Planning Commission skeptical of the fine print for zoning fix in the Aves, East Central

by Taylor Anderson | Feb 17, 2025

Two influential members of the Salt Lake City Planning Commission told city staffers a proposal to merge two multifamily zones wasn’t ready for primetime this week, fearing the concept as written would lead to collateral damage and new buildings that are out of scale with existing neighborhoods.

Planners are working on updating the RMF-35 and RMF-45 zones, codes that were supposedly created in 1995 to promote mid-density infill, but which in effect blocked most development from occurring in the zones.

The city is generally looking to reduce lot size and width requirements and reduce parking minimums in the one new RMF45 zone. The proposal would also include design standards, which currently aren’t in place in the code, and density bonuses for preservation and affordability.

The ultimate goals are to encourage the creation of new missing middle housing units and to rewrite the code in ways planners hope will lead to more owner-occupied housing stock.

Planners say the existing parking minimums discourage the construction of family-sized housing, noting that new homes with more bedrooms are required to provide more parking under the existing rules. The updates would require one off-street parking space per unit regardless of the type or size.

66% of the lots in the two zones aren’t wide enough to allow for construction without special approval from the city, a reality that planners say encourages land banking and lot consolidation.

The city is considering a 45-foot maximum for multifamily construction in the new zone, noting that’s the minimum needed for four-story buildings, and adding that it would discourage four-over-one podium construction that is plentiful throughout the city today.

It’s not entirely an upzone. Just 28 percent of existing lots would see a moderate to high impact on what could be built compared to what’s theoretically allowed today. 35 percent of lots would actually be down-zoned, and the remaining 37 percent would allow more or less what’s present today.

The briefing this week was a first glance at how the debate will play out as the planners get feedback from the public, the commission and eventually the City Council. And it showed the planners are already facing pushback from an audience that’s largely supportive of fixing broken zoning codes.

“I’m not sold on this,” said Commissioner Amy Barry, one of the longest-serving members of the commission.

Barry noted she lives on a street in Sugar House that is zoned RMF-35 today and would be impacted by the proposal.

She said the street is lined with existing missing middle housing that was largely built in the 1960s and 1970s.

Most of the existing RMF-35 and RMF-45 zones are in Central City, East Central and the Lower Avenues. But there are also pockets throughout the city, including on Barry’s street in Sugar House.

“I don’t particularly find it congruent to say the stated goal is you want to promote missing middle and you do that through a high-density zone,” Barry said.

She said there are existing RMF-35 zones that already possess housing that achieves the stated goal of the updates, and suggested the planners should be more granular in their approach to the merger for fear of incentivizing investors to replace housing already in place with new buildings that maximize what’s allowed under the new rules.

“On my street, I have a lot of housing types — single-family homes to moderate density. South, in the business district, you get high density,” she added. “We have a lot of different things happening here with RMF-35, it’s almost as if you need to separate out which ones these work for and which ones these don’t.”

“My problem is, with the cost of land, nobody is going to buy land in these areas, the Aves and Sugar House and actually think, ‘I’m going to build us a cottage with eight units,’” Barry said. “There’s zero way that’s going to pencil.”

Commissioner Bree Scheer, the longest-serving member of the commission and the former director of the Master of Real Estate Development program at the University of Utah, also voiced concerns about the proposal.

“The research that’s been done so far has been generally focused on why we can’t build on these unsuitable lots, and that is a really great question. The research is very solid,” Scheer said. “But the solution is much more sweeping than the very specifics of that research.”

Scheer said she was in favor of fixing the broken zones, but her concerns were more about the scale of potential new buildings compared to existing housing stock in the existing zones.

“I’m completely in favor of having lot sizes that make sense and that can have a larger number of units on them,” Scheer said. “What I am not in favor of is making a really jarring addition to a neighborhood or expecting somehow that that neighborhood is going to transition so that someday there’s going to be nothing but 45-foot or 50-foot buildings in something that is currently a single-family zone.”

The pushback could complicate things for the city, which is leaning heavily in favor of consolidating its zoning code to simplify the development process in favor of allowing more housing to be built. But it’s not likely to derail the effort, as the criticism was not about the intent of the work but of the specific approach.

Commissioner Landon Kraczek made clear that he is looking to move beyond the mistakes of the past.

“Where I kind of stand on it is it feels like it’s kind of a blip in time, 20 years, where we were allowing less. Before 1995, all of this was allowed,” he said, later realizing that 1995 was somehow 30 years ago. “If we allow more uses like this, then we’re able to let that be a piece of our past instead of letting it hurt us all the way into the future. We need these missing middle housing types.”