more economically robust, bringing more customers within easier access of businesses and yielding higher tax revenues per acre for local governments; it can enable a stronger sense of community by facilitating positive interactions between neighbors; it can promote healthy lifestyles with increased physical activity; it can enable cities to grow while consuming less farmland and wildlife habitat; it can promote safety by creating well-defined public spaces and activating them with pedestrians and other “eyes on the street;” and it can facilitate social equity by poviding abundant housing for all needs and desires and by providing the option to shed the high cost of car ownership from those who cannot (or would rather not) bear the cost. 
Zack Urban Solutions will draw on our experience to ensure that our client’s projects—whether they consist of a development plan for a single building, a specific plan to guide the revitalization of a whole neighborhood, or a master plan for an entirely new town—contribute to the creation of sustainable, vibrant, prosperous, and fair communities that bring joy to all who live, work, and play there.