While participating in public hearings and outreach efforts, I've been keeping a running list of issues various residents and neighborhoods have with the proposed new zoning code. Here's the current version.
Major omissions:
The proposed new code fails to:
·
Address the issue of housing affordability and
fix what’s broken in the current inclusionary zoning provisions.
·
Implement neighborhood conservation measures –
e.g. to prevent pop-ups, dig outs, McMansions, conversion of housing stock to
other uses, condo-ization of houses, out-of-scale development, etc. or to
provide more effective buffering between zones with significantly different
scale, uses, or intensities of use.
Increasingly, a neighborhood that is not protected by historic
preservation will not be protected at all. And historic preservation itself is becoming less protective than it used to be.
·
Incentivize development in areas that have
suffered from disinvestment.
·
Apply the Green Area Ratio and affordable
housing requirements to the newly expanded downtown. Analyze what it takes to create attractive
and livable downtown neighborhoods and provide mechanisms for insuring that
infrastructure, open space, and other public facilities and amenities are
provided as heights and densities increase.
·
Make the regulations more user-friendly. Somehow the Office of Planning has managed
to draft a new code that is even more opaque and unwieldy than the existing
code. Moreover, because the new code
starts from scratch and uses some of same terms but defines them differently,
the status and applicability of previous case law is unclear.
·
Provide mechanisms for effective representation
of community interests in development review processes.
Significant policy changes
The proposed new regulations would:
•
Effectively eliminate single-family residential
zones.
•
Encourage the conversion of houses into
apartments.
•
Allow more commercial activity in residential
zones.
•
Threaten the integrity and viability of
neighborhood commercial districts.
•
Activate alleys by allowing home-based
businesses and rental apartments to be located in garages and other
out-buildings and by allowing residential development
of alley lots of 450 SF.
•
Minimize opportunities for public input and give
developers and property-owners more control over development and land use
decisions.
•
Rely on generic “conditions” with no enforcement
mechanism or penalty for non-compliance rather than on BZA review and
project-specific requirements.
•
Eliminate the ability to create overlays; impose
one-size-fits-all policies citywide.
•
Deliberately make it more difficult and
expensive for people who live in the city to own a car.
•
Treat every area within one-half mile of a Metro
station the same with respect to parking requirements
-- regardless of existing conditions.
•
Significantly expand “downtown” to encourage
maximum heights and densities in areas beyond the city center.