Residential zoning code updated

Spokane City Council members have expanded zones for offices along major arterials and have temporarily held off on lowering minimum lot sizes on the edges of the city in last minute decision-making over a long-awaited update to the city’s residential zoning code.

The council unanimously approved the new code late Monday, the first rewrite in 48 years of development rules governing the city’s residential areas.

The new code fully implements the state’s growth management law and the city’s five-year-old update of its broader comprehensive land-use policy plan.

The new code will allow for greater urban residential densities by reducing minimum lot sizes to 4,350 square feet from the current 7,200 square feet in most single-family zones.

The new code will guide concentrated development into a series of urban centers and corridors and provide new opportunities for alternative types of housing, including attached housing.

Several last-minute amendments sought by developer and neighborhood interests were approved by the council. They include:

•Allowing offices as a conditional use in multi-family and high-density residential zones, but only along principal arterial streets.

•Maintaining minimum lot sizes of 7,200 feet in areas with agricultural soils, wetlands, high slopes or stormwater problems for the next nine months.

Those areas, such as Five Mile Prairie and Moran Prairie, are facing growth pressures.

The Plan Commission is being asked to come up with a long-term plan for melding smaller lot sizes into areas that are being converted by development from semi-rural uses.

•Allowing gates at entrances to planned-unit housing developments with private streets.

The council sent to the Plan Commission requests to create two tiers of lot sizes in single-family zones; to allow medical centers without a conditional-use permit in high-density residential zones; to allow low-income duplex projects in single-family zones; and to open single-family zones to residential beekeeping.