The Cleveland City Planning Commission has made the creation of mixed-use neighborhoods that are pedestrian friendly, bicycle friendly and transit oriented a centerpiece of a wide-ranging initiative to make Cleveland more competitive as place to live, work and visit. “Connecting Cleveland 2020” is the name of the emerging comprehensive plan that will articulate this new vision for the city. A key ingredient in the initiative is reform of the city’s zoning code, a project that has been underway for several years. Some of the city’s recent accomplishments in zoning code reform are summarized below.

Pedestrian Retail Overlay District. This overlay zoning district allows the city to designate selected neighborhood commercial districts as places where all new buildings must be placed at the sidewalk edge, ground floor frontages must be devoted to retail uses, parking requirements are reduced, and drive-through lanes are prohibited on the pedestrian street frontage.

Live-Work District. This recently adopted overlay district permits older, under-utilized industrial buildings to be re-used for a combination of living and working space, even in industrial districts that otherwise prohibit residential use. The regulations also eliminate the requirement for provision of additional off-street parking, which would normally be triggered by the “change of use.”

Downtown Surface Parking Lot Prohibition. With the development of the Gateway sports complex (Jacobs Field and Gund arena), Cleveland feared that the increased demand for parking would result in an increased appetite for building demolition on the part of downtown property owners. The city moved proactively by adopting an ordinance that prohibited new surface parking lots in the core of downtown. Although the ordinance includes necessary exceptions to prevent “regulatory takings” of property when it can be proved that surface parking is the only economically feasible use, the ordinance has been successful in contributing to the preservation and re-use of downtown buildings.

Urban Lot Sizes. A simple and little publicized amendment to Cleveland’s subdivision regulations in the mid-1990’s allows the City Planning Commission to approve the creation of “substandard” lots (i.e., lots that are smaller than otherwise required) where such lot sizes are characteristic of the neighborhood. Whereas the city’s zoning code requires new residential lots to be at least 40 feet wide and 4,800 square feet in area, the Planning Commission has used the new provision to permit the creation of lots that are as narrow as 25 feet and as small as approximately 2,000 square feet in order to allow development of single-family and two-family houses that fit the scale of older, urban-density neighborhoods. Without this provision, such lot split proposals would have faced an uncertain outcome in a routine zoning variance procedure.

Urban Townhouse Districts. Recognizing that townhouses are an urban housing form that are under-represented in Cleveland’s housing stock, the city adopted a set of three townhouse districts intended to ease the approval process for townhouse developments of varying densities. The regulations allow the city to zone property in one of three districts, each permitting a different townhouse density, with the most urban of those districts permitting the buildings to cover 100% of the lot area.

Planned Unit Development District. Cleveland’s PUD District provides zoning flexibility in return for innovative site planning and urban design amenities. In recent years, the regulations have been used to facilitate developments as diverse as a subdivision of detached condominium units clustered around a wooded common area and a truly unique development of apartment buildings, restaurants and offices integrated with the pedestrian re-use of a historic bridge remnant along the Cuyahoga River.