Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Limits on rentals with or without absentee landlords

[Philip Dowds (rpdowds]

Zoning is medium-good at monitoring and governing fixed conditions that can be 
counted, tape-measured or photographed:  Height of a cornice line, number of 
parking spaces, floor area to lot area ratio, etc.  Zoning is not so good — in 
fact, really quite terrible — at monitoring or governing activity and 
transience, like how many people live in a dwelling unit, how old they are, or 
how they are related to each other (or not).  Maybe on a certain day you can 
prove that all your members own and drive only SmartCars (sadly, now vanished 
from the US market) — but a year or two from now, who can say whether or not 
all those SmartCars will be replaced by Escalades?  Probably not your local 
zoning officer.

It is true that local parking requirements (e.g., required spaces per dwelling 
unit, or per 1,000 sq ft office use) seem to be going down.  More interesting 
are the zoning experiments that limit or prohibit accessory parking.

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Thanks, RPD
617.460.4549

On July 7, 2023 at 11:02:22 AM, Sharon Villines via Cohousing-L (cohousing-l 
[at] cohousing.org) wrote:

> On Jul 7, 2023, at 10:50 AM, Joyce Cheney wrote: > > Added units can also 
> affect requirements for parking and separate insurance. Jc How successful 
> have people been lately in getting exceptions to zoning requirements AFTER 
> move in? It would seem that if you can demonstrate, for example, that you 
> have fewer cars than “normal”, could you get parking requirements lowered? 
> Before move-in, we were able to add compact car spaces and delete full-sized 
> car spaces by showing that a large majority of residents had compact cars. 
> That allowed us to have enough parking so we had one spot for each unit. I 
> would think this might work after move-in as well. If you read the Strong 
> Towns website, you will see that parking requirements are falling, not sure 
> how quickly but they are being discussed as unused space that is costly 
> because it reduces the amount of property available for tax-paying 
> enterprises. Sharon ---- Sharon Villines Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington 
> DC takomavillage.org