Agenda - Planning Commission - 03/01/2012

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PHILADELPHIA On December l5, 2011, the Philadelphia City Council unanimously voted to replace its 1962 zoning ordinance with an entirely new document covering all of the city's 146 C) Before Philadelphia overhauled its zoning code, it had multiple different overlay districts with similar development standards intended to protect the character of neighborhood shopping districts. The city's new code remaps most of these overlays with a single new base zoning district. resulting overlays only included restrictions on uses and permitted signs, while others went further to address parking amounts, parking location, and other issues. A sample overlay district map is shown below. square miles of land. In the process the number of base zoning districts was reduced from 55 to 36 and the number of overlay districts from 33 to 17. in some cases the remaining overlay districts include unique standards for different areas of the city (i.e., each area subject to special controls does not have a separate overlay), but the result is still much simpler than the structure it replaced. The most significant district con- solidation occurred for small - scale, walk- able commercial strips. Over the years 16 different Philadelphia neighborhoods had decided to reinforce the character of their lo- cal "main street" shopping area by crafting overlay districts for these areas. Most of the 0 Ridge Avenue (Only applies to Tots zoned CMX Because many of the local neigh- borhood controls were very similar, Philadelphia decided to create a new base (not overlay) zoning district called Commercial Mixed Use 2.5 (CMX -2.5). The new use contained a limited list of permitted uses similar to the city's existing CMX-2 district and the larger dimensional standards used in its existing CMX -3 dis- trict. After mapping the commercial corri- dors into the new CMX -2.5 district, most of the old overlay zones could be deleted. Of course, the fit was not perfect—it never is in consolidation efforts. Those neighborhoods whose existing commercial mixed use overlays addressed other issues wanted those controls continued, so some of the overlay controls stayed in place. So, for example, the city's East Falls overlay remains in place to carry over specialized setback controls for Kelly Drive as well as specialized building width and curb cut controls. But use restrictions no longer ap- pear in the overlay —they now appear in the underlying CMX -2.5 district. Similarly, the Ridge Avenue overlay remains in the code to carry over limits on use of space for commer- City of Philadelphia ZONI NGPRACTICE 2.12 AMERICAN PLANNING ASSOCIATION J page 5