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Stories from the NFCCA Newsletter, the “North Four Corners News” |
North Four Corners News ♦ October 2024
The Montgomery County Planning Board has adopted — and the County Council will be considering — the Attainable Housing Strategies (AHS) report, which recommends zoning changes to increase permissible housing density. The goal of the AHS initiative is to address the county’s housing shortage by increasing the options for building “more housing types in the county, particularly along the county’s growth corridors, ” which includes both University Blvd. and Colesville Road.
The AHS report recommends allowing development of “small-scale” buildings in single-family neighborhoods “by-right” simply by filing a building permit and without any opportunity for public comment. “Small-scale” buildings include duplexes or triplexes with 2 to 2.5 stories.
The AHS report recommends even greater housing density in Priority Housing Districts, which it defines as areas within one mile of major public transportation (Metro, Purple Line, MARC) or within a 500-foot wide buffer strip abutting any growth corridor. Quadplexes with up to 3 stories could be developed within the 500-foot buffer zone along both Colesville Road and University Boulevard (see illustration above).
Building height, setback, and lot coverage requirements for small-scale housing will remain unchanged, but will need to conform to a “Pattern Book” (yet-to-be developed by the planning agency) intended to ensure house-scale size and form, compatibility, and feasibility in the neighborhood.
In growth corridor buffer zones, permission to develop “Medium Scale” housing with 3- to 4-story stacked flats, small apartment buildings, and small townhouses will be evaluated under an Attainable Housing Optional Method (AHOM). AHOM development applications will be reviewed under more flexible development standards, allowing increased density, reduced setbacks, and more building types in exchange for site plan review by the Planning Board.
The Planning Board also recommends using a Corridor-Focused Master Plan process to rezone properties along the county’s primary growth corridors for even higher intensity large-scale housing developments with 4 or more story mixed-use live/work buildings, stacked flats, and small apartment buildings.
Along with allowing greater housing density, the Planning Board recommends reduced minimum parking requirements, with the steepest cuts in parking requirements slated for the Priority Housing Districts — that is, the 500-foot areas bordering University Boulevard and Colesville Road. On-street parking is already tight on many streets in the NFCCA community.
The planners believe that parking requirements add to the high cost of developing housing. As a general rule, the minimum baseline parking requirement is 2 spaces for single-family, duplexes, and townhouses. In multifamily housing, parking space requirements range from 1 to 2 spaces depending on the number of bedrooms in units. However, earlier this year the Council enacted zoning changes eliminating parking requirements for areas within a quarter mile of a Bus Rapid Transit station, such as the one in Four Corners (see story in April 2024 issue.)
The Planning Board recommends reducing the current parking requirement by 50% of the current baseline requirements when there is on-street parking on one or both sides of the street, except in Priority Housing Districts, where required parking would be reduced by 50% in areas with no street parking and by 75% in areas where on-street parking is available. Perhaps recognizing the controversy inherent in this aspect of their recommendations, the Planning Board listed other options for calculating parking requirements, such as considering street frontage, tying requirements to number of bedrooms, counting tandem parking (two cars in a line.)
A series of listening sessions in September and early October gathered public feedback. The next step will be consideration by the County Council and, once the AHS recommendations are adopted, the County Council will need to enact zoning text amendments to make changes to current zoning requirements.
In addition to the AHS recommendations that the County Council will be taking up, the University Boulevard Corridor Plan (UBCP) will be moving toward Planning Board review and Council consideration. The UBCP could include recommendations for medium- and large-scale housing density, commercial and mixed-use development, as well as traffic flow proposals. ■
© 2024 NFCCA [Source: https://nfcca.org/news/nn202410a.html]