MSU Extension Planning

I'm Dave stances. I'm a city planner and zoning administrator for the city of Marquette. Were an urban community in a very rural area. So a Marquette County has about 75,000 residents. About a third of that is in the market area. We have about 5,000 students that live in the city. Like a lot of communities. We're, we're seeing the gap in affordability hit really hard. There's not a lot of new houses being built. There's not a lot of apartments being built. And there's a lot of people that want to live here. And so we're seeing a lot of people move to neighboring communities because there's just not enough housing here. There's a real desire for housing here that's not being met. So we started trying to address the housing affordability issue proactively around 2015, when our latest master plan was overhauled. About two years ago, the city did appoint an ad hoc housing committee to try to investigate and come up with some solutions. But there are a long list of zoning changes that we've made that address those issues. So I can start with talking about lot sizes for residential properties. A lot of what we've done is aimed at trying to make development on a small scale more feasible and more affordable. We looked at the math of how we calculate the size of setbacks and yards and the buildable space in our rear yard. We addressed the minimum lot size. We've created a standard for single-family home districts for the smaller, medium density districts that allows for a 37.5 foot wide lot. We've seen a few people split lot since when enacted that reform and build homes on those smaller lots. So that's been effective. I would say that actually the most impactful thing we've done is to create a lot of mixed use zoning districts. And we did this with nodes and corridors approach. So mixed-use districts are shown in orange here. So nodes and corridors approach is to place or to convert zoning districts that are in heavily used corridors and change those zoning districts to mixed use so that they can have residential and commercial uses. Residential, not just commercial, not just Office zoning districts that were formerly industrial or they were city-owned to mixed use, knowing that they're going to be converted to something else in the near future. And that creates a lot of opportunities for smaller developers to increase the height standard for the multi-family residential as well. So we're going up to 44 ft from 36.5 multifamily districts. We've done a lot of work to create different set of zoning standards for smaller residential parcels. So for one to five units. Now you can do that on a 75 foot wide lot instead of 100 foot wide lot, you only need 9,000 sq ft of space. Whereas capacity to 15,000. We've created administrative site plan review for smaller multi-family projects in the past, any kind of multifamily alteration or redevelopment additions would have to go through full site plan review. So we've tried to look at all aspects of our code and tweak them to make these, particularly to make small scale development more affordable and more attractive. So right now we're taking an incremental approach to code changes that will facilitate missing middle housing in what we're single family zoning districts. So e.g. we started with some changes about five years ago that allowed for duplex. Lots to be smaller. So duplex as a special land use required at 1.9 thousand square foot lot. Now we're down to 6,000. We're not at 75 foot wide lot with anymore. We're at a 50-foot lot with. So it's still a special land use, but it's easier to achieve that. Going farther than that is something that we're exploring. But we're going to do that through the update of our masterplan dwelling units. We'd again took the excess the incremental approach with the accessory dwelling units that started with allowing somebody to do it as a special land use, 0 to make those a use by right? As a use by right. Hopefully accessory dwelling units will prove to be part of the solution. Parking is one of those really vexing issues, and that's one of the issues with making a duplex a use by right. Duplexes and a small college town, like I said, you often have six or eight students, are things that we've done is in a lot of our districts. Now, the parking can be offsite. If the property owner can find space within 2,000 ft, that can provide them some kind of an agreement a legal agreement to allow for the parking to be on that site. I think it's a good idea to start looking at your zoning ordinance in terms of variances, what kind of variances are driving requests to the Board of Zoning Appeals that probably tell you a lot about problems you have with your code. Other changes with zoning districts is one that's it's not necessarily a difficult change. If you have buy-in from your elected officials, change your zoning districts, change some of the districts from strictly residential or commercial to mixed use. Mixed use opens up a lot of opportunities for more housing. And looking at the building envelope and existing zoning district, can you add light to your buildings? Can you add another story or can you, in your downtown districts, can your buildings, the 10 ft or 12 ft, or 30 ft taller? Can you add stories? I mean, this is the way that I think a lot of communities are going to most effectively and affordably address additional housing.