City officials reviewed a study on diversifying downtown ground-floor spaces to include non-traditional uses like light manufacturing and healthcare under the new comprehensive plan's active-use overlays. Staff also reported a severe downturn in both commercial building permits and affordable housing production, driven by high construction costs, negative rent growth, and state funding bottlenecks. To stimulate development and increase density, the city is implementing multiple policy levers, including zoning changes to allow middle housing, eliminating parking minimums, and expediting review timelines for residential projects under 200 units.
Building_development
City Center Redevelopment Authority · Mar 19, 2026 · 48:16–48:31 · Watch on CVTV ↗
Keywords: zoning comprehensive plan building permits affordable housing infrastructure density
What was said
47:14 And I think development community is excited by that. - Yeah, and I think also one of the, especially for smaller projects or smaller landlords, they may not be able to kind of forgive or give away that much rent. So for, particularly for ground floor uses that the city deems as having a lot of public benefit, are there opportunities where the city can provide some sort of assistance, whether it's technical, financial or kind of reduced costs to help promote and make it easier for the landlord to locate those uses, yeah. - And I would also add, the new codes that the city's working on are really gonna help 'cause you hear it from all of us, flexibility's the key to everything in the business and to have the codes being updated
48:13 to accommodate all these different uses in more areas than maybe traditional zoning would allow, I think that's gonna be a real benefit and you'll wanna promote that as well.
48:27 - One other comment, thinking layering on the many studies, are the catalyst sites integrated with this? So you guys can bring that in, I just didn't see that. - Yeah, we don't have a map showing that currently, but I think how we're thinking, if you look at the different kind of heat maps of where things are, the catalytic sites are kind of in the gaps of the heat maps. So it gives us that kind of opportunity to look at those and relative to where things are now and say, okay, and I think that's kind of one of the next steps is saying, based off of where everything else is, what makes sense here? And how do we think about those catalytic sites more strategically in the context of current conditions and current uses? - That's great, and I would just add, and I saw it in there, so I know you're thinking about it, but just reiterating the importance of public infrastructure,
49:26 I think sometimes we forget how critical that is, and you're the only ones who can do it. So I would just emphasize that.
Evidence (1 match)
direct keyword 48:16–48:31 zoning, comprehensive plan, building permits, affordable housing, infrastructure, density
that the city's working on are really gonna help 'cause you hear it from all of us, flexibility's the key to everything in the business and to have the codes being updated to accommodate all these different uses in more areas than maybe traditional zoning would allow, I think that's gonna be a real benefit and you'll wanna promote that as well. - One other comment, thinking layering on the many studies, are the catalyst sites integrated with this? So you guys can bring that in, I just didn't se