The Downtown Baldwin Park Code is a form-based code (FBC). This FBC reinforces the historical form patterns with the use of streets, frontages, buildings, and open spaces that are appropriate for Downtown Baldwin Park context. 

The focus of this code is on the few but critically important urban standards that shape the public realm. These include design of streets and open spaces, setback, building height, building frontage at street level, parking, and access. 

The objective design standards ensure that redevelopment within the Downtown area promotes a safe, comfortable, and interesting walkable environment along the street by providing contextual building scale and mass, and pedestrian access and visibility that establish a human scale to the street.

The FBC identifies three types of environments with distinctive character and intensity.

1. Downtown Core: The Downtown Core is the intersection of Ramona Boulevard and Maine Avenue — the two most significant corridors in downtown. The Downtown Core allows the highest intensity in Downtown within a walkable urban setting. 
2. Downtown Corridor : Outside the Downtown Core, the parcels along key corridors such as Ramona Boulevard and Main Avenue will have active uses at the sidewalk level with residential or commercial uses at the upper levels. A continuous building frontage will provide definition and enclosure to the Ramona Boulevard and Maine Avenue public realm. Taller buildings line up along the wide stretch of street frontage with building heights stepping down in the rear where the building meets the residential neighborhoods.
3. Downtown Edge: The Downtown Edge zone serves as a buffer between the Downtown Core and Corridors and the stable residential neighborhoods around downtown.

The Downtown area will develop incrementally and more organically. This code intentionally encourages improvisation and innovative infill development that creates a rhythmic patterns of existing and new buildings unified by a distinctive, vibrant, and walkable public realm.