Raleigh Public Record (https://theraleighcommons.org/raleighpublicrecord/topics/udo-2/page/3/)
You walk on them, drive on them and bike on them, but you probably don’t give much thought to how blocks, streets and streetscapes are designed. In Chapter 8 we take a look at those things.
While parking lot landscaping generally remains the same, Planning Manager Greg Hallam said, “there are fewer buffer yards required between different types of commercial uses and between differing residential densities.”
Yesterday we reviewed one part of the parking changes. Today, let’s look at the rest. Parking reductions were made in the Downtown District (DX), TOD Overlay District and Urban Frontage.
Today, we’ll take a look at 7.1 — Parking. We’ll be splitting parking into two sections since it’s a hot topic and takes up 14 pages in the UDO. “Generally, minimum parking requirements for commercial uses has been reduced while minimum requirements for multi-family and institutional uses have been slightly increased.”
Photo by alex_ford.
On Day 10 of our UDO coverage we told you that the section of Chapter 5 that deals with Transit Oriented Development hadn’t been completed. The TOD section was released on Friday and can now be found with the rest of Chapter 5.
Up until a month ago, community gardens as most people think of them — taking up a vacant lot — were not allowed under the zoning code. The city council approved a new set of rules April 5 to allow gardens as a primary use of a property, and those new rules are now part of the draft Unified Development Ordinance.
The Use Regulations chapter really spells out district by district, use by use, what can go where. This is where we really dig into the nitty-gritty of the new zoning code. Tomorrow we will dig into some of the specifics about the changes proposed for use regulations, but first, let’s get an overview.
Overlay districts are nothing new in Raleigh. Chapter 5 of the new Unified Development Ordinance more or less takes the same overlays districts from the old code and puts them in one place. An overlay essentially makes it easier for the city to take an expanded set of rules and place them on one district, for example around an airport or a highway, or to preserve the historic character of a neighborhood.
Tuesday, we got a crash course in the special districts permitted under the new UDO. The UDO spends a little extra time on three special districts, Manufactured Home Park (R-MP), Campus (CMP) and Planned Development (PD).
Now that we’ve finally gotten through mixed-use districts, let’s move on to Chapter 4, which talks about special districts. There are six different kinds of special-use districts.
