What The General Plan Says About The Land Use Map

October 23, 2021

Here is what the General Plan says about the Land Use map: It is an important guide for decisions related to development; it is the visual reference about the land development objectives of the City.

The General Plan states, “One purpose of the General Plan is to promote the City’s objectives with respect to development. Another purpose is to introduce greater densities than the zoning may indicate in order to achieve open space through the use of density bonuses or other incentives. The objective is to achieve preservation of key scenic features and important amenities per the General Plan while maintaining overall average zone density.” That last sentence is important. Really important.

Here is what I believe this means. Let’s say the land use map shows an area designated as low density residential. The General Plan is telling me that the area should average low density residential. A portion could be changed to medium density, but then the rest of the developer’s parcel should be lower-than-low-density to “maintain overall average zone density” as the General Plan clearly states.

The General Plan points to the creation of open space to achieve this. Open space provides a significant public benefit. So, on a case-by-case basis it may be determined that it is reasonable to change the Land Use map to achieve a significant public benefit. But the land use should only change to achieve a significant public benefit.

Here’s what we do too often. We change one property owner’s parcel in the land use map’s low density single-family area to medium density. All of it. The result is that the parcel averages medium density. There is no open space, or insufficient open space, to ensure that it averages low density.

Bottom line: We’re dealing with the land use map in the wrong way. Plus, this creates a second problem. I call it “density creep.” Fifteen years ago, the Land Use map designated a lot of the city as low density residential and identified a lot of areas in the city for open space. Looking at the current Land Use map shows so much of that open space gone and so much of the low density residential changed to medium or high density.

So now we are faced with situations where a property, call it “property A,” is designated low density residential on the Land Use map and it used to be surrounded by low density residential on the map. But the City changed densities for one developer at a time for all the other parcels around “property A” to medium density. Now, developing “property A” as low density residential doesn’t seem logical. So, we change the parcel to medium density. And so medium, or even high density slowly creeps through the city, and we get little, if any, open space as a public benefit in return.

Here are the City’s Land Use map from March 2021. (Click here to download larger PDF version.)

Here is the city’s Land Use map from 2006 (Click here to download larger PDF version)

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