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Marchand reviews example of mixed-use development before vote.
Karyn Gilvarg and Tom Talbot of New Haven’s City Plan Department have been working on amendments to the city’s zoning ordinance that make it friendlier to mixed-use development: the idea that stores and apartments and offices can be mixed all together in dense city blocks rather than separated in specified districts.
The Board of Alders Legislation Committee has unanimously approved their proposed text edits, allowing the changes to be voted on at the next full Board of Alders meeting.
“Why make these changes now?” Gilvarg, who is the executive director of City Plan, said at the committee’s vote this past Thursday night. “The residential districts in New Haven are quite separate from the commercial districts in the ordinance. They have certain setback requirements. They come from an attitude of a 100 percent residential neighborhood. What happens when you get into the business districts is that the ordinance takes those standards from the residential districts and pulls them in, creating unusual double standards.”
Her amendments to the ordinance would alleviate some of those tensions that arise today when developers seek to incorporate residential and non-residential use in the same building within a business district.
No longer will the Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) have to approve variance after variance regarding side yards. No longer (or, at least, less frequently) will required gaps between buildings create dead spaces that, to quote Gilvarg, “subtract from vitality rather than contribute to it.”
While describing the amendment’s reduction of the parking requirements for residential buildings in business districts, Talbot, the deputy director of zoning, identified exactly what the city is looking to accomplish through these changes.
“Sometimes we’re creating change,” he said. “And other times we’re managing changes that are happening anyway. That’s what this is. It’s reflective of the way people live and the way people would like to live in the city now.:
The amendments would change language in the zoning ordinance that governs building in the city’s business zones — nine zones known as the “B” family of zones — that are mainly downtown and in arterial business districts like Grand and Whalley avenues.
The recommended changes would make the physical standards such as the setbacks from the street and the floor area ratio, or FAR, the same in for commercial and residential buildings in those districts.
Builders of apartment buildings would no longer have to include front and side yards, under the proposal. In all parts of downtown except those bordering on residential neighborhoods, they would now need to provide only half a parking space per dwelling unit, rather than the current requirement (depending on the district) of a full space or three-quarters of a space.
Gilvarg: A new urbanist rewrite.
The new rules would also create an across-the-board maximum standard for almost all of downtown of one dwelling unit allowed per 1,000 square feet of interior gross area for residential construction projects. The rules would no longer insist that commercial space go on the first floor of mixed-use buildings; they would state a “preference” instead of an “insistence,” according to a summary in a City Plan advisory report.
These changes would promote more projects like those that have received special permission in recent years, like the Novella on Howe and Chapel Streets and College Square at College and Crown.
Read more about the specific proposed changes to the zoning ordinance here.
“I have the privilege of representing this body on the City Plan Commission,” Westville alder Adam Marchand said in support of the zoning text changes. “I can personally attest to the fact that there have been so many occasions where we’ve approved relief for projects that really ought not to have needed relief. It’s really important that we have regulations that actually reflect the policy direction that we want in the city.”
Committee Chair and East Rock alder Jessica Holmes agreed. “We have as a city come to the conclusion that mixed-use is desirable in many different areas,” she said. “And to see that the zoning changes will make it easier to accommodate that reality is something that makes a lot of sense.”
Markeshia Ricks contributed reporting for this article.