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MULTI-FAMILY RESIDENTIAL DESIGN GUIDELINES AND STANDARDS INTRODUCTION The City of Overland Park has regulated the site planning and design of multi-family developments since 1987. While these review guidelines have helped produce multi-family developments that are better designed than most in the Kansas City region, the city has recognized shortcomings in this process both from a substantive and procedural perspective. For example, the guidelines do not reflect some of the key goals and objectives for multi- family development as set forth in the city's Master Plan. In other instances, hands-on experience with developments has revealed areas that the guidelines do not address adequately such as parking lot landscaping and use of incentives. To address these issues, the city retained Clarion Associates to work with the community to revamp these existing multi-family design standards. A. MAJOR THEMES AND GOALS FOR IMPROVEMENT In conceiving the project, the city identified a number of important overarching issues to tackle in revamping the design guidelines. These were confirmed and supplemented during the interview process and in meetings with staff and city officials. These major issues provide a context for the guidelines and standards that follow. This section provides a summary overview of these major themes. They include: 1. Implement the Master Plan The Master Plan contains some fairly specific multi-family land use goals. These focus on compatibility of multi-family development with surrounding land uses, landscaping, location, and circulation. While some of these goals are addressed by the existing Multi-Family Guidelines (e.g., landscaping), others are not. To illustrate, the Master Plan calls for protection of natural areas, but the design guidelines contain only very vague statements to encourage preservation. Similarly, the Master Plan recommends that a variety of housing types be encouraged in multi-family developments, but this issue is not addressed in the current design guidelines. Another example relates to the current sy. stem of density bonuses. The Master Plan states that higher densities should be attainable only for projects with exceptional design and Iocational features. In practice, however, bonuses are granted pursuant to existing guidelines for amenities or site improvements that are modest at best or are minimum requirements in other jurisdictions. 2. Achieve a Balance Between Clear, Quantitative Standards and Creativity in Design Like most communities that have embraced detailed project design review, Overland Park is facing the challenge of crafting clear, quantitative review standards that are easy to administer and offer certainty to developers and citizens alike while maintaining a requisite degCee of design flexibility to allow and encourage creative site and building design. On the one hand, the existing process is criticized as being too flexible with too much left to negotiation. Indeed, many of the current design guidelines are rather vague and not mandatory. This puts city staff and review bodies in an unenviable position of having to negotiate certain design aspects of each development from scratch. On the other hand, developers can never be sure CITY OF OVERLAND PARK, KANSAS I OCTOBER 7, 2002