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Summit County Council Approves Neighborhood Mixed-use Zone

After months of discussion, the Summit County Council finally approved the proposed neighborhood mixed-use zone at its meeting on Wednesday.

 

The approval of the new zone occurred relatively quickly in the middle of the council’s long, busy agenda. The vote was 4 to 1 with a dissenting vote from Roger Armstrong.

 

The council also approved a master-planned development process to implement the zone.

 

Before the vote, the council added language pushed by councilor Chris Robinson that increased the affordable housing obligation from 20% up to 50%.

 

“I felt like we need more affordable housing and in order to allow for this clustered, mixed-use nodal development to occur, that it needs to have a large affordable-housing component,” Robinson said.

 

For instance, he said, if a developer created an NMU project with 100 market-rate residential units, they would have to create 50 more that were affordable—or a total of 150.

 

“The thing about this zone is, it doesn’t have specified density, just like the community commercial,” Robinson said. “You can build however many units that you can fit on the site, meeting the open-space requirements, the setbacks, the height limitations and so forth.”

 

He said if the project was commercial, the applicant would have to offset the additional workers their project would create by 50%.

 

Armstrong, the lone dissenter on the council, said that the NMU is reasonably well done, but “we have not stopped to examine whether or not it fits in the areas designated in the general plan as available for NMU zoning. That seems a cautious step before enactment to determine unintended impacts.”

 

Robinson said the zone will be significant for the kind of housing it will supply.

 

“It allows for multi-family, which is a very, very hot commodity in this market, and nearly any market,” he said.

 

The creation of the new zone was prompted, in part, because developer Henry Sigg is proposing a mixed-use project in the Silver Creek area near Home Depot.

 

Robinson questioned whether developers will be motivated to build this kind of project.

 

“Nothing says that they have to build residential,” he said. “Residential, obviously, is the sweet spot in the market where most developers would gravitate. Only time will tell, but it is a pretty flexible zone. Its use will be limited to, first, those areas in the general plan that show mixed use, and secondly, convincing the council that it’s the right thing to re-zone.”

Known for getting all the facts right, as well as his distinctive sign-off, Rick covered Summit County meetings and issues for 35 years on KPCW. He now heads the Friday Film Review team.
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