Facing more apartment buildings proposed downtown and concerns from residents over the nature of those buildings, Newark City Council enacted a series of zoning code changes Monday night to limit building height and reduce parking requirements for developers.
Council members referred to the changes as a “major milestone” for a city that’s experienced notable growth in recent years. The changes were more than 18 months in the making. They will not apply to plans already submitted to the city.
The most significant changes pertain to the city’s central business district zoning, known in the city code as the BB district. The previous code allowed developers to construct buildings there up to three stories, but they could build up to seven stories if they met certain requirements.
For many years, as apartment buildings with ground-floor retail began to replace aging structures on Main Street and in other downtown areas, projects remained around three to five stories. But a recent spate of proposals including Lang Development’s seven-story Green Mansion hotel and Todd Bariglio and Michael Scali’s six-story, 78-foot apartment building at Main and Haines streets, led the city to reconsider its building height limits.
Council voted Monday to limit the height of buildings in the central district to five stories. There is no structure to receive clearance for additional floors.
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Council also voted Monday to “decouple” parking from the construction of residential buildings in the BB district. Developers will need to specify the amount tenants must pay for a parking space separate from the cost of renting their unit. The tenant will then have the option to forgo a parking space.
The city believes this will help discourage students and other renters from bringing their vehicles to campus and therefore reduce traffic and parking lot congestion downtown.
“People just bring their cars because they have spots,” Planning Director Renee Bensley said.
The decoupling requirement will only apply to plans submitted and approved moving forward. Developers of buildings already constructed can decouple or not at their own discretion.
Council also voted to reduce the parking requirements for projects involving apartments from two spaces per unit to one space per unit. They dropped the requirement for units over three bedrooms from three spaces to two spaces.
In recent years, critics said the city’s parking requirements applied a suburban-style code to an urban area and contributed to perceived parking issues downtown. Where the city should be promoting its walkability, it was doing the opposite, they said. Developers routinely applied for waivers because they did not want to provide or couldn’t provide the spaces required by code. The cost of those waivers has also gone up.
The changes also added architectural requirements and guidelines pertaining to the materials used to break up and articulate building facades, roofing, windows and plaza and courtyard spaces. Stories above the third floor must be setback from the road 15 feet to reduce the perceived scale of the buildings.
Council also made changes to the RA district, which covers multifamily dwellings and high-rise apartments. Among the changes, high-rise apartments are now limited to seven stories and garden apartments are limited to three stories, both down from a maximum of 10.
Building height and parking requirements have been a topic of discussion in Newark for several years, but these specific changes relate to a week-long public planning event the city held in March. A consultant suggested code changes at the end of the week that were then recrafted several times as Newark’s Planning Commission and City Council held discussions throughout the rest of the year.
There were some points of disagreement throughout the process. A parking subcommittee recommended the city eliminate parking requirements in the downtown district, but planning staff recommended a more incremental approach. They worried the move would be seen as “too drastic.”
The Planning Commission recommended that Council leave out the mandatory decoupling element of the parking changes and instead allow all developers to decide for themselves. The commission heard pushback from developers who said they shouldn’t have their business models decided by the city. The decoupling requirement, however, does not set a minimum price for parking.
In some previous public hearings for controversial projects such as Lang Development’s Green Mansion hotel, members of council who had concerns about the projects felt their hands were tied by the city’s code. If projects met code, they are obligated to approve them. They’ve now all had a hand in amending the code, although some council members indicated Monday they weren’t wholly satisfied.
“There is no such thing as a perfect law,” Mayor Stu Markham said.
Any difference in how the zoning code affects development in Newark could take some time to realize. The city has received proposals for two six-story apartment buildings on Main Street that have yet to go through the city’s approval process.
In the place of The Continental apartments at the opposite corner of South Chapel Street and Delaware Avenue, Tsionas Management has plans for a six-story, 189-unit apartment building.
Construction is also continuing to extend from the downtown center to areas like South Main Street where two plans, from Lang and developer Hal Prettyman, could add a seven-story apartment building, a five-story apartment building and seven three-story townhomes to the area between South Main Street and The Rail Yard apartments along Apple Road.
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Contact Brandon Holveck at bholveck@delawareonline.com. Follow him on Twitter @holveck_brandon.
