The Columbus Dispatch
Columbus' effort to revamp its zoning code is supposed to encourage denser development and help ease the city's housing crunch, but one thing it most definitely will not do is end the disputes over what should be built where.
A 20+ acre parcel of wooded land on the city's Northwest Side with past development disagreements has made that point clear.
The land owner pledges to deliver hundreds of new housing units if it were included in the city's "Zone-In" proposal. The plan calls for denser and higher developments along many of the city's main thoroughfares in an effort to increase housing construction. The City Council is expected to vote on the first phase of the zoning overhaul this summer.
"Do we have a housing crisis or not?" asked Sam Zimmerman, whose family has owned the site at the northwest corner of Henderson and Olentangy River roads for decades. "Why is the Zimmerman land being excluded, and why do we have this special scrutiny?"
Zimmerman raised his concerns recently at a public hearing on the zoning plan.
City officials say the vacant Northwest Side site isn't a good fit for "Zone-In."
The reasons it doesn't fit are "due to its site-specific characteristics," said Anthony Celebrezze III, a spokesperson for the city Building and Zoning Services. Those characteristics include "a small stream, mature trees and topography," as well as the composition of the nearby intersection, which doesn't offer walkable connections to other commercial areas, Celebrezze said.
To hear city officials describe it, the need for additional housing in Columbus is a crisis, necessitating jettisoning the old ways of thinking, including a complete rewrite of zoning rules. That Zone-In rewrite offers a new can-do code that clears the way for developers to build much denser structures with less opportunity for neighborhood officials to object.
In announcing his proposed new pro-growth zoning code in early April, Mayor Andrew Ginther said residents need to transform themselves from "NIMBYs" to "YIMBYs," or from "Not In My Back Yard," to "'Yes In My Back Yard" when it comes to new large-scale housing proposals.
"Let's be unapologetically pro-growth, (with a) commitment to prosperity, equity, dynamic and inclusive growth," Ginther said in April. Officials have also suggested the current code was written to be racially exclusive in the 1950s.
Zimmerman said his property could help the city grow and wonders why it was not included to allow for development.
"It's really very simple," he said. "We meet all of the criteria that the city has published, and then some. ... The profound question is: What's this really all about?"
But inclusion in Zone-In could potentially mean that new apartment buildings up to seven or even 10 stories, could be casting a shadow over the Knolls, a quiet, wooded and itself hilly single-family neighborhood of large, neatly groomed yards and 1960s-era houses up to several thousand square feet. The neighborhood is just to the south of the parcel in question, across Henderson Road.
A parcel with past fights
A development was first proposed on the parcel in 2019 under the current, more stringent zoning. Nearby residents opposed the more than 400 new housing units, citing concerns about increased traffic and potential sewer-system capacity problems.
The new Zone-In plan could allow for even denser development on the site than the 2019 proposal.
Residents around the site are concerned that Zimmerman is bypassing the process of going before the neighborhood association for re-zoning review, said Monica Tuttle, zoning chair of the Northwest Civic Association, which functions as the area commission.
"He wants to get a free pass," waiting until the 11th hour of the multi-year Zone-In process to try to be included, when city officials and the neighborhood agree the site isn't suitable, Tuttle said of Zimmerman.
While most Zone-In parcels take land already commercially developed and allow for it to be redeveloped as residential, the Zimmerman land is a vacant, wooded lot that if included could ultimately be pre-approved to be developed as commercial, Tuttle said.
"He waited until he knew what the proposed zoning was going to be before he said, 'I want to be involved.' So basically, he hedged his bet. ... I've been going to public hearings for over a year now. I haven't seen him at any of the meetings."
Franklin County property records show that the Zimmerman land is comprised of eight parcels, and currently about a third of the total acreage is zoned commercial, while the rest is residential, including single-family.
With City Council set to approve the Zone-In map in the next several weeks, there isn't a mechanism at this point to add new parcels. "We've passed that point," Tuttle said.
Ironically, blunting and bypassing neighborhood concerns like those of Tuttle's group is meant to be a feature of Zone-In, to cut through the costs and delays of NIMBYism.
Adding a wrinkle to this debate is that Mayor Ginther himself resides in the Knolls, although there is no evidence to suggest he personally asked for Zimmerman's land to be excluded from the first phase of the citywide rezoning proposal.
While the city team that developed the new zoning map works for Ginther and "reported out" to him and council leaders on their proposals, it "received no specific guidance or requests regarding specific areas" from those officials, Celebrezze said.
For his part, Zimmerman doesn't accuse the mayor of personally objecting to the project. But he says his site checks all the boxes that the mayor's plan says it wants.
For example, the site is not only on an existing COTA bus line, but also on a proposed Olentangy River Road "bus rapid transit corridor" that would serve the northwest community.
It's also nearly on the Olentangy Trail bike path, giving another non-auto form of transportation to and from work and play. And the land is vacant, meaning no historic buildings or existing housing would be torn down, Zimmerman points out.
Most of the parcels to the immediate north and west of the Zimmerman site are already zoned and/or developed as multi-family, commercial or even light industrial. To the east is a major freeway, 315, and to the south the 50-mph Henderson Road.
Around, but not adjacent to, the Zimmerman land are parcels that are included in the city's new rezoning proposal, which calls for buildings of up to 16 stories along other corridors, such as High and Broad streets. To the west at Henderson and Kenny roads, are a group of large parcels that officials included in the Zone-In map that would become the new "Community Activity Center" designation, with buildings up to seven stories. About a mile to the north, on Bethel Road, is a group that would become a "Regional Activity Center," allowing up to 10 stories.
Lack of Zone-In awareness
Tuttle said she is not a major fan of the Zone-In proposal in general, but that the area has less problems with transforming large existing parking lots into new housing than taking the wooded Zimmerman land and potentially making it commercial.
She thinks the current 35-foot building height limit should remain — but with every floor above that reserved as an incentive for affordable housing. Such a plan would do much more to build affordable housing, she said.
She also thinks that each of the 12,300 parcels included in the first phase of Zone-In should have a standard sign on it warning residents it's under consideration for a zoning change — as is currently a city requirement whenever a developer attempts to rezone land, she said.
The thousands of signs lining major streets would raise public awareness of the magnitude of what the city proposes, Tuttle said, because despite all the Zone-In publicity, "No, I don't think that the average citizen is listening."
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