West Richland Zoning

West Richland mapThe City of West Richland (think Tri-Cities) is currently updating its zoning ordinance and is still accepting public comment. Instead of just posting a blanket request for public comment, though, they have a fairly target survey online in both Word and PDF formats.

The survey is interesting in how it steers public comment to focus on the issues that will actually be addressed in the zoning ordinance and the request for quantitative feedback. While the development community is likely geared to think in terms of zoning terms, forcing citizens to evaluate how many people should be allowed to live in an ADU forces the difficult questions.

Apparently, though, the city has only received thirty responses.

Here’s are the options the city provides to promote urban density:

  • Subdivisions must provide for a minimum of 2, 3 or 4 dwellings per acre.)
  • Require all residential land divisions within the City to be served with City sewer and water, or the development cannot occur. (Does not directly impose a specified maximum lot size—relies on financial impacts to encourage urban-sized lots.)
  • Require a minimum lot size of 5/10/20/40 acres (Underline choice), when new development is not served by City sewer and water. (The idea being to preserve the area for future development, when city utilities are available.)
  • Require any land division that does not represent urban density to include a “shadow plat”, for further division of the lots in the future. (Example: In the sample drawing below, four one-acre lots are created now, with each one-acre lot set up to be divided into three lots in the future, for a total of 12 lots. The home and outbuildings are limited to one of the three designated building sites within the 1-acre lot. The other two building sites remain vacant until the lot is divided again. See drawing below.)

Sources

- posted Mar 27, 09:44 AM in

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