REMOVING DEVELOPMENT BARRIERS

When the Northeast Ohio First Suburbs Consortium met to discuss housing in 2020, they found a new issue confronting them. After years of demolishing abandoned or deteriorating single-family homes, cities were ready for infill construction on the vacant lots, but for many communities zoning requirements were hindering development.

“While some cities have updated their zoning laws over the years, some of our First Suburbs’ building and housing codes are over 100 years old,” says Jennifer Kuzma, Director of the First Suburbs Consortium, a government-led advocacy group of 20 inner ring suburbs around Cleveland. The group recognized that rebuilding neighborhoods would require addressing planning and zoning issues to set the table for development.

The First Suburbs Consortium partnered with the Cuyahoga County Planning Commission, the Cuyahoga County Land Bank, and First Federal of Lakewood to undertake a Single-Family Zoning Analysis to study the problem. The goal of the analysis was to identify issues within zoning regulations that can make constructing desired infill housing difficult or costineffective, and to outline best practices and incentives that can make infill more practicable.

Beginning in 2021, the Cuyahoga County Planning Commission undertook Phase 1 of the project, which identified the opportunities and obstacles for infill housing. The analysis found more than 5,300 single-family zoned vacant lots in the First Suburbs—the vast majority of them individual lots within builtup neighborhoods.

Importantly, zoning was not always aligned to allow development on these lots. Of all single-family zoned lots in the First Suburbs, 41% did not conform to minimum lot size requirements, and 48% did not conform to minimum lot width requirements.

Mary Cierebiej, Executive Director of the Cuyahoga County Planning Commission, explained, “Zoning in many First Suburbs was not designed for infill housing. Even rebuilding the same house that had been there before often required multiple variances, which take time, money, and effort.”

To address the obstacles, the Cuyahoga County Planning Commission developed resources for communities as part of Phase 2. These include a Code Update Options document that describes how to approach changes to zoning, an Infill Incentives Options guide that outlines various ways to incentivize new development, and a Design Guidelines Guidebook that describes best practices and example code language for design guidelines. Additionally, the project includes an online tool that allows communities to test zoning changes against existing lots.

The Cities of Berea, Euclid, and South Euclid were active participants in the process to ensure local buy-in and expertise. Two of those communities—Euclid and South Euclid—are partnering with the County Planning Commission to update their singlefamily zoning districts as part of the study.

Infill homes such as this house in Maple Heights are important to rebuilding neighbhorhoods that experienced significant demolition after the Great Recession.

In South Euclid, the community is working to add an infill housing overlay district to ease the process of building infill single-family homes. The overlay district would reduce minimum lot size and minimum lot width requirements across four zoning districts. In one district alone, reductions in required minimum lot sizes and widths would bring approximately 1,170 more lots into code compliance.

As the analysis concludes, the partners look forward to additional communities using the resources to adjust zoning and ultimately attract more infill housing. “We want to see more homes, more people, and more investment in our neighborhoods,” says Kuzma.

For more information on the project and to download the final documents, please visit www.CountyPlanning.us/ Singlefamily

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