Biz Renewal Plan Adopted For Whalley

A long-in-the-works rezoning initiative designed to boost the city’s neglected ​“commercial corridors” received unanimous aldermanic approval for Whalley Avenue — and was officially dropped, for now, from Dixwell Avenue and Grand Avenue.

The alders took that vote Tuesday night during their regular bimonthly full board meeting in the Aldermanic Chambers on the second floor of City Hall.

The board unanimously approved a zoning ordinance text amendment and zoning ordinance map amendment to create a new Commercial Gateway District zone for Whalley Avenue between Howe Street and Pendleton Street.

The City Plan department first introduced a version of the proposed zoning changes to the City Plan Commission back in June as the latest step in a years-long effort to adjust the city’s 1960s-era, automobile-centric zoning code.

The zoning updates passed by the alders Tuesday night include a variety of measures targeted at spurring dense, walkable, and environmentally sustainable development along a stretch of Whalley Avenue currently dominated by surface parking lots, fast food restaurants, and other single-story commercial venues.

The now-adopted law changes include replacing parking minimums with parking maximums; allowing certain commercial uses like bakeries, supermarkets, and restaurants as of right; and increasing the allowable floor area ratio (FAR) for new building projects to 3.0, with additional density available through a variety of environmental sustainability incentives, including the use of mass timber construction methods.

“This package of text amendments is ambitious in a number of ways,” Westville Alder, Legislation Committee Vice Chair and City Plan Commissioner Adam Marchand said Tuesday night. ​“It pushes the envelope in terms of zoning on the issue of design standards, on the issue of green design, on the issue of density and New Urbanist principles.”

Before passing the rezoning updates for Whalley Avenue Tuesday night, the alders formally removed from stretches of Dixwell Avenue and Grand Avenue that the city had initially proposed be included in this project.

Over the course of months of City Plan Commission public hearings, neighborhood meetings, and aldermanic committee meetings, Dixwell and Wooster Square neighbors successfully petitioned City Plan department staffers and alders to drop the one-size-fits-all rezoning approach for their respective avenues.

Dixwell critics were particularly concerned that the new zoning regs would result in the gentrification of a predominantly working class, historically African American neighborhood. Grand Avenue neighbors focused their concerns on five-story-plus buildings potentially overwhelming the corridor’s current streetscape.

City Plan staffers and Dixwell and Grand Avenue neighbors have pledged at previous rezoning meetings to work together in the coming months to develop bespoke community-sourced zoning updates for their own respective neighborhoods.

Marchand noted that, at previous public hearings, Whalley Avenue residents and business owners have uniformly expressed support for the rezoning plan — calling on the city to move quickly in passing a law change that would remove regulatory burdens for developers interested in building new housing and retail and office space on the avenue.

Marchand also pointed out that the alders decided to drop a rent affordability requirement that had been included in previous versions of the commercial corridor rezoning project. Up until last month’s Legislation Committee hearing, the City Plan department had been recommending that new residential developments with nine or more units set aside 10 percent of their apartments at affordable rental rates.

That requirement was dropped from the final version of the Whalley Avenue update, Marchand said, because the alders decided it best to wait until the city has conducted a citywide ​“inclusionary zoning” study before implementing affordability requirements.

“This body continues to see the issue of affordable housing as a priority,” he said, ​“but felt that rather than do a small-scale pilot in just this one commercial district, it’d be better to wait for the citywide approach.”