Big Zoning Changes Start With Small Lots

In an opening zoning-reform salvo, the city will seek to make it easier to build attic, basement, and garage apartments — and to drop the minimum required lot size for new housing to 4,000 square feet.

City Plan Director Aïcha Woods discussed those proposed local land use law updates during the regular monthly meeting of the City Plan Commission, held online via Zoom.

Woods did not submit any formal, specific proposed law changes to the commissioners for consideration or a vote.

Rather, during a section of the Wednesday evening meeting set aside for general policy discussion, she broached the topic as one of the top zoning-related priorities for the department in the year ahead.

In particular, she said that her department plans to propose changing local land-use laws governing accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and minimum lot sizes.

“We all know zoning matters,” Woods said. Zoning laws ​“can have an incredible impact” on what kind of housing is built where.

Historically, ​“exclusionary zoning” regulations around housing type restrictions, minimum lot size, parking minimums, and density have reduced housing choices and artificially increased the cost of building new places to live, she said.

“I think exclusionary zoning has specifically been used to continue racial segregation. I just want to name that as an underlying reason for the work we’re doing and the disparities that we are recognizing the need to correct.”

She said that making it easier to build ADUs in particular ​“can create new housing units while respecting the scale of our historic fabric.”

Edgewood resident Seth Poole (pictured), speaking up on behalf of the ADU proposed updates, stressed the importance of allowing New Haveners who already own homes in the city to use existing space to increase housing stock, typically for relatives and friends, at affordable rates.

“Our city has removed dilapidated housing to the tune of thousands of homes being leveled in the past couple of decades,” he said. ​“We scramble and remove greenspaces for kids to play in order to accommodate the need for affordable housing.” 

Making it easier to build ADUs — in their attics, basements, and garages, for example — would allow for New Haven to significantly increase its housing supply without eating into more open space.

“It’s important for zoning to be flexible to accommodate people who are supporting the tax base of our city, and open up that opportunity for landlords to make that decision for themselves.”

The commissioners unanimously praised Woods and city staff for putting together these high-level zoning proposals. 

Woods said that the next step will be to present these ideas to the soon-to-be-empaneled Affordable Housing Commission before coming back to the City Plan Commission with more specific, proposed text changes. The Board of Alders must then review and ultimately vote on any zoning updates before the changes become law.

“We’ve been talking about working on some zoning amendments for a long time,” Commission Chair Leslie Radcliffe said Wednesday night.
Seeing them finally starting to happen, she said, ​“is good for my soul.”

Pro ADU

The first proposed zoning update pitched by Woods on Wednesday pertained to ADUs.

Those are residential living units that exist on the same parcel of land as a single-family or multifamily structure, she said.

“The ADU provides complete independent living facilities for one or more persons, including space for living, sleeping, cooking and eating and sanitation,” read a slide that Woods presented on Wednesday night.

ADUs can be interior to an existing building, such as an attic or basement. They can be attached, such as an addition to an existing principal structure. Or they can be detached, in the form of a converted garage or carriage house.

“Our greatest number of housing units [in New Haven] are in the one to four-family range,” she said. ​“This has tremendous potential for creating a volume of affordable housing units.”

She said the city would like to see a phased approach for updating ADU laws.

A first phase would legalize ADUs citywide so long as they are ​“inside the envelope, or within the size and footprint of an existing accessory structure,” she said.

That is: no new construction of additions or detached structures, only conversion of existing space into newly-legal residences.

“This would give us a little more time to develop neighborhood specific design standards and look at the right pattern of where you might want to put an addition or where you might want to put a new unit.”

This first phase would also require that a property be owner occupied in order to add on a legal, as of right ADU.

“We’ve heard some concerns about speculation around this,” she said, thus the impulse to keep the owner-occupied requirement to start.

The second phase would be exactly the same as the first in terms of which ADUs would be allowed as of right, but the owner occupancy requirement would be removed, Woods said.

And the third phase would legalize new attached ADU construction and new detached ADU construction — that is, building an addition onto an existing structure or building a new structure entirely on an existing property — so long as those ADUs follow city-defined design guidelines.

This third phase would also have no owner occupancy requirement, and would impose no additional parking requirements.

Commission Vice-Chair Ed Mattison praised the proposals. He added that, based on his former experience as an alder trying to help a constituent who wanted to build a legal ADU on his property, ​“what in my opinion is really needed is not only a comprehensive set of statutes and regulations that are pro-ADUs, but it also has to have a lot of public explanation.”

That is, if the city makes these changes, it can’t just settle for text changes and then move on to the next project. It has to educate the public about what is now legal and how property owners can take advantage of the new laws.

“I think it’s really going to take a lot of explaining to the public.”

Minimum Lot Drop To 4K Sq Feet

Woods said that her department will also propose that the city reduce minimum lot sizes throughout the city to 4,000 square feet.

“This would be across all neighborhoods, all zones,” she said.

This recommendation comes as large minimum lot sizes have taken center stage in a regional and statewide debate around how zoning laws inflate the cost of housing.

“The larger the minimum lot size, the more exclusive to single family, the higher the construction cost, and the less choices for people in that neighborhood,” she said.

City staff attorney Michael Pinto said that reducing minimum lot sizes to 4,000 square feet ​“will help us build back in the preexisting density” from before Urban Renewal saw the leveling of dilapidated housing structures, often leaving in its wake large swaths of empty land used for parking.

Current minimum lot areas in residential zones across the city range from 7,500 square feet in the R2‑1 general single family district to 6,000 square feet in the RM‑1 low-middle density district to 5,400 square feet in the RM‑2 high-middle density district.

“By reducing the overall lot size to 4,000 square feet, I think we will have a better chance to do appropriate infill in those areas, and to increase the housing stock overall.”