Ivy Vann, AICP CNU-A
Ivy is a planner and designer with many years of experience in town planning both in New Hampshire and nationally. She works on charrettes, planning projects, code review, master planning, public engagement, and comprehensive planning. Ivy is certified as a planner by both the American Planning Association and the Congress for the New Urbanism.
She is a 42-year resident of New Hampshire, and served on her own town’s planning board for more than a dozen years, providing her an up-close look at the process for improving zoning regulations to increase housing choice. She particularly enjoys helping citizens articulate their vision for their place.
Ivy is a member of the Incremental Development Alliance team working on Phase Two of the Vermont Homes for All Toolkit. She is a faculty member for IncDev, where she teaches would-be developers the ins and outs of such topics as good design standards, understanding the finances of building, and how to understand both building codes and zoning codes.
Ivy has worked on housing needs assessments, code audits, and regulatory revisions for a number of New Hampshire towns including Dublin, Lebanon, Winchester, and Newmarket most recently. For the Town of Newmarket Ivy wrote a completely new form-based code for the Main Street and adjacent neighborhoods; the town has begun the shift to a totally form-based code in the entire town, a project Ivy is currently spearheading.
In her own life she is a small developer, having turned her house into a three family, and the original carriage house into a duplex. She currently has a 14-unit project which just completed the entitlement process. This experience has shaped her understanding that zoning codes have to work within the economic framework of their place: if the buildings allowed by the code are not financially viable they will never be built, no matter how much the townspeople wish they would appear.
Areas of expertise: zoning, very small projects, historic buildings, working with elected officials, property management