Planning Commission - public_hearing

Okay, moving on to the last item under hearing and action, which is item number four. This is zoning code updates, phase one zoning code text and map amendments, DCP-MPZC-2026-00169, in response to the executive order 2019. regarding permitting process reform, and this is citywide. Presenting is Ms. Ristow.

Good afternoon, commissioners. As many people have noted, this is a very long commission meeting today. I appreciate you all sticking it out so you can hear my very exciting information. In case there's anybody listening who doesn't know, and for the court reporter, my name is Carolyn Ristau. Last name is spelled R-I-S-T-A-U. I am the zoning administrator for the city of Pittsburgh. and i'm here today for the second time to present the executive order phase one zoning amendments and once again i'm very excited to have my own clicker Alright, so as those of you who were present last time, you may remember, there is a lot in this amendment package. So it's going to take us some time to go through everything. We are going to talk a little bit about the background of the executive order, the timeline on this particular amendment package, the details of the proposed amendments and the next steps. So this package is based on the Executive Order 202601 to reform the permitting process, including components of the zoning regulations and policies. It specifically calls out how Pittsburgh's current zoning code is outdated and makes it harder to build housing and bring economic opportunities to all of Pittsburgh. zoning doesn't have to be that barrier it could actually support the goals of providing encouraging affordability growth and responsible equitable development across all neighborhoods and all parts of the city of pittsburgh and so the executive order is announcing that we are going to start to change that with this first phase package as the first step The executive order, again, as I mentioned, has a lot of things that it's addressing. And so the zoning amendments are only a part of the larger picture. And so, as you'll notice, the numbering here starts pretty high because there are 25 other action items that the departments are working on before you even get to the zoning code amendments. We've been quite busy for the last several months. And we're gonna go in a different order than the numerically based on sort of like the intensity of the amendments. So the timeline, again, the executive order was in January. By spring, we got our definitive list, the items on the previous slide, of what we needed to work on. So since the spring, we've been identifying the parts of the code that could be updated per those directives, working together to put together the legislation, the package. We've proofread it. many times gone back, added things, changed things, proofread it again. We're pretty confident we got it all in order. And in June, we started going around to each of the council members. We have monthly check-ins with them. And so in our monthly check-in, we were just providing them with a briefing on that amendment package. Then this month, as you remember, we did briefing two weeks ago. We did do a public notice the week before that because there is a map amendment as part of this package, which requires a 21 day posted notice. um after today um the council process will hopefully uh be launched based on your actions today um and there will be public notice there will be a public hearing and there will be a vote all of which we hope will wrap up in the fall All right, so the first item, oh, did this work? Sorry, we are experimenting to see if not only do I have control of the clicker, but if I can also have control of a mouse so I can point to specific things as they come up.

Uh-oh.

So I sort of have control. There's another mouse or cursor that is not attached to this that's on top of the letters, if anybody's aware of where that one is coming from. Perfect. Thank you. Technology is our friend and our enemy. All right, so the first item that we're going to talk about from the executive order is removing obsolete sections and language from the zoning code. I get a thrill out of this, and I understand if not everybody else does. And the goal is to make it easier to understand and use our zoning code. So there's a long list of items that we are doing under that bucket. They are primarily in order of where they show up in the text. So the first one is there's currently text establishing view protection overlay regulations. This was added to our code in the 1990s, but it requires a map to make it actually usable and enforceable. And so the text was introduced, and it was followed shortly after. And perhaps Commissioner Reppy is a little bit closer to this than I was.

I always wondered why we had this in the zoning code. OK, well. There was never a map for an overlay. Yes.

So I have, in the course of my career, had conversations with planners from the time, so I have a teeny bit of understanding of what happened. They did introduce a map amendment shortly after the text. There was a preliminary area identified for the first view protection overlay. It went through the public process. I assume it went through Planning Commission and made it to City Council. I actually don't know that for sure, but it was on the path. And the end result was that when people started to understand what these regulations actually meant in the context of a map, it was not thought to be as great of a thing as initially conceived. And so there was a significant opposition to that original proposal, and the map did not get adopted. I'm not sure if they ever tried a second one. I suspect not. In the meantime, the text remained. And so this has been in our code for over 30 years without being able to be used. And so in our perspective, this is essentially a failed experiment. It's time to remove it from the code. And then moving on to the next items. A few years ago, Oakland went through the planning process and we adopted a neighborhood plan for Oakland that included calls for new zoning districts for the neighborhood. um those new zoning districts were created and they were implemented through map and text amendments and the map amendments erased several districts from the map so they replaced the Oakland public realm districts and they also replaced especially planned Oakland Oakland planned unit development district so all of those no longer exist on the map but nobody took them out of our code when we got rid of them and the intention was that these districts these older districts that were replaced were not going to be needed in the future the new districts were intended to take their place and moving forward so we're proposing to remove these from our code now Sort of a similar story, it's a little different. Trajectory, there was a proposal for especially plan district called palisades park in the area of the city that is now known as Hayes woods. This is a very entertaining proposal. It included. Racetrack casino sort of development in again in this fairly isolated part of the city. The especially planned district was approved. The development never went through. Who knows what the reasons were? I don't know what the reasons were. I'm sure somebody does. And so in the meantime, that land got dedicated to this. the city took over ownership of it it's been dedicated as a park and it's now in our park zoning district so again the map was updated the the specially planned district was removed from the map the text still lives on in our code again an entertaining read but probably we should just print it out and save it for our our own amusement when we need amusing zoning things um and in the meantime take it out of the code so it's not causing confusion for how do we regulate um the next couple of items are um uh we believe are partially the result of um confusion with the companies that have hosted our zoning code um for a time um we've had two in the last 10 years And some errors have been introduced that were not necessarily legislated. And so we have the specially planned riverfront landing district. The text for that is in there twice, which It's just not helpful. So we are proposing to remove the extra one. Okay, good to know. And then over time, I feel like this was all within the last seven years because I don't remember these being missing seven years ago when I did plan review. But over time, a few of our use definitions have disappeared from the code, even though we never legislated the intention to remove them. So we have a handful of uses where we have the parent definitions missing, the use type. So we talked... No, we didn't talk about this earlier. Like, for an example, multi-suite residential has a limited use and a general use, depending on the size. So the limited use is there with the districts where it's allowed and not allowed. The general use is there with the districts that's allowed and not allowed. But the parent definition telling us what constitutes a multi-suite residential use is missing. And so that makes it very difficult. So we have to find an old copy of the code, flip back to it, and to try and find these definitions in order to use our code. So we are proposing to restore the definitions that, again, we never legislated them out of the code. They just disappeared. Then the next item is removing Chapter 913 in its entirety. This is because Chapter 913 is an oddity. This is not a standard part of any zoning code I've seen in any other place. This is something that Pittsburgh did with good intention, but it's just not usable. the intent of chapter 913 is to list every single administrator exception special exception and conditional use that you can get in the city of pittsburgh however if you're an applicant you're not going to say hey i wonder if i can get administrator exception flip to 913 and read through the list you're going to be looking at the use table and saying I want to be, I'll use that multi-suite residential again, I want to be a multi-suite unit residential and I'm looking at the use table and in a certain district, I don't have those memorized, it's probably a special exception or something for a multi-suite residential. so the use table is where you're going to find that or for example we offer administrative exceptions for certain conditions with setbacks you're going to learn that when you're looking in the sections about the setbacks you're not going to go to 913 to figure out hey is there another way to do this yes commissioner

Yeah, so the rationale for Section 913, there actually was a rationale. When the Urban Zoning Code was enacted in 1996, the original code from 58 or whatever it was, did not have a use table. And so each use was listed and it was listed with what those uses were in there. And there was... say there was a learning curve with using the use table and 913 was seen as a kind of bridge for people to get used to the new zoning code for those that had been used to having to have to look through the text to find by use whether it was an administration exception etc so it was really kind of morbid it was an oddity of the transferring of the zoning code at that time i i appreciate court reporter who's speaking please that was commissioner repi thank you you're welcome

I appreciate that context. As you know, I am a zoning nerd and zoning history nerd in particular. And that actually makes a lot of sense. Because a lot of municipalities, especially smaller municipalities, still don't have use tables. And so I can see this being a tool to help make that transition from one style of regulating uses to a use table. Again, that was 30-some years ago, approximately, that we went to the use table. So I think people are now used to it, so we can get rid of this chapter. I think you interrupted my train of thought there. I mean, it was great. But my sort of... What is it? The punchline is that everything in this chapter is either redundant or obsolete. Because nobody was using it, we forgot to update it over the years. And then the final thing in this section about the obsolete uses and cleaning up the language is I mentioned that in the last 10 years, we've had two different platforms hosting our code. And this is the full city code that's hosted by these platforms. So a few years ago, I forget exactly how many, the city transferred from the muni code platform to the ecode platform. When we did that, the contract included that the parent company of ECODE would do a proofread of our entire city ordinance. Personally, I am envious of the person who got to do that. And so a couple months ago, Department of City Planning received the proposed edits to the zoning code. And since we were in the middle of working on this amendment package, we felt that this was consistent with what we were trying to do and incorporated those edits into the amendment. All right, the next item is from the executive order is to begin to reform the zoning code with smaller targeted changes to bring in line with comparable cities. I feel like that's sort of an overarching umbrella of basically everything we're trying to do with this amendment. But there are two specific items that we called out under this umbrella. The first is that map amendment that I spoke to earlier. So some of our zoning districts downtown being one of them have an urban open space requirement. And downtown is divided into I believe it's five sub districts, most of which have a 10% of the lot area urban open space requirement for lots of a certain size, however, the fifth one. Which is sub district D so it's yeah. Not necessarily five, but four of them have the 10%. One of them has a 60% of the lot area, urban open space requirement, regardless of the size of the lot. And again, there was intention behind this. Um, I'm not sure if it was a chicken with the chicken and egg scenario. I'm not sure if gateway towers happened first and then we adopted our code to match it, or if our code said this and that's why gateway towers is the way it is.

It was the latter. This is Commissioner Rappi. It was actually the latter in which all of the Gateway Center District had been built. And so in order to kind of fit the Gateway Center into the downtown district, the Subdistrict D was created with its kind of excessive open space because of the excessive open space that is part of the Gateway development. But then when housing came along later, like in the former AT&T building and things like that, in the State Office building, there was confusion. Yeah.

Gave me a break to take a little sip of water there. Thank you. Yeah. And so, I mean, the Gateway Tower is beautiful. I certainly have spent many lunch breaks enjoying that urban open space. However, for the smaller blocks that are on the other side of, on the Monongahela side of that portion of downtown, 60% urban open space does not make sense. And this is one of the ones that We think there's value in revisiting the 60% urban open space requirement in its total. However, that requires more careful thinking and more careful approach. So we put a pin in reconsidering the 60% urban open space in its entirety. But in the meantime, we wanted to be able to unlock some parcels for development that are currently being prohibited because of this requirement.

So, actually, I'm remembering now.

I have images to go with this. This was our graphic that we added since briefing to sort of illustrate how, again, there is immense amount of urban open space on the Gateway Towers side. Again, the lots are large. They're able to incorporate a lot of urban open space and still have very dense buildings. On this other side, the lots again are much smaller. The former Post Gazette building and its parking lot here, the building itself is um probably already at least 60 percent of the lot area so that um the 60 urban open space requirement would mean essentially they would have to demolish at least a portion of the existing building um which is just not um the desired direction uh we want to maintain the the character um and enhance the character of that part of downtown So the proposal again is to rezone the block here closest to the Monongahela River. As you can see in the image on the right, it is adjacent to Subdistrict C, which again is one of the districts that has the 10% urban open space requirement. And I think we have a chart that identifies the differences between the two sub-districts, the one that it's currently in and the one we're proposing it to change to. Excuse me. Again, the primary difference is the urban open space requirement. Excuse me. The primary difference is that urban open space requirements. There is a second difference that there is a density bonus allowance within the GTC for residential uses. Otherwise, height requirements are the same and pretty much all the other base requirements are the same between these two sub districts. So we feel that this was an appropriate move to further the goals of the vision for downtown. The other item within this category is we are making an update to the street tree requirements of the code. These updates are not changing effectively what we do currently. They're just codifying more clearly what the current policy is. So we are clarifying that the 30 square feet minimum for those tree pits that Commissioner Reppy is not a fan of.

We call them tree troughs instead.

Tree troughs, okay. This 30 square feet tree trough actually is required to be three feet by 10 feet as the minimum dimensions with a three foot depth. The trees are required to be spaced 30 feet apart in order to enable us to use the sidewalk for more than just trees. um and it also clarifies that the species of the street trees must be selected from the recommended species list maintained by the city forester totally in on that

Sorry, what was that? Completely in on the species.

Yes, very important. It matters as far as making sure the species are appropriate. If there's overhead lines, there are certain ones that can fit when there's overhead lines without needing to go through the massive pruning that we see in some of our older neighborhoods with older trees. But if there isn't overhead lands, we want a bigger tree. So there's a lot of nuance in the recommended tree species list. One of the other things that I wanted to point out that is related to the street trees, currently the landscaping section that the street trees falls under, there is an alternative compliance option, which we have been using extensively for an extended period of time. requirement actually states that it requires an administrator exception, which is the 21 day posted notice. In practice, we actually haven't been doing that and we haven't been doing that for quite some time. And so we feel this is an appropriate moment to align the code with what we're actually doing and so we will continue that it is an administrative approval but much like we have some other administrative approvals like waivers of loading requirements that do not have that 21-day posted notice but we still you know we work closely with the applicants to make sure that what they are doing meets the criteria specified in the code and so again we're keeping the criteria in the code we're just removing the poster that we don't actually do All right, next item. This one is the directive from the executive order was to eliminate redundant dimensional standards, particularly focusing on our floor area ratio requirements and our height and feet and stories. And the goal of this is that we will be able to provide new denser housing opportunities across the city while being a little bit more clear on what the expectations are. so in summary i'm going to take another sip of water before i go into this it's extensive All right, some more zoning history is going to come in here. So our zoning code is a hodgepodge of different times and different philosophies around how to regulate zoning. And I would say that still the majority of it is older philosophies, older thinking, often what's categorized as Euclidean zoning. sort of the original basis of zoning in the United States. And so our older districts, the residential districts, and the majority of our mixed-use districts, our parks and our hillside districts, they all regulate height in feet and stories. Once upon a time that kind of made sense. Today, it does not. And our more recent districts, the Oakland ones that we talked about earlier, for example, do not have that double regulation of height in feet and stories. And so in these older districts, this has caused problems over the years. The example that I like to use is in a residential district, primarily the height limit is 40 feet and three stories. However, you could technically fit four stories in the 40 feet height limit. And we have seen many proposals for that, particularly if somebody is interested in an integral garage and they still want three floors of living space above that. That turns the building into four stories, which is not allowed by the code, but they are still within the 40 feet height limit. So they're going to the zoning board simply for a variance for an additional floor, which does not make sense. So we are removing height in stories and simply regulating the height in feet. Similarly, we also have regulations that more more thoroughly regulate the overall density or the overall volume of the building. And there's a number of ways in which you can regulate the volume of a building. And reading our code, I kind of feel like back in the day when these districts were being developed, Pittsburgh was like, let's do them all. And that is not the intent. The intent is that you pick and choose a handful of these that create the overall building volume limitations. And again, we chose all of them, which again causes contradictions and complications. And this is one that I'm remembering. We have added Okay, so taking a pause for a second on the explanation of that, we did include an example of the site development standards. Again, this is typically how it's illustrated for the older districts. We have this table that identifies each of the items. and the edits that we're making again are relatively small we are removing the height and stories from the maximum height at the bottom and then we are removing in our mixed use districts we're removing floor area ratio and you can see underneath the floor area ratio that struck out that we have maximum lock coverage that we have setbacks and we have the height and the three of them together get at the similar purpose and intent as a floor area ratio So we added some photos and some illustrations to help to explain this. So this is an example from East Carson Street. It's one of our very popular local neighborhood commercial zoning districts. And as you can see, it is very densely built out. And essentially, most of those buildings, let's see, can I get the mouse to work again? Like this building here on the corner, where's my mouse? this worked before. We got to the exciting part and the mouse isn't cooperating. Okay. There it is. Yeah. So the building right above where the cursor is, that could not be built under our current restrictions in the LNC. The building to essentially the catty corner from that could not be built under the current restrictions in the LNC. The ones across the street also basically could not be built because of those restrictions. So here we move to the street view of that same area. The building on the left here is the one where my cursor was near in the satellite view. So, again, this is, this is an illustration of our local neighborhood commercial districts now the base requirement for the local neighborhood commercial commercial district as far as height goes is you are allowed 45 feet and not to exceed three stories, however. we have that floor area ratio requirement in addition. And in the LNC, it is a two to one floor area ratio. Now floor area ratio means that your total floor area is limited to a multiplier of your lot area. So when you have a two to one floor area ratio, if your lot is a thousand square feet, you are limited to 2000 square feet of building. And again, here we have a 90% lot coverage. So to make the math easier, we'll just pretend that the numbers work well. So if you want to max out that 90% coverage, you're basically limited to two stories. You could have a very tiny third story for that leftover 200 square feet, but that's not a very effective third story.

Yes, Commissioner. Commissioner Rappi for the reporter. Again, this is one of those kind of great compromises of the mid 1990s when originally at the time, as this is kind of early days of performance zoning, FIR was the scene as the way to kind of dictate size and mass of buildings. And that had been proposed. That also confused a lot of people. And so in a great bit of compromise that maybe was kind of split the baby, maybe too much, they added back in height. We added back in height and setback requirements as well as FARs as a way because people just didn't get what FAR was, frankly, at the time. And so we ended up with the kind of worst of both worlds in that case. So I'm happy to see at least one version of it struck.

Again, I appreciate the context and the opportunity to drink some more water. Just give me a sign when you're ready. Sure. I mean, again, like that makes perfect sense. But people still struggle with floor area ratio. If you are not a professional architect, this is not a concept that is very familiar. And so let's see. So again, with that in mind, um we have here in the photo the buildings on the left are um four stories which again were limited to 45 feet and three stories so that is not compliant the other side of the street is about three and a half stories um And again, that is not really compliant either. And so by taking away that story limitation and taking away the FAR limitation, which again we need to do because the FAR conflicts with what the height allowance is. This means that the four-story building on the left is compliant, that the one kitty corner from it is also compliant, and that there is room to go up just a little bit on the ones on the right. And then you can see in the background on the left, there's a building that was clearly built after some of these restrictions were in place, and it totally does not fit the context of this street. And so this change would enable some redevelopment there that would more closely match the rest of the street. And so again, these are minor changes that stay within the context of the neighborhood, but allow for a significant addition in floor area that could be used for residences, it could be used for businesses, office space, you know, what have you, because this is one of our mixed use districts. Let's see, did I cover everything with the addition of the photos? Okay, yes, there are two other points on this item. There's a few places where heightened stories is how we regulate height, only with heightened stories, not with the heightened feet. And there was one place when we were reviewing those sections in the Grandview public realm that there was sort of a clear one-to-one for what would be the translation to height and feet. that would meet the intent of this district. So we are proposing to make that switch there. There are a handful of other areas that are currently regulating only heightened stories that needed a little bit more thought and analysis before we figured out what to do with those. So we put a pin in those and expect to revisit them in future. Relatedly, because we had all these regulations of floor area ratio, we had the height and stories, when we added the performance point system and the bonus height criteria, the bonus height criteria had to speak to FAR and height and stories. So we are cleaning up those sections where applicable to, again, we're not changing the regulations here at this point in time for bonus height. We are just making sure that that language stays consistent with the proposed changes that we have elsewhere. All right, we are ready to move on to the next item in the executive order. So while we've already discussed a few complications and quirks of our zoning code around height and density, the urban neighborhood commercial, which is again in that older mixed use category, takes it a step further. And so the executive order specifically called that out as one that we needed to simplify the height requirements. And so that the site development table that we looked at earlier, where the height and maximum height was listed in the urban neighborhood commercial district, there are two maximum heights listed. And it's based on whether or not you are within 1500 feet of a major transit facility. If you are within that buffer, your maximum height is 60 feet and four stories. Again, we're dropping the stories as part of this package. And outside that, you are 45 feet and three stories. Now, if you remember, I mentioned when talking about the LNC and East Carson Street example, that district's height requirement is 45 feet and three stories. Now, the local neighborhood commercial and the urban neighborhood commercial, you might notice their names are kind of similar. And that's because their districts are. They're very similar districts. The primary difference is the additional density that you get in the urban neighborhood commercial. And so in addition to the fact that it's very confusing to have two maximum height requirements based on which part of the district you're in, it also actually doesn't make any sense to have a UNC zoning district if you don't get that additional height. And so we are proposing to drop the shorter of the maximum heights and have that 60 feet. Again, we're dropping the stories. So having district wide in the urban neighborhood commercial be limited to 60 feet. Another thing that's different about the urban neighborhood commercial is that it has a special exception option for additional height. Our urban industrial district also has a similar special exception. And again, those special exceptions are referring to the heightened stories and they're referring to the FAR. And so we are simplifying that and aligning that language with the changes we're making elsewhere. With one exception, I believe it's on the urban industrial, there is a height cap that is currently only in FAR. And again, it would take a little bit more process and consideration to figure out how to translate that to feet. So we are maintaining the existing height cap in the FAR language for the time being. And again, we've added some graphics to help explain this. Actually, I think I put them in the wrong order. So here is a map of our existing urban neighborhood commercial districts. Those are the maroon, burgundy, reddish spots along the map. And then the bluish circles that blend into each other, those are the major transit buffers. And so you can see, here comes the mouse, hopefully. Over here in our western neighborhoods, there's an urban neighborhood commercial that's nowhere near a transit buffer, and so it doesn't get any of the density allowance currently. And again, if the intention was to not have that greater density, it would make more sense for it to be a local neighborhood commercial district. But then in our east end, the majority of the urban neighborhood commercial district area is within that major transit buffer. um so the illustration that we have comes from um allegheny center on the north side and this is one of the unc districts that only a portion is within the major transit buffer so currently this portion so this bottom corner is the only area that is eligible for that 60 feet maximum height everything else in the shaded area is not eligible for that 60 feet height limit part of the irony is that the tallest buildings in this district are outside of the denser allowance area there was no train at that time when that district was created that is an excellent point that yes when this district was created this district was created we did not have the north shore t station and that's where this major transit buffer is being measured from is the north shore t stations um so yeah that's a really good point i hadn't i hadn't put that part together thank you um and so we we've highlighted um a parcel or we've highlighted a portion of this area in yellow um it's currently used as parking lots surface parking lots And so if somebody were to want to come and redevelop it, currently, because it's not in that denser, it's not within the 1500 feet of the major transit facility, they would only be permitted the 45 feet, three stories. And so that's sort of the mock-up of the white areas here. With the change that we're proposing of making it district-wide 60-foot height maximum, they would be able to go at least one more story, which is illustrated by the green portion. But as you can see with the buildings in the background on the right-hand side, those, again, are in the same zoning district, and they are significantly taller. So what we're allowing here is still less than what we're seeing in several of the existing buildings in this neighborhood. All right. We included some close ups of the different UNC districts and their relation to the major transit facility buffer. All right. This is our last directive in the list from the executive order. So the final directive from the executive order is to adjust the outdated residential compatibility standards. These are a significant barrier to development in places like our local neighborhood commercial districts. And And here we've added some illustration to try and help explain how residential compatibility works. So if you are in a local neighborhood commercial district, as an example, that's sort of the reddish salmon-ish color in the map, and you are adjacent to a residential district, which is the beige color here, you are subject to residential compatibility. Now, residential compatibility in the old iteration of how we have it in our code because again this is another one of those things we've been evolving as we've been evolving our zoning districts it's been evolving nationally as a concept of how do we manage this so the older iteration in our code is divided up into three main categories there is additional setback restrictions there are additional height restrictions and then there's nuisance So things like noise, light, I think odor might also be in there. So I do want to point out at this point in time, we are not touching that third category, those nuisance items. We are maintaining the existing regulations on those. But we are adjusting the height and setback requirements. And so the parcel that's highlighted in the map is in this photo, it's the second one. So it's the White House that's set back a little bit further adjacent to the Yellow House. The Yellow House is in the residential district. And so the yellow house is what it is, but the property next to it, that white one, is subject to residential compatibility if somebody were to propose a renovation or want to build something different there. And what residential compatibility says currently is that essentially that lot, you can't build anything. Because these setbacks are so severe, it would leave, I think it would leave five feet of buildable area, which is technically actually not buildable. And then the next property over would also have an additional setback restriction. And so we'd have to chop off the first 10 feet or so of that building in order to make it compliant. And so we don't think that's a good way to continue to regulate residential compatibility. Residential compatibility is important and we do want to make sure that we are maintaining protections for residential neighborhoods that are adjacent to more intense districts like a local neighborhood commercial, but we want it to be more reasonable. And so we've proposed a few modifications of the residential compatibility to bring it closer in alignment with our peer cities and also to bring it slightly closer in alignment to what we are doing ourselves in our newer districts. I will also note that this is another one of those areas we expect to revisit when we look at the full code and do a more thorough analysis of how do we want to do residential compatibility across the city moving forward. In addition, so again, the first section is about the setbacks. And so in addition to creating conditions like not being able to build up to the street line, the setback conditions are there are 15 different sort of iterations and combinations that may apply to your lot line depending on whether you as the non-residential property are, if your side is adjacent to a side or it's across the street from a side or it's across the street from a way or a rear or a front or it's your front that's across the street or away or adjacent or it's this or it's that or another. Sometimes multiple conditions apply to a single side. It is a nightmare to attempt to read through all those and figure out which one applies in which conditions. And so looking at our peer cities, this is not standard. And so we are going to a much more simple approach. that there will be three conditions. The conditions will be, are you adjacent to the residential property? Meaning that you share a property line. We don't care if it's your front side, rear, or their front side, rear. If you're adjacent, there is one standard. If you are across a way, there is a standard. If you are across the street, there is a third standard. And those are the three conditions that we will be considering. Yes, Commissioner Raffi.

Yeah, question. In the past, the contextual setbacks overrule or have been contextual setback standards of 925 or whatever it is. Are you allowed to use those over the residential compatibility standards? Which ones win in those cases?

I don't recall ever using contextual to override residential compatibility, partly because there's generally provisions that if there's a conflict, the stricter regulation applies.

Yeah.

No, I'm just thinking that I may have been thinking about adjacent properties, but okay, that's I was just because I know that there's that that's been something that's been suggested in the past that it was being sure that we had accounted for that.

Yeah, I can the way that I remember doing it when I did plan review and the way that if somebody brought that to me as an applicant today, I would probably say that the residential compatibility is the because it's the stricter requirement. That's the one that we have to go for.

Okay, just thank you.

Yep, you're welcome. So, yeah, so setbacks are confusing for residential compatibility. We are going to make them less confusing. Height is excessively prohibitive. We are going to make it less excessively prohibitive. Oh, sorry, I forgot. We did have a slide that explains what the three conditions are that we are changing the setbacks to. So again, there's 10 feet if your property line is abutting those of one of the residential districts listed, 10 feet if your property is across away from one of those districts, and five feet if you are across the street from one of those districts. So the red dotted line is the existing residential compatibility height restrictions. And it is based on a measurement from the property line of the residential property. And so the current limitation is that if you are within 50 feet of that residential property, you are limited to 40 feet in height, which is the same height as that residential district. And so going back to our local neighborhood commercial, East Carson Street example, approximately half of those buildings or a third of those buildings would not be able to reach their full 45 feet allowance because of this. After 50 feet you can go up 10 feet and that limitation of a 50 foot height max applies to until you reach 100 feet away from the residential property. So in our LNC district once you're 50 feet away you get your full height maximum. But if you're in the urban neighborhood commercial, for example, and currently if you're in the transit buffer area, you do not get to meet your full height potential until you are 100 feet away from the property. Now, given that Pittsburgh has an awful lot of 100-foot deep lots, occasionally some 120-feet deep lots or something maybe a little bit longer, this is effectively limiting the majority, if not all, of many parcels around the city. And it's not consistent with what we are seeing in our peer cities. It's also not consistent with what we applied in the Oakland districts. And so we are proposing a compromise to ensure that we are still providing uh mitigation of height impacts on a neighboring residential property we are keeping a height cap but we are lessening the restrictions of that height cap so in the proposal if you are 20 within 25 feet of that residential property you are limited to that 40 feet in height but at that point you get to jump up to 45 feet Again, in our LNC districts, you're limited for a much smaller portion of your lot, and then you can enjoy your full height potential. Our UNC districts would still be limited from reaching their full potential in the 25 to 50 foot range from a residential property. At that point in time, the UNC district would be able to meet their full potential. maximum height allowance excluding the special exception if they go that route and then from 50 feet to 75 feet we are limiting the height maximum to 65 feet this would only affect our most dense districts And then beyond 75 feet from the residential property, you are able to achieve your full height allowance. Again, those are pretty limited where the height would allow to be more than 65 feet. And for comparison, the Oakland districts take a very different approach to residential compatibility and including for the height. And so where they measure from is different. than how we measure it in the other districts. But if we were to imagine the scenario of a property abutting a residential property, so there's a shared property line, we can compare these as apples and apples as opposed to apples and oranges in that situation. And so in the Oakland districts, if it's adjacent to a residential property, the height limit is 60 feet. for the first 20 feet of the property. So again, that is massively different than our existing residential compatibility with other districts. And it's also way more permissive than what we're proposing for the residential compatibility and height.

This is Commissioner Reppy. Which one wins in this case?

So the new Oakland districts are not subject to Chapter 916. So the yellowish greenish thing, the dotted line, is what's applicable in the new UC districts and the RMU districts. All right. So that is the conclusion of the description of everything that's in this amendment. So next steps. The notice of these amendments has occurred, of course, because today is our hearing and action. And so we are in the middle of the process on these. we are hoping that today you all will make a recommendation to city council at that point the city council public hearing will be scheduled sometime in the fall after their recess and then hopefully we'll move smoothly on to a vote in final action But again, this is the first phase. The executive order is divided into three phases. So phase two of the executive order, we are going to undertake a full zoning code overhaul. And yes, very exciting. And I pointed out a few of the areas in this particular amendment where we feel like we are taking an interim step until we do that full code overhaul. We may be revisiting some of these topic areas and making additional changes at that time. And then once we adopt a brand new code that's in plain language and it's clean and it's easy to use, we want to keep that updated so we don't end up in the situation where we are today, where we're removing things that haven't been used for 30 years. um and so our intention is in phase three once we have that new code that we will implement a regular maintenance process so that we are continually coming back if we've if we've tried anything new and experimental you know let's take a couple years see how it's working report back if it's not working let's tweak it or um you know new things happen all the time yes As we heard earlier today, we talked about short-term rentals. That wasn't an issue 20 years ago. I think I got that right. It wasn't an issue 30 years ago. But it's become a thing. And so we need to update our code in order to respond to that. The vape shop bill that we had recently is another thing. We needed to update our code in order to stay current with the needs and impacts of land use on our city. And so our intention is in phase three that we establish a regular maintenance process to address all of those in an effective and timely manner.

Agreed.

And that I believe concludes today's presentation.

All right. Yes.

Okay, there it goes.

Thank you for being so very thorough. Is there anyone here that wants to you do? Okay, come on up. You've been waiting so patiently. And for quite some time. Thank you.

uh as a city and zoning geek just really appreciate all of that so thank you evan petrak uh here as a resident of downtown actually in the gtc uh district so uh just glad to be here uh honestly and admittedly all this stuff is just getting this on record um you know I'm going to share some questions on my mind for the zoning specific to the map adjustment. Let me know if I'm using the incorrect terminology here, bureaucracy terminology here. But if this is a citywide measure, why is it such a very small selection of parcels being considered? That strikes me as notable and unique. uh does the existing zoning actually effectively restrict the construction of new housing or other developments on that land I I personally would disagree with the characterization that you could not build housing or build uh you know build on those parcels that are being rezoned downtown is the second densest neighborhood in the city by population per square mile not counting workday population but has some of the least and least well integrated green spaces uh throughout the city of pittsburgh um so i guess in summary it strikes me as a half measure and neither fully removes the outdated zoning while also making an adjustment that appears to target very specific parcels that also if i may be blunt happen to be slated for private redevelopment and this strikes me against the spirit of zoning where uh you know zoning exists and then good developers and good actors develop to that zoning not vice versa um

and if we are doing that full zoning code overhaul uh why again are these parcels being uh being rezoned um so mr stow uh can respond to that or the is that all of your questions yeah that's everything okay thank you thank you so much and thank you for coming in did you uh oh i'm betting the report report away his name got chewed up in the zoom can you repeat your name please

Sure. Yes. So sorry about that. Evan Petrak here is a downtown resident.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. You're welcome. Have a great day. Thank you so much. And Ms. Ristow will be responding. Is that? No. Yeah. No one online? Okay. All right. Well, then your turn to respond.

Thank you for that question. I had an answer while I was sitting down and then as soon as I stood up. So the question as to why do this now when we are doing a full code overhaul in the foreseeable future, partly that was because it takes time to do a full code overhaul. And so it will be several years before that would be in place. And while we acknowledge that downtown, that open space is vital downtown and making sure that we have those green spaces and those green pockets, 60% just is not, it's just not tenable. And it's not consistent with our peer cities. And Even the existing buildings on those lots, I don't think were able to... Some of them have some of that open space, but I don't think they were able to actually hit that 60% threshold. The reason why we're not getting rid of the full 60% is if we do that without further thought and consideration, it is potential that the existing green space that's there, like particularly at Gateway Center, that could be privatized. And so people would no longer have the opportunity to go out and use it for lunches and whatever. And so that's why we're doing this sort of half measure. But this is definitely one of those items that we expect to revisit in the full code overhaul and find a path forward that strikes that balance between making sure that the great existing open space that there is there gets to be able to be maintained, while also relieving the burden on developments, and having a more reasonable approach for new new projects.

Can I clarify a question? Yes. Not that it's prohibited for a developer to request a rezoning. But this particular map amendment was not at the request of a property owner. Is that correct?

The property owner did not make the request correct.

All right, so that answered your question. Nobody else online, right? Okay, now we're closing the floor for public testimony. It looks like Commissioner Vatz may have a question or comment, correct?

Yeah, I have a super quick question. I know it's been quite a long day. First of all, I just wanted to express my thanks to the zoning administrator, city planning staff. I know this is a big job. It's very important. So I'm very glad to see you taking it on. About the residential compatibility standard, my question was, is the measurement from the property line of the residential property or from the actual residential structure?

It's from the property line.

Got it. I still have some concerns about residential compatibility standards. It will probably still significantly hinder some redevelopment. Obviously, it's better than what we have right now because we're making it a bit more permissive, but I still do have a lot of concerns about that. But ultimately, overall, I think great job on everything and happy to see some of these changes moving forward.

Uh, and it looks like commissioner. Thank you commissioner vats. It looks like commissioner hunt. Uh, did you have your hand up?

Yes, I did, and I also keep things very, very brief is, uh. I guess we're, uh, we're earning our August recess here with a 4 plus hour hour meeting. Um, but, and then quickly, I just want to say that I enjoyed the general Pittsburgh history lesson and Pittsburgh zoning. History lesson provided by the zoning administrator and commissioner so so thank you as we head into the recess. Um, we're similar to commissioner bats. I want to commend the department specifically on, um. The study of our peer and competitive cities, it's important for all city departments to look at our competitive positioning versus other kind of midsize cities. I also want to commend the department on the last piece, I think on your last slide regarding zoning maintenance and would recommend with many complex processes, reviewing the code every five to seven years and seeing where things are changing. Specifically, we've Downtown is a fast-evolving neighborhood and a very important neighborhood for our city. So continuing to promote development in downtown Pittsburgh is important for our tax base and for the city's future. Along those lines, as transit changes and hopefully continues to expand throughout the city, continuing to encourage TOD development. That's all. I hope everybody has a great recess and great work. Thank you.

All right. Thank you so much. And did you want to say anything? Okay. I want to say a lot. I'm going to be honest with you, but like we're about to lose quorum. So I'm trying to get at least this part in and we might have to do something different for the director's report. But here's where we are. Commissioners, do we have a motion from the floor to make a positive recommendation to council here today? Yeah, so 2nd, okay, move from O'Neill a 2nd from repi. I'm going to do roll call commissioner Burton Falk. I commissioner hunt. Thank you commissioner. O'Neill I thank you. commissioner repi hi thank you and commissioner vatz hi thank you so you need to oh i did first commissioner burton sometimes i i know it's getting a little yeah it's been a while since we've done this long yeah um thank you so much for all the hard work no kidding and i am just thrilled at the fact that you were so geeked out about it And at this late in the day too. So kudos, like very seriously. I know that we're about to, so thank you everybody for being here.