The Salt Lake City Council gave an early blessing in favor of essentially ditching its single-family zoning in favor of allowing up to fourplexes to be built in much of the residential land across town.
The council took a straw poll vote at a hearing Tuesday that showed every member is in favor of city planners looking at consolidating the R-1 single-family zoning and legalizing missing middle housing on a broad scale, even as some expressed concerns about the fine print.
The effort is one of multiple ongoing attempts by City Hall to update much of the city’s zoning code to clear the way for more housing to be built in more neighborhoods, all with the eye on driving down the cost of housing.
On Tuesday, the council heard a presentation from planning staff to potentially consolidate the city’s three R-1 single family residential text sections — R-1-12,000; R-1-7,000; and R-1-5,000 — into a single section of code.
Planning staff presented council members with two other potential changes to city zoning code Tuesday, which included allowing flag lots to be developed and expanding potential housing options.
The latter would include adding a “small lot dwelling” to the land use category, according to a presentation to the city. This would allow up to four units to be built on R-1 plots, and it would not replace R-1/R-2/SR1-3 zoning standards for single-family homes. Instead, the small lot dwellings would allow home owners to build more units on their land.
These potential changes would eliminate the requirements needed to build multiple units on land zoned for single-family residences. Under changes made just over a year ago, landowners needed to meet affordable housing or historical preservation requirements in order to get multiple units on their land.
Nick Norris, director of the Salt Lake City Planning Division, told Building Salt Lake that current affordable housing incentives allow up to four units and require those units to remain affordable for 30 years. Norris said the city is supposed to keep up with those units to ensure they remain affordable, and as the years go on and more units are built in this way, the city would have to keep an eye on more units.
Norris said the potential change discussed Tuesday would allow for the same amount of units, but it wouldn’t carry the affordable requirement and oversight from the city. The units would have a maximum footprint, which Norris said could naturally make the units cheaper.
“The idea is that there’s some built-in, naturally occurring affordability because that dwelling is smaller,” Norris said.
Another change being discussed is legalizing different building forms, including duplex, triplex, fourplex and townhomes as permitted uses in R-1 zones. These types of homes are called missing middle housing, a crucial type of housing unit that is in scarce supply but can be found scattered throughout Salt Lake City, as this type of housing was once legal before the city changed its zoning code.
Previous versions of the proposal considered rezoning all of the R-1 properties into the same code. Instead, city planners now recommended leaving the R-1 zones on the map as they are and, “take the three separate sections of code and consolidate those all into one chapter,” said Ben Buckley, a principal planner for the city, during the Tuesday work session.
The proposed changes include standardizing building heights for single-family residences at 30 feet for pitched roofs and 24 feet for flat roofs. The proposal would also eliminate front setback averaging, instead requiring new houses to have a front yard of 20 feet.
Reactions from council members were largely positive, but some had lingering questions and concerns about the potential changes.
Councilmember Sarah Young said creating more housing generally should help with affordability, but she was concerned that if this proposal was implemented as is, fewer homeowners would take advantage of the affordable housing incentives because they could put up to four units on their land either way.
“I just don’t want to move forward with a broad scale approach in policy and zoning change at the city that then ultimately undermines the existing efforts for affordable housing,” Young said.
Young, and all other council members, voted unanimously in a straw poll to generally support the city zoning staff’s research into the potential changes.
Norris said the next step in the process would be for the City Council to create a legislative intent statement to initiate the zoning change. Once that happens, and Norris said he expects it will, city planning staff can allocate staff resources and get the ball rolling to create the city ordinance. He said the process will likely include creating a public engagement plan to get public input on the changes before going to the Planning Commission.
As of Tuesday, there’s no timeline in place as to when the changes could be formally considered by the city council.
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