The Snyderville Basin Planning Commission has forwarded a positive recommendation to the Summit County Council for a new neighborhood mixed use zoning district.
The Basin Planning Commission has worked on the new zone designation over the last year. Planning Commission Chair Malena Stevens says the goal of the new zone, which expands the existing community commercial zone, will help to create vibrant neighborhoods – and that will require that enough residential development is included. Commissioners consider affordable, attainable, and market housing to be part of a mixed-use neighborhood. She says they didn’t want to define exact housing requirements in their recommendation, saying flexibility is needed.
“Because with these projects a neighborhood mixed use zone is only appropriate and can only be requested in specific areas that are outlined in the general plan. If here is a lot of housing adjacent to some of those areas, we didn’t want to tie the hands of those who could really develop vibrant projects that could serve those areas in great ways or tie the hands of future planning commissioners.”
Stevens says the amount of affordable housing that any new development project has to build, is already outlined in the county code. The code also provides for additional density incentives for community benefits.
“Within the zone, there are several different things they could request. You know, maybe they could add some additional height to be able to put affordable housing on top of some businesses, that kind of thing, to be able to infill that way. We also have, if they built parking structures, there was some incentive for that as well.”
Stevens says the planning commission is trying to focus their recommendations on the county’s goals of sustainability, affordable housing and transportation.
“We’re trying to build neighborhoods which are achieving those goals which are very interwoven and they kind of need to be addressed holistically. One of the differences with the neighborhood mixed use zone in comparison to perhaps rezoning to something else is they actually would have to have their plans go through a master plan development process as well. So, we could see, what are they intending to build? Does that work within the zone? How does that work?”
Stevens clarifies that the neighborhood mixed use zone overlay approval would require an application from a developer and is allowed in only specific and defined areas of the basin.
