Zoned into it

I met someone at random the other night at The Interval (an awesome place, by the way!) and he told me about a project that a certain Very Large web company is getting underway down at Moffett Field. He was starting to explain how the project was organized and funded within the company and I said that it sounded like they had been “zoned into it”, meaning of course that the company had agreed to do X in exchange for the city allowing them to do Y, as related to how the land was zoned from a planning and developing point of view. So, they didn’t volunteer to do it, they got zoned into it.