April 17, 2026 — Meeting Transcript

Good afternoon, everybody. We are here for our April 17th discussion session. The only item on the agenda is to talk about infill standards. And I think Ryan Helle is going to lead that discussion. Thank you.

Good afternoon, everybody. We are here for our April 17th discussion session. The only item on the agenda is to talk about infill standards. And I think Ryan Hall is going to lead that discussion. Thank you.

All righty. So today we're going to go over, we're going to do a brief recap of the items we talked about last time. We're not going to spend a ton of detail, just kind of going over the summary. And then we're going to spend a majority of the time talking about infill development, telling the story of what infill development in Clayton actually looks like and what are some ways that we can maybe better help infill development fit into the surrounding areas. So to kind of lead off with what we've been working with comprehensive plan is that residents really value the character of their neighborhoods and they're generally open to development, but they want to make sure that development is context sensitive. And some, there have been examples where development has not always been context sensitive. So we want to make sure in future zoning code revisions, we're making sure that our zoning code is reflecting what the current conditions are like and what residents want to see as outcomes in their neighborhoods. So outcome of the comprehensive plan, the key results here, modifying the lot size setback regulations to better align with historic neighborhood patterns and then establishing appropriate infill development standards. So 2.5 is what we talked about most of the time last time, and we'll go over that summary. And then 2.2 is what we're going to spend time on today. I will note that that key result 2.2 talks about form and materials. We're really just going to spend time talking about form because materials is kind of going to kind of be an evolution of things to probably happen beyond this point in the process. So to kind of recap from last time, talking about a lot of the lots of dimensions that we discussed, setbacks, really there weren't that many challenges with setbacks. It really just shows up with garages in some neighborhoods. And so we're looking at where's ways that we can reduce the setback for smaller one-story garages. We got a little bit of feedback from the Planning Commission that they were concerned about if you had garages that were getting two feet apart from each other on the property line. So we've made some adjustments accordingly, but we are looking at reducing that setback for smaller garages. No changes to lot area. Didn't see any issues there. Lot width. Last time we talked about the R5 district, that's your high point demand area. And then we talked about R2 as well. Generally, the feedback that we got from R2 and then as looking into a little more, it really wasn't worth revising R2. There were some examples in R2 where maybe lot widths or outcomes didn't align with the surrounding character, but those examples going forward would be minimal and the outcomes of revising R2 to try to address some of those issues would probably cause more problems than problems it would solve. So really we're just looking now at revising the width of R5 going from 50 feet to 40 feet, and that shouldn't change any of the conditions. Just sort of bring the zoning code in line with what lots look like in that neighborhood. And then density, didn't find too many issues in terms of density. Mostly that if we tried to adjust densities, we were going to, again, create more problems than we would solve. But we did find that R3 has a density ratio to it. It just happens to be redundant. It doesn't really do anything because you have to basically, you can have duplexes and it applies that ratio, but it's just the equivalent of the minimum law area. So it doesn't actually do anything. And in terms of lots that are actually non-conforming, it's only like maybe two or three lots that are non-conforming in R3. And they are just like a hair under what the lot minimum is. So improving that ratio really shouldn't present an issue in terms of density. And then as we were looking through all those lot standards, we found that R7 really didn't – the existing conditions on R7 lots really didn't meet any of the zoning criteria. There's only four lots. They're on South Brentwood across from Shaw Park. If something were to happen to those lots today – like a natural disaster or something that would damage those properties where they'd need to be reconstructed to their current conditions, the R7 district would actually really get in the way of those people taking care of, maintaining, restoring their property. So the best path for R7 is probably to rezone those properties to M3 and do away with R7 as a zoning district. So let's dive into infill development. And before we get to the solutions, I kind of want to paint a picture of what infill looks like across Clayton. So this map where you see more of the orange, that's a newer construction where you see more the dark green. That's where you have your older properties. We can see that infill kind of happens everywhere. I guess I should clarify the nuance for those larger properties like the South 40, where you have a ton of properties that skewed a little bit. But for all of our single family properties, this is pretty accurate. We do see, though, that there is a cluster of newer construction on the north side of town in Clayton Gardens, a little bit in Old Town. And so although it happens everywhere, there are definitely concentrations where infill is happening. And there's a lot of things that are going to impact why infill happens in certain locations. One of those is gonna be land value ratios. Something to understand about Clayton is that a lot of the value in property here is in the land rather than the structure where you see orange on here, that is gonna be more of it is in the land where you see more of the green and more of it is the structure. If more of your value is in the structure, the incentive is to retain the structure if it's in the land, then really the incentive is to tear down. Now, I'll clarify that this is a few years old. This is immediately post-comp plan. I don't feel that it's appropriate to just put out the current data. One, it probably wouldn't be accurate because we've made some revisions lately, such as the lot coverage changes, which would probably affect land values a little bit. Additionally, I don't want to do developers' jobs for them in finding what properties they're going to come for next. So this is a few year old, but this was accurate for the time. There's a lot of places where all the values in the land. And if we kind of pivot back and forth between where his infill happened and land values, if you look up in that top left corner in Clayton Gardens, you can see that it's for all those new constructions, that's where you get the value in the structure. But you'll also find value in structures in areas that have maybe higher densities, maybe with some multifamily as well. Another impact to infill development could be the density of a lot looking at the floor area ratio. It varies, but there are clusters, of course. You can see that areas like High Point and Munn, there's pretty consistent floor area ratios. Clay Shire, pretty consistent, but it's kind of a little bit more mixed when you get to a place like Clayton Gardens or Old Town just because you have so much of that infill development going on. However, if a potential developer knows that they can tear down an older structure, which residents have said they'd like to retain to build something bigger, that is an incentive to keep in mind.

I just want to make sure I understand this one better before we move on. So where it's orange, is this actually what the floor area ratio is or whether what's built there is... close, like compares to the permitted maximum.

This is a pretty accurate display of the density of a property currently, the massing of a structure, how big a structure is compared to the size of a lot. So you see orange, you have bigger structures relative to the size of the lot.

And does it have any relationship to what like Does the coloration have any relationship to what is permitted under current zoning on that lot? Or this is just like actual current floor area ratio conditions?

are current florida ratio conditions i mean it's we're pulling county data so it's always possibility of being a little bit dated but if we jump back to where infill is happening and we look at that clayton gardens area and then we jump back over to floor area ratios we start to as in combination with land values we start to see this picture being painted of newer properties That's newer properties tend to have more of their value in the structure, whereas older properties tend to have higher floor area ratios. So we see this picture here of whenever a site is being developed saying, okay, we know that they're tearing down a smaller structure. We know they're tearing down that smaller structure because more of the value is in the land.

Thank you.

No problem. So how has the size of homes changed over time? This is a fun graph here. On that bottom axis is where you've got the year of construction, and then we have a couple different variables on the sides. But what this is painting a picture of is how many houses were built in a given period and how's the size of them change. So those green bars that you see number of houses, we can see that we've got like our roaring 20s boom. We've got our World War II dip, our post-war boom. And then it kind of dips for a while and then picks back up. But we see that where we had the majority of construction in Clayton, we've got flurry ratios kind of plus or minus 0.3 a little bit. And then it really just starts climbing and we get to current day construction and it's plus or minus 06. So the average size of the new house is being built are twice that of a lot of the legacy structures. And you can see the huge quantity of homes around today that were built pre-war, post-war that are around that 0.3, which means we have a ton of housing stock that is right about that 0.3. A small amount, but a growing amount that is double the size. So how does that fit into the neighborhoods? How does that change based on the zoning district to the neighborhood? So this was specifically for the R2 district, and it's easy to pull out R2 because it's the largest one. You can see on this pie chart here on the right, that orange that you see, that's all R2. 75% of Lotz and Clayton are R2 single family. Everything else is plus or minus 5%. What's interesting about those other zoning districts is they tend to be pretty concentrated. Like if you told me something's R5, I know it's going to be High Point, Des Moines. If you told me it's R6, I know it'll be Moreland's area. And so when we talk about infill, there is context here. And what I've got is a bit of distribution chart of all these zoning districts here. On the very left where you see that red there, that's our one. That's the largest single family lot. It's pretty concentrated in terms of the sizes of structures relative to the size of the lot. There's not a huge distribution there. Go one to the right, that orange there, that's our R2. So we see that there's definitely a peak there, but we've got a lot of stuff that's under the peak and not as much that's over the peak. That tells me that those properties with higher floor area ratios are smaller compared to those under. It's not an even bell curve. And then we get to the rest of them. And that's our higher, you know, our duplexes, our multifamily. And they've got these really wide distributions, but we know that they tend to be pretty concentrated. That tells me if there's infill in a place like High Point de Monde or the Morelands area, there's probably a variety of structure types in that area. And infill size, like the size of the structure is probably going to be less of a factor as to whether or not that property fits in. But if we look at something like our R1 or R2, which have narrower spreads, that's going to be pretty different, especially R2, given that 75% of our properties are R2. So what does that look like if we actually break down the R2 neighborhoods? Over on the right, we've got the average floor area ratio of all of our subdivisions in R2. And so if you look at Clayton Gardens, Clayton Gardens addition, that is twice that. you're looking at twice the size of a house relative to the size of a property in Clayshire. Interestingly enough, Clayton Gardens and Clay Shire are governed the same way. In the zoning code, we have Clay Shire slash Clayton Gardens Urban Design District, but it looks like two, but they're on a zoning map, but they're governed the same way, or if you jump down to Tanglewood, that's the piece that's almost in la-do. Clayton Gardens is three times the size in terms of massing than Tanglewood, so we've got very different types of form and massing on all of these properties, These are all governed the same way. Maybe if you took the actual house out of Clayton Gardens, like the actual square footage, 3,000 or 4,000 square feet, whatever it may be, and stuck that in Tanglewood or Clayshire, it might not stand out. But if you took the proportion of house, if you took that 0.6 floor area ratio and took that to one of these other neighborhoods, it would really, really stand out. That definitely changes the character of a neighborhood. And so this graph kind of starts to tell the story of lot size relative to that floor area ratio. So that bottom axis, that's your property size, that left axis there, that's going to be your average floor area ratio. And so you can see down on the right, that's where Tanglewood is. We've got pretty big lots relative to R2, but pretty small floor area ratios. Up in the top left, that's where we've got Clayton Gardens. We've got relatively small lots, really high floor area ratios. Again, going back to that point, if you took the house out of Clayton Gardens, it might fit in in Tanglewood. If you took the proportion of house out of Claytons Gardens and stuck it in Tanglewood, you're probably going to have a different story there. So there's a lot of ways that we can look at infill solutions. So the current conditions, we know that infill is happening everywhere, but our infill guidelines within our zoning district is really limited to urban design districts. There is gonna be some change in homes going forward, say if we even did nothing just because there were changes to lot coverage. It was more or less in various zoning districts. That's gonna have some impact, but that's not gonna do everything, but just something to keep in mind as we look at solutions. And as I looked at what a lot of other communities are doing, we actually have a lot of tools in our arsenal to really tackle this problem already, what these other communities are doing. So we measure height from average existing grade of the property, and that's something that a lot of communities are doing. We have step downs, increased setbacks for more height. We use landscape buffers, all these different tools already that a lot of other communities are using. But how effective are those tools? So our height calculation method, that's pretty effective. Step-downs, they're not used very often. That picture on the bottom left there, that's kind of what a step-down is supposed to do. It's supposed to bring down the height of a structure to kind of match what the surroundings are or at least create some kind of natural flow so you don't have just this sudden change in massing. The problem with a lot of our lots is that they tend to be deeper than they are wide. You need relatively wide lots to give space for step downs. When you have these narrower lots, it's really hard to implement that. But maybe that's something we could apply more broadly than just in our urban design districts. We also have increased setbacks for taller structures. That's one's used pretty often, but I would say that has actually pretty limited impact on the massing of a structure because you can, you know, the ratio of increased height to setback is not sufficient enough to really change what a property is going to look like. It might be a couple feet here and there, but you still have significantly taller homes. But there are ways to adjust that. We could look at tying different incentives to that structure Maybe we request a deeper setback in exchange for height. There are options to modify that, but staying the way it is is probably not appropriate. Use of dormers and half stories. This is pretty limited in terms of its use. I would hardly say that it's like a height mitigation measure per se. It's intended in the zoning code to encourage people to make their second stories half stories. It doesn't actually work out that way. But there are ways that we can probably modify that. We need better half story definitions, which we can get into in a second. And then landscape buffers. This is probably the most common one that we get. And I would say that it's not terribly useful. It tends to get folks to the finish line. But the way that our zoning code is actually written is is it wants you to do these big canopy trees. The lots aren't big enough for that. Maybe perceived from the front or the back of the property, sure. But a lot of the concern is coming from immediate neighbors. So maybe they want to stick something on the side of the house. You don't have a lot of space there. How big can that tree or that landscaping actually get? Is it evergreen or not? What if it dies? What if somebody doesn't like it, wants to take it out? It's not a permanent solution. So what are some options that we could look at? One of the most useful tools I found would probably be a basement exposure limit. One of the issues that we've had moving forward is that these properties are just getting taller. It's not like you're going from two-story to three-story houses. You're going from two story to two story, but they're just getting taller. A lot of that's because we're lifting up the finished floor height. You've probably seen several examples of homes in the area that have pretty exposed below great garages or something right in the front. And it could be generous to say that those homes are two stories. So one of the ways that we could look at modifying how homes are presented on the block is a basement exposure limit. If you expose more than a certain amount of the basement, that counts as a story. That's going to change the calculation of how somebody would design the space. Another thing we need to look at is finished floor height going off that basement piece. This picture here is a good example of how finished floor heights can change the character of an area. This was a proposal at one point. This was not the final product, but this is one of the initial proposals from an applicant. On the left, you have your typical mid-century ranch. On the right, if I recall, that house is probably like a late 90s or earlier 2000s construction. But the center house, the new build, Their finished floor height is at the middle or above for those adjacent houses. That makes it present so much taller in a community. So one thing that we could look at doing is having a finished floor height requirement relative to the adjacent properties to bring that house down a little bit, bring it more in character with the surrounding area. So basically the conclusion of the infill solutions that we want to look at is we want to add a definition for what is actually a story that would address some of the elements of how are we actually defining a half story? How are we actually defining basement exposure and call-outs? And this is going to start to put definitions to those items that have been more ambiguous. If you have a half story, but your dormer is the size of the entire floor, is that a half story? I don't know. If your whole basement's exposed, is that a floor or not? We want to actually define those things. We also want to add a finished floor height relative to the adjacent properties. And this is probably going to do a lot more than anything else to sort of bring properties down from the beginning. Developers show up and they usually propose something pretty tall. And by the end of it, every time the plan commission has asked them to bring it down a little bit. And then we could also apply our height mitigation strategies across our zoning districts. Because right now they're... They're really only in their urban design districts, and there's great tools that are in there, but we want to make sure that this is applicable everywhere. What that's probably going to look like is the addition of an infill section in our zoning code. A lot of other communities, Kirkwood, Webster, have examples of these built into their zoning code. That makes it a little bit more solid, and that's something that we would probably want to have so that way folks who are building in Clayton going forward already know from the beginning, hey, this is how it's appropriate to build a house in the space rather than proposing something and maybe going back and forth a couple times with the Planning Commission. So it's not a long list of solutions, but there's a few really effective things that we can do to kind of tighten things up and hopefully make the design process a little bit easier for folks wanting to build in Clayton.

Thanks. Thank you, Ryan. Appreciate it. I feel like I have to focus so hard when you're talking. Yeah, I mean, it's complicated and you do a great job explaining it. So thank you. We'll just kind of go around, see if there are any questions. I'm sure there are. Becky, if you want to

start. Yeah, would you mind actually going back to the recommendation slide? And I'm wondering if you could, I don't necessarily want to put you on the spot, but if you could describe for me what a definition of a half story might be. Like, I don't have a concept of that.

It's usually, most of the definitions I've seen, it's going to be a ratio or proportion to the floor space below it. Kind of one of the issues that we run into, and this is, I would say, more on accessory structures than it is actual houses, is you'll say, I'm putting a half story because I want to put a space above my garage. And then they will put in dormers that are essentially the entire, equal to the entire floor plan of the garage. And they'll have sort of this faux floor roof around it. Is that a half story? I think that's generous because we don't have a definition. It's kind of been left up to the Planning Commission. Adding a definition saying, you know, it's a proportion ratio or percentage of the floor plate below is probably going to rein that in a little bit. So that way, whether it's on top of a house or if it's on top a garage or accessory structure, that structure is probably going to fit in a little bit better rather than having this interpretation discussion.

And how does a half story like come into play? So like, if we allow things to be two or three stories in different areas, like why would someone say it's a half story? Like they're trying to adjust the floor area ratio or something different. What, like,

Half story ratio, half stories give you a little bit of flexibility in terms of your massing and your square footage on a property. So for a lot of roofs, especially higher pitched roofs, we might have a rule that says, okay, you gotta cap out it at two stories. But there might still be space between the top of that second story and the actual height for some flexibility. That half story gives a homeowner the flexibility to maybe do something with that space that they couldn't do before. There's also ways that you can tie half stories to different incentives. So if you have an area that presently doesn't allow a half story, which is the case in Clayton Gardens, but we think the houses are getting too big, there's an option there to say, hey, if you actually shrink the footprint of the house, maybe there's an exchange here. If you reduce your coverage, half stories kind of give you an incentive option to provide to folks, say, here's another way to get some square footage out of a property where we can also reduce the massing in another way.

And then the last section of this recommendations, I'm not totally sure I get it. So I think that when you talk about addition of infill section across residential zoning districts, That makes me think we're talking about like we've got language that's specific to infill development and that we maybe today have that in some urban design districts and we're going to. area to cross all of the zoning districts.

Yeah, so it would be in addition to our zoning regulations. There would be a section that's added in there that speaks to some of these infill strategies and what that's going to allow rather than just in the urban design districts. Since we know the infill happens everywhere, it's going to give staff the ability to review against those infill criteria because we know that you know, it's going to come up anyway at the planning commission level. So we can go ahead and evaluate against that. We can provide recommendations. It also gives the planning commission something solid to sort of anchor into, gives the person that's designing something to sort of anchor to as well. But it would be adding a section into the zoning code.

And is the idea that that something like the finished floor height guideline would be part of the infill section, or is the infill section like something different?

That would be part of it. It

would be okay. Cause that's what I was like any new development. Okay. Great. You answered all my questions. Thank you.

I guess I'll make a particular like to Davis Place because we've been there for 40 years. It was built on an empty lot, and I would think in the 40 years we may have had six, eight new houses. I mean, Davis Place generally has been very different than Clayton Gardens, had very few infill. So I guess I'd like to understand, following on Becky's question, how that might relate to a neighborhood like Davis Place where there's been very little development. And in terms of height, I know, for example, that South Central, that we live on, everything on the west side of South Central, just because of the topography, tends to be somewhat up on a hill, which makes all the houses look somewhat higher when you drive down the street. Other side of the street, that doesn't exist at all. So is that, I'm just thinking about someone, and we do have a new house, God knows 515 South Central took years, but we do have a one going in there. So maybe we'll have more in the future, but how do you see that impacting an area like that in terms of this infill

provisions that you would add? What's kind of nice about the infill regulations that I've seen in other communities and that we would model off on is that they tend to be broad in their application. They tend to be pretty flexible. An example would be we wouldn't set an established finished floor height of X feet. We would have it relative, kind of like how right now we have an element of the zoning code for setbacks where it can be relative to the adjacent properties. And we've also found that Clayton Gardens does have that concentration of infill, but even whenever new houses are proposed in other neighborhoods, the process tends to be pretty similar. The concerns tend to be pretty similar And that tells me is if we're seeing the same concerns across Clayton, then we can probably really effectively tackle that with consistent infill guidelines.

One other one, just I like the recommendations, but I'm sort of curious if we were to adopt all these and then you have Someone who develops fairly frequently residentially in Clayton. We have some who don't have such great reputations. We have others who do. But if you were dealing with one of these who's more of a credible home builder, any sense just from an economic standpoint? Nobody likes change, I'm sure, in the development community. in terms of the economic impact of these changes or dealing with them, would you expect, other than the usual don't like change, would you expect a lot of pushback from developers, residential, if you impose the new conditions?

I mean, truthfully, I'm not sure because We actually haven't had much feedback at this point, even to some other changes like with lot coverage. We haven't had any new homes proposed. I don't know what the consequence of that looks like. I hope that when we get to the point that this is proposed in a text amendment, that there is some feedback. That's always helpful. Anytime that we add a regulation, we're usually definitely trying to solve a problem, but that does come with a trade-off that we at least need to consider. So that feedback is going to be important. I think that Probably the lot coverage element that we've already kind of gone through is probably going to have a greater impact than these one. And because we don't know the outcome of the change we've already made, it's why the recommendations are more limited. There's a ton of infill tools that are out there. But I want to be really targeted because I don't want to get us to a place where we've all of a sudden added a ton of new regulations and run into that exact problem of killing the development process. Thank you.

Just since you brought up one neighborhood, something that Ryan and I have also talked about is when we pull the general strategies that regulate infill development, really stressing that they're relative to what's around it. So the tool itself might be the same. It says you need to take the average of the finished floor of your neighbor's. But the result of that average might be very different for one side of Central than the other side of Central or for Davis Place versus over in Tuscany Park or some other neighborhood. And then what we're also able to do is kind of pair these tools that Ryan's finding with our neighborhood standards. So we want to put some of these tools in the zoning code as Ryan suggested, because then that provides teeth during staff review to require changes and then also provides more teeth to the planning commission architecture review board. And then we can use some of our guidelines with the neighborhood standards to influence our recommendations and best practices. So we might recommend that one strategy for height mitigation is more appropriate in a certain neighborhood. than it is in another neighborhood to help integrate that and one that comes to mind a lot is like roof styles so we have looking through our neighborhood inventory we have a lot of mixture of different roof types but we have a really significant concentration of hip roofs on new construction so there's actually if you go if you flip to the end you can see this map i think it's helpful keep keep going there's a nope There we go. So this is roof type based on our inventory of all the neighborhoods. So you can see pink is hip roof. So it's a pretty common roof style, but so is gable. A hip roof is it looks like an X from the top. So it's where all four of your roofs are all angled. All four sides of the roof are at an angle. Yep, so it comes to point at the middle. So hip roof is a pretty common one across the city, but what we find if you go to the next slide, this is all the homes that have been constructed after 2010. So now pink completely takes over when you look at just after 2010. And then if you go another layer, if you look at post-2010 hip roofs, The slope of the roof is much more shallow than a lot of the hip roofs that we have on older homes, which are more steep. So some of the infill mitigation strategies about height that Ryan's talking about with slope grooves and dormers, you can play with that, add on to it with your neighborhood standards to try and incentivize somebody to put in a steeper roof in a neighborhood where there are a lot more steep roofs. And in exchange, allow them to have some dormers. So maybe a good example, if you go back to the one more slide back, would be looking at like Wydown Forest, for example. That's where you don't see a really significant concentration of hip roofs. You see a lot of gable roofs and that means that they're probably likely there's a super slope. So you add a dormer, maybe you get a two and a half story because you have a dormer, because you have a slope roof and that's going to integrate better than a more shallow roof. I know that gets into a lot of details, but I think that's how we'll kind of take the large citywide standards that Ryan explained and make them more localized to a neighborhood.

Is there a reason on your current policy that everybody would want to build a hip roof? Because clearly it seems to be the favorite. I vaguely remember we even had that discussion where we had the home that came in a few weeks ago that had the appeal, and I think that was one of the roofs they were looking at. What is driving that? Is it a policy question? Is it a market question?

My best guess is probably that it's the best roof type for these higher structures. Because whenever you look at your older structure versus your newer structure, the ceiling heights are just taller. They have less space between the top of their top floor and their max roof height.

Yeah, so it's really so that they can maximize the interior finish floor height of their floors. So a lot of our interior finished floors, so the second floor will have a 10 or 11 foot clearance. Older homes might have a 9 or 10 second story clearance. So to meet our overall height regulations, they need a lower slope of their roof because we use that strategy of median height for a sloped roof. So it allows them to have a a shorter roof and maximize the floor space. And also the hip roof when you're talking about a box construction is also a little bit easier to design into the home.

Are you suggesting that a hip roof can be basically kind of like shorter than, and like a gable roof, like you can't

do a low-pitched gable roof. You can do anything, but in terms of engineering, it's a lot easier to get your, yeah, to get the roof to be at that lower, shorter point. Got it. Yeah, this is perfect.

Great education. These two houses on the right here, the one on the right is probably two stories on the interior. It's probably got a full floor behind there. but you know the the house that was proposed here they chose just to take that that second roof high as high as they could which is why they have such a shallow roof

sorry to hijack ryan but go for it

so I appreciate your presentation. I thought it was very thoughtful and reasonable. And if you could go back to the recommendations slide, please. So as I look at the recommendations, it strikes me that from looking at the from a street view that the goal here, it addresses the goal of sort of having a consistency of look. I'm wondering, though, when it comes to massing, we haven't got any recommendations here regarding lot coverage or floor area ratio or maybe setback. I'm just wondering, do we want to have something with regard to that so that we don't have something that's a real mass difference from another house?

Yeah, so we looked at, you know, options for floor area ratio and there are some communities that do that. Every one of our neighborhoods is so different that if we were to try to codify that, that would probably be rather difficult for us to also codify. probably be a relatively strict standard. There are probably ways, though, that we can incorporate floor area ratio. We've talked about moving forward as we get more into neighborhood standards, kind of having guides for each neighborhood. There may be recommendations of floor area ratios in there. I don't know if that's the best tool for us, though, at the moment to tackle infill.

Yeah, and I don't know that we need to either. I just more want to make sure that we've thought about it as we go forward. If we had implemented the recommendations that are here in your recent memory, would this have significantly impacted any of the infill requests that we addressed?

Definitely in terms of basement exposure, we probably would have had one or two recently that looked a little different. Finished floor height, that one always tends to come down as well. And then applying the height mitigation strategies. So if you're building Clayton Gardens, you probably are exposed to that a little bit, although I'm just gonna be honest, our developers, they don't look at that. It's usually something we have to remind them about later. Codifying these is gonna make it pretty clear in the beginning what the expectation is. I expect that there's going to be some change. I don't expect you're going to see a drastic change in the sizes of homes overnight because developers, they are accustomed to building to a certain degree. But I think these in combination with the recent coverage change are probably going to be pretty effective at reducing the difference in the size of new homes compared to existing homes.

OK. And then what have you thought through or had the opportunity to think through what if there is a variance or exception process to this? And if so, what is it?

Something I have to think about. The ones that immediately come to my mind are we always have the variance process if there is actually a hardship. It's probably gonna be a little bit more challenging to say hardship on infill development, but there's always that option. We've also in our urban design districts had alternative compliance processes where somebody can propose something that's different. As we get into the process of regulating design more and more that's probably going to come up, we did this in the commercial zoning districts as well, where we actually we put an architectural section in the commercial zoning regulations. We also have alternative compliance so that's probably something that's going to be available to some degree if we start to enact these more.

My concern there just is it's one thing to implement this, but then if there's a ready variance process, then it kind of takes away the effectiveness of the whole thing. I'm not saying you shouldn't have one. I just want to make sure we've thought through that. So my last comment is The overall goal here is part of our master plan is to address neighborhood consistency. So I think it would be great to, um, take this plan or recommendation to some of the neighborhood associations or trustees, um, and get some constructive feedback about this is the goal. This is how it might or might not affect your neighborhood in and get some feedback that said, um, There is so much detail in here, and especially when you started going through the roof or the roof discussion, it seemed a little overwhelming. And so I also think that that could be a problem. But I do think it's important, especially if we think there are neighborhoods that are ripe for infill, to say our goal is to not change your neighborhood or at least limit the effectiveness. Do you think we're achieving the goal? I just think it's important because otherwise people won't have any idea that we're going through this whole effort to actually help them do what they said they wanted.

Absolutely.

I may have missed this when I was a little late. I had a kid who fell off a swing, so I had to deal with some school stuff. I guess Rick alluded to it a little bit, but I'm still a little less than clear as to exactly what the goal is we're trying to solve. Is it stopping infill? Is it controlling infill? Is making sure the infill looks nice? What are we trying to do here?

The feedback that we got during the comprehensive planning process was that residents felt that Newer and newer infill was just getting bigger and bigger, and it had these externalities. It wasn't fitting into the neighborhood. And so we kind of want to make sure that new construction is not just overwhelming the surrounding properties in terms of size and massing. So we don't want to stop development. We don't want to put in place something that's going to kill development. We just want to nudge new construction in a direction that is going to more meet the residents' expectations of what a new house is going to look like.

So if part of it's a size, and maybe we did this earlier, and I apologize if I'm blanking, but why wouldn't we limit square footage for a house?

That starts to get pretty specific. I mean, we can do that. We would need to determine floor area ratios that were appropriate for each neighborhood. This goes back to... This chart here on the right of how every neighborhood looks different. I mean, that's something that we can do that starts to get really specific. I'm hesitant to start getting really specific at this moment just because, to be honest, I don't know what the consequence of the lot cover changes are going to be. We recognize that that's a good thing. That's going to bring down the size of homes a little bit. I don't want to... put so many different regulations though that all try to tackle the size of the house just yet. We might get to that point. I don't know that we need to do that yet.

Go to the map of this that I threw at the end there. Because I think it will. Okay, so this map, the average floor area ratio in R2, so this shows all of your R2 zone lots, the average floor ratio is 0.32. So this map shows you the green parcels are the ones that are essentially the average square foot of a house zoned R2. the purple parcels are all of the ones that fall below the average and the orange are all the ones that fall above the average so what this shows is the same thing as the graphs ryan was showing you earlier there's a really there's a spread that skews that average and it varies greatly by neighborhood how that neighborhood relates to the average so if you look at polo It's all below the average for the most part. But Davis Place has a huge mix, but Clayshire is below. And then if you start to actually pull the specific averages of those neighborhoods, they all also vary. So this is where looking at this analysis, we don't feel that floor area ratio setting an average here. is going to do much for those projects. So because even with one that comes to mind is the new house that was built or is being built almost finished in Polo. And that one was a neighborhood where people were really distressed by the size of the home that was being proposed. And we did an analysis there of the floor area ratio for that house, and it actually fell point like 0.02 or something above the average floor ratio so this is an example where for we don't think floor ratio is going to be as effective of managing infill development compared to the neighbors as the other tools that ryan showed you

and i guess that was that's what i'm trying to figure out what the ultimate goal is if the goal is size to me that's one set of solves if the goal is we don't want it to look big we want it to fit in neighborhood then that seems like a different level of solves And I'm just trying to still figure out what the recommendations that are there, which one of those is it trying to solve? And is it really going to solve either of them?

Probably a little bit of both. Something like the lot coverage changes are going to address more of the size, but these are going to touch on that side of how does it present a little bit different. It probably is going to adjust the square footage of homes a little bit, especially if you got into something like, you know, decreased setbacks for more height, because I don't know how much more square footage you're going to get out of additional height. But it's probably going to be more of the presentation than the final square footage.

Okay. And I guess the only other question was you hit on this a little bit is, I know it's more work, but given the amount of diversity we have in different neighborhoods, I wonder if we're going to reach a point with what we're trying to do that it almost makes more sense to have a neighborhood by neighborhood set of rules as opposed to trying to come up with rules. either a uniform policy that doesn't make sense or one that's so flexible. That also leaves too much, too much play across Davis place in the Moreland. So clever act of Tanglewood. I don't know how I fully feel about that, but I'm just wondering if like the neighborhood guidelines or neighborhood districts, I forget the verbiage reason is going to be enough or whether we really just have like full on set of rules for each neighborhood, because that's the best way to solve these. What a, the two goals we're trying to sell for. I don't know if you have thoughts or not, but I was just going to throw it out as a...

My immediate thought goes back to... This one talking about the distribution of massing on different properties. So much of this is R2, and we definitely would focus, you know, we definitely want to have some guidelines for R2. But once you start to get into a lot of these other neighborhoods, you have a lot of variability in size. Taking this back to the floor area ratio point, there might be a point where we need to seriously look at floor area ratio, but there's also a lot of neighborhoods where that floor area ratio is going to vary, you know, block to block or, you know, even on the same block.

Well, and I think too, Jeff, to your point, like what are we trying to solve? Like Ryan, if you go to that one where there's a picture of the house, I think it was on Topton where it adjusted a lot. Yeah, that one. So, I mean, I feel like the plan commission, because they came in and proposed this house and it, it complied with our

number two.

Yes. It complied with our code and Anna, please correct me if I'm wrong, but it complied with her code. And I think the plan commission guided them in a way so that it came down, you know, so that there wasn't that. basement showing so that the whole house came down. But I feel like providing standards like this, then the builders know in advance, these are some things that need to be done. So you have a plan commission that isn't necessarily varying from year to year. Like the standards are more uniform, I would say. So at least then there is also some guidance in terms of things that builders or developers can do to address not only like our concerns and staff concerns, but things that are already there, like in our code, rather than things that they're suggesting, you know, from up here, I guess, during the meetings. I

remember Kami and some others mentioned like for the one, we were talking about a different house, but the one in the middle of just having like the middle of the doors and the windows just don't all line up with looking at 121. So I can see the visual piece. I guess I'm still trying to wrap my head around whether What's being proposed is actually solving the problem we actually are trying to solve. It sounds like it's going to help. I'm just wondering, is it not enough or is it kind of going, is it taking us this way when we need to go a little bit more this way?

Well, and that's not fair. And I don't,

I'll defer to you all a little bit, but.

Yeah. And I guess Ryan, to that point, like your thought is that you're going to kind of wait. Cause I was wondering, like, you know, you said there are so many different tools that we can use, but we're starting with a small amount to kind of see where it goes. In addition to the fact that we've reduced, um, impervious coverage or increased impervious coverage, um, Yeah. So, or maybe I've still said that wrong. You all know what I mean. So we've gone to a place where we have put some restrictions in, in order to help that. So your recommendation is to kind of see how that goes before we start adding more infill restrictions.

Yeah, I think that this is a good next step. I think it addresses the items that the Planning Commission and Architecture Review Board most commonly address. I think what's kind of great about the Architecture Review Board is they have the flexibility to kind of look into things that aren't always codified. And this is going to start to touch on those things that we've seen repeatedly. But, you know, design can be so complicated sometimes. I don't want to immediately jump into regulating in too many ways. Again, there may be things that we need to come back to, but I think this is a good next step to address those items that we've seen consistently come up.

Well, and I think too, I mean, like there's a new house that just went on Susan Street, like down on Crestwood. I mean, everybody knows it's a new house, but I feel like it doesn't stand out as much because a lot of the houses on that street are already tall, you know? But I think that because you've already, you've got older homes that have really high ceilings. So when you're building a house, a new house that already has high ceilings, it doesn't look that much different compared, especially in massing. And I think as we've all said, Clayton Gardens is where we see that massing because you've got homes that have and I might be wrong, but homes from the fifties that have 10 foot ceilings as compared to the ones from the twenties who have the 12, 14, like the huge ceilings. So I think it's still that massing that I think we're still going to struggle with. And we'll just have to see whether or not some of that, you know, some of what we're thinking about accomplishes those goals. Yeah.

Interesting. The one on Crestwood, all I've heard is that was tastefully done. I don't big house and it replaced a very small house. So they did something right.

Right. But a lot of the houses around it have pitched roofs and big roofs and, you know, tall ceilings. You just, the massing is very different. And I guess that's where you've got more purple as compared to orange throughout Claverac because the lots are just bigger. So.

Yeah, I guess when you first started your presentation with all the floor area ratio and showing all the neighborhoods, I was kind of thinking we were going in the direction that we would have neighborhoods that would have similar floor to area ratios. Just when you looked at Clayshire and you were saying all of those are really low. So when you go in and you build a new house there, how do we keep that characteristic without... having a definitive kind of floor area ratio in that neighborhood as an example

you know sometimes the lot sizes themselves are going to start to uh determine that it kind of gets into um a lot of our lots are deeper than they are narrow um floor area ratio is not always the the width and the massing at the front sometimes that the depth sometimes it's that half story um the goal of providing all the floor aerations was really to tell the story of how wildly different these neighborhoods can be. And although we may not be at this moment looking to regulate floor air ratios specifically, We can still have that flexibility while having these tools that really start to tackle that presentation of the property at the front. But at the end of the day, I promise you guys, the planning commission is always going to say that house looks too big if they think it looks too big. Right. But,

you know, you were saying there was so wildly different. So should we have, you know, neighborhoods that have on one end of the spectrum something versus the other end so that we're not doing that? We could. I think

the conversation we need to have, if that's the direction that folks want to go, is where are we going to permit higher floor area ratios? Because we could set everything right at what everything consistently is. Then you really do start to impact whether or not somebody's going to choose to develop in that neighborhood. And the residents have said they don't want to see existing homes torn down. So maybe, you know, maybe that's an appropriate goal. But there is a consequence to that. We would actually have to have the hard discussion of we think this area is appropriate to develop. We don't think this area is appropriately.

Or just develop, you know, within the characteristic of the neighborhood. So is that something you can put in like the neighborhood characteristics? You know, just maybe not so specific, but kind of just like appropriate I

mean, I think the piece that we have here is we talk a lot about zoning and it creates the guide for development, but that development's occurring because there's that market desire or pressure to create development in the first place. We're not at a point right now where we want to influence the market of development. We're kind of coming at it from a standpoint of if development is going to occur on this lot, then we want them to do it with these factors in mind rather than as ryan said trying to play the game of are we encouraging or not encouraging redevelopment at this point so what we've done you know ryan's taken a lot of what the patterns have come from the the decisions that the playing commission arb have been making as well as looking at other communities and i think a big piece of it is similar when we went from impervious coverage to green space a big part of this is also just an identity shift, so to speak, towards the public, towards the developers of what is important to us when it comes to infill development. It's going to be hard to solve for everything, but we've had these tools that are in some of our urban design districts and those have been successful in a lot of other places, but I think it depends on who you ask on whether or not they've actually been successful within our urban design districts because Clayton Gardens is the first place that got it, but it's still completely different as a community right now than as it was prior to that or, you know, prior to the development occurring. So a big piece of what we're trying to do here is better write the tools into our regulations so that the ARB doesn't have to play as much of a last minute to the game trying to get developers to play ball and make the changes that we want because they're going to already have to change make those changes to get through staff review. So trying to alleviate some of that pressure off of the architecture review board to influence it. And so I think when we're playing all, changing all these little elements, I think Ryan's right that we don't want to change too much too fast because we're going to have implications that we didn't expect that will come from that. So these are the tools that I think that, you know, Ryan's proposed and I agree that I think they would potentially have the most impact on development moving forward. And then we can further highlight in a context sensitive manner where the tools will be best utilized in different areas. So right now, You know, there's elements of Clavarac is a good example. There's elements of Wydown Forest. There's places that development should occur and use certain tools. Wydown Forest, the lots are very small. The concept of using a step down is probably not going to happen, but using that roof line element, as you guys all saw from the appeal house, that was a big part of what the ARB was referencing there. So giving ARB the tool to say that roof line is important in this neighborhood context and you haven't taken that into account in your design, I think will be a more powerful tool in that case than floor air ratio would be.

Okay. Might push back on that later. Yeah. But and then I guess my other question is that that finished floor height, and I'm glad we went to this slide, like, what do you do when it's a, you know, garage that's in the basement? How does that get affected? Because then we're like having to go down further, right? Then you take up more green space and like all of that. Does that affect?

Our architecture review guidelines right now kind of discourage those front-loading low-grade garages. It has to happen in some place. The first thought that comes to my mind is if we had the basement exposure limit, that's going to start to count as a story. That's going to impact what can occur above that. So that property might have to look a little different, and that's the consequence of it.

Is that only on the front facade, or is that also on the side, that basement area?

My intent for it was the front facade because that's where we get most of our concerns about massing. We have so many rear entry garages that every single house would all of a sudden be impacted by that. That would probably be a step too far, but definitely that front exposure.

Right. So then if you're having to go down a steep driveway and then get into the side of it because you can have your garage there, does that affect this at all? Like the steepness of that and then like your green space and like the topography of the yard then? I

mean, your rear entry garages definitely impact the... The way a home is designed, something that we've talked about is we like rear-entry garages, but that increases coverage. There's going to be tradeoffs to everything. But in terms of basement exposure, I think right now front facade is the most appropriate place to start with that. And if we see that there's no reasonable outcome from that, that's when we can come around and

read. Yeah, because I really like this because I think it's smart and I think it will help with the overall heights of houses. Because I know people are like, let's have eight steps to our front door and then it's just the massing of the house. But I just think that's something we might want to also think about.

Yeah, and I think if it's a below-grade tuck under in the back, we also implemented in our green space – So now you have additional hurdles to get over if you're going to do a below grade garage with just stormwater management and soil testings and other things. So that's where, you know, we did that for a stormwater issue, but it's going to also impact how people design their home from the standpoint of this. Because yes, if you had a rear entry tuck under garage, it would bump the house up in a similar manner to a front entry tuck under garage. Yeah. Yeah.

Does anybody have any other and Susan do you have any?

I'll play catch up from this and thanks. I'm sure I will listen to when I get home, but um, I like that idea of neighborhood trustee impact and In considering the variance by neighborhood because whole idea is to keep character and you're doing all the work on that already Looking at our comprehensive planning and everything else. I'm not sure if There's a problem with distance. There may be a reason to incentivize keeping what we have, not tearing down. And so if we go that way in some of these, I think that a lot of people in the community are very happy with that. Certainly there is a time for a tear down, but we've seen it when sometimes it doesn't seem like it was really the right thing for the neighborhood. I also wonder as we do this, and I don't know what it would look like, but as we look at We've come a long way in sustainability and responsible building knowledge and throughout our different codes and things like that. If there's some way to put some of the knowledge that we have, don't label it as a sustainability thing, but say that this is the materials that should be used for the home that we want in this neighborhood, a better building, a responsible building home. So as you think about that as you do the codes, because a lot of this stuff it's so interrelated, it can go under different categories. And putting it in a category that we can save the character and the quality of our building would be great. Absolutely. So those are just my comments.

Any other thoughts? Ryan, do you have more to talk about today or is that the? No. That's it. Okay. No. And then in terms of like the neighborhood standards, when will that, are you guys kind of like, I guess, timeline? Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so we've started working on that one parallel. So we're kind of going to see how this works out because we want to pair them together, as we kind of alluded to throughout this presentation. So we will come back with some presentations on that one probably in a month or so. We'll see exactly the timeline of that, but it will come shortly following. And I think we can... maybe present that in combination with some of the other elements of the neighborhoods that maybe we weren't necessarily going to utilize like floor ratio and we can show you guys more of the data that we have so that you can provide a little bit more feedback on that element along with the ones that we are recommending.

And that's where you might get into the discussions about roofs. I mean, thinking about, again, in Y-Down Forest, just because we just had that house, you then would potentially have recommendations for infill development or for developers saying, here are recommendations for bringing the bulk of a house down, or that's where those would

come in. Yeah, so the actual... So as Ryan shows on here, we would have in the infill regulations within our zoning code, there would be how do you calculate finished floor height and what then yours would be the average or plus or minus a couple of feet of the average of the two homes that flank you. Well, then in the neighborhood... specific guidelines that would be adopted by the irb that's where it might say something like out of the five infill options these are the ones that we feel are most appropriate or would be best utilized in this neighborhood to help okay yeah so there's going to be some of the choices that are left because we also did hear in the playing commission feedback that there are people who want to be able to make some of their personal choices on design style. And so that's something we want to make sure that we're supporting. So if there is somebody who just happens to like modern design a little bit more, how are there ways that they can still build a house that has more of a modern twist but has some patterns that relate back to the neighborhood so it fits in a little bit? So that's where we're going to try and provide options for people and then guidance on how they could fit that in the neighborhood.

Yeah. And I think too, like the house that's finishing up on university because it's like the way you walk right into the house and there is no step up there. And again, you can tell it's a new house, but I think they did do a nice job of trying to bring the house down a little bit. And there's House and Forsyth, which is very tall in comparison. That's brand new that Melman did that. I think we all had concerns about on the plan commission, but they use one of those like strategies and there's a huge space between, I mean, there's, you know, I mean, it's a fairly large significant like width in order to, because of that, that change in height. And I think it helped a lot, you know, like in terms of balancing around, but so I think some of the measures are working is my point, but yes, I think. adding more would be helpful. Yep, but anybody else have any other questions? I just want to say I

appreciate the fact we're bringing all these different components out incrementally and that makes sense. It does seem to me when there is a rollout of all this, whether it's to developers or even to neighborhoods, that it is important to bring all these pieces together because that's really the only way you can understand, I think, what we're accomplishing. So that goes to Jeff's point in terms of what we are trying to accomplish. I hope that when you bring all the components together, stormwater and green space and that people will understand collectively what that all will achieve. Because, I mean, I know to the extent that I've heard complaints from people who live in Clayton Gardens, and I did live there for 10 years, it's usually about stormwater. I mean, you occasionally hear, oh, the new house looks kind of like a new house, and it's kind of jarring. But usually it's more about green space and stormwater and how that new house – is causing more water on our site and those types of things. So I think as a total package, I think it'll make sense to people as long as they see that these are all parts of an overall scheme.

Yeah, and I unfortunately, I feel like Clayton gardens. Even though we want to communicate with them the most there they've never for as long as I've been on the board or council, they've never had a very. They don't have an organized neighborhood association, so it's that makes it difficult. To communicate with them, but there are certainly people in the neighborhood that are more vocal and interested. So. passing information along to them will be helpful.

They're also almost all new again, right? Like there's not going to be much more infill there and whatever there is, is actually going to create a more cohesive. Yeah. Yeah. It's not the one that was there 30 years ago.

Yeah. And I will say to Susan's point too, I do hope that we can craft a way to make it harder and harder for people to demolish new homes. So, you know, jack up the fee as much as we can. Yeah. All right. Well, great. Thank you very much, Ryan. Thanks for all your work on this. All right. Surprisingly, finished a little early. So hope everyone has a nice weekend. Thanks a bunch.

Thank you.