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Following a lengthy discussion at its April 13 meeting, the Lexington City Planning Commission voted to amend the city’s lot width requirements for multifamily dwellings and agreed to have a longer discussion about density requirements in the city in the future.
The issue of the city’s lot width requirement for multifamily dwellings was a key feature of the Planning Commission’s discussion of the conditional use permit for the proposed development of city-owned property on Spotswood Drive last December.
Under the code as it stood at the time, 50 feet of lot width was required for the first four units, with an additional 10 feet required for each additional unit. For the 62 units proposed by Echelon Resources on the Spotswood property, the lot would need a width of at least 630 feet of width at the street front. The property is 406.44 feet wide along Spotswood Drive. The development did meet the city’s requirements for lot area, which require 10,000 square feet for the first four units and an additional 1,500 square feet for each unit over that. The lot totals 101,500 square feet, well over the 97,000 square feet required for the proposed development.
The fact that the development met one standard but not the other was a point of debate during the Commission’s discussion of the conditional use permit, with Commission members Pat Bradley and John Driscoll ultimately voting against the conditional use permit because it did not meet both metrics. The permit was approved in a 4-2 vote by the Planning Commission. The issue was noted in the presentation of the conditional use permit to City Council, but was not raised in any of Council’s public discussions on the permit.
The Planning Commission took up the discussion of the lot width requirement at Council’s request, with Council hoping to avoid another circumstance like what happened with the Spotswood development, where the proposed development meets one requirement but not the other.
City planner Arne Glaeser presented the Commission with three options for amending the lot width requirements for multifamily dwellings in the city: Leave it as is, delete the language from the code, or table it and have a larger discussion about population density in the city in the future, recommending the second option due to the city wanting to have the language changed as soon as possible.
To help provide additional insight into lot width requirements, Glaeser provided the Commission with examples of requirements for multifamily dwellings in nearby localities, including Rockbridge County and Buena Vista, neither of which list any lot width requirements for multifamily dwellings.
The cities of Staunton and Clifton Forge were also included, both of which have lot width requirements, but rather than increasing with the number of units like in Lexington, they set a minimum width requirement – 50 feet in Clifton Forge and 100 feet in Staunton. Driscoll, who did additional research on his own, found similar standards in Henrico County, with the set minimum width requirements ranging between 100 and 150 feet.
“One of the questions for us is do we want to look at this, not necessarily just to eliminate the lot width requirement, but to say what an alternative would be that makes sense for Lexington and the kind of development we want,” Driscoll said. “I would agree with Arne that this [requirement] as it’s written probably comes from a different time when you wanted more of a suburban landscape.”
Driscoll advocated for leaving the language the way it was and for having a larger discussion about density in Lexington.
“I think this question of density is important in different areas of the city,” he said. “I think we’ve been talking about this as if all [zoning districts] are equal, and they’re not. The planning profession is aggressively saying ‘put as much density as you can where the infrastructure is to keep the costs down.’ My feeling is that you can have incremental increases in density in places that make sense. It doesn’t have to be blanket across the city. I’m more for options one and three, that we leave this as it is based on the strength of the description [of the development] and conditional use permit, and acknowledge that it is something that, in this case, it does make sense to look at, but it’s not tied to only one property, and I think that’s the point.”
Driscoll also reiterated a point he’d raised during the Commission’s discussions on the Planned Development-Mixed Use zoning district – that the city would benefit from thinking about things like density in a long-term way and not just development by development.
“Think about 10 to 15 years down the road. Don’t think about, ‘I have this parcel here and that parcel there,’ because what you’re putting in place is going to define the character and development [of Lexington] in the future,” he said. “That’s one of the ways we should be thinking about this, and not just, ‘Well, we have three lots in the city that we know.’ Well, with our new Planned Development-Mixed Use [zoning district], we substantially changed the character of development in the C-2 areas in the future … We’ve created the platform for them to do much higher densities, so that’s going to change the character of the C-2 areas.”
Commission member Shannon Spencer also advocated for having a larger discussion about the city’s population density requirements.
“If we want to take up the issue of density as a way of giving more direction to the kind of development we have, it seems like we maybe need to consider this in a more holistic way … to have a more well-planned future of the community,” she said. “That would be what I would be looking at if I were considering density issues. I don’t know that we have any other properties that are going to be further constrained by this, but … I’m just concerned about considering all of the options.” - Noting that Lexington’s requirement of requiring additional width for larger multifamily developments is the exception among the handful of nearby jurisdictions that have lot width requirements, Commission Chair Blake Shester proposed amending the lot width requirements for multifamily dwellings to a standard minimum of 100 feet, and also agreed that a larger discussion on density was something the commission could do in the future.
“Basing it on the number of units, that makes us special, and I think that’s the confusing part,” he said. “By having a narrow frontage and a very deep lot, you’re still able to fit a full housing development with parking adequately, but in Lexington that’s not okay. You can’t do that, because we’re the one locality we’ve seen locally that says it has to be a width [based on the number of units], whereas other cities say 100 feet, an arbitrary number.
“That language in our zoning code seems to be an outlier amongst every other jurisdiction we’re talking about,” he added. “It’s a mechanism to reduce density and to make it very prohibitive to have any sort of development. It’s using a special mechanism in a very unique way that doesn’t seem to exist in other zones.”
Leslie Straughan moved to amend the lot width requirement for multifamily dwellings to a 100-foot minimum requirement, which passed in a 5-0 vote.
The proposed amendment will be presented to the Lexington City Council for a public hearing at its meeting on May 4.
