Stamford neighborhood group takes aim at latest change in rules on land use: ‘The details matter’
STAMFORD — Armed with protest petitions and hundreds of signatures, a Stamford neighborhood group has taken aim at a set of zoning text changes passed this month that tweaks the city’s jumbled land-use rules.
Members of the Stamford Neighborhood Coalition, which has rallied to fight what it sees as overdevelopment, filed a petition Friday afternoon calling for the repeal of a sweeping set of zoning changes passed by the board at its latest meeting.
Stamford’s Land Use Bureau Chief Ralph Blessing called the changes a “cleanup” meant to standardize rules from past regulation updates. But coalition members argue that details passed on March 14 will have spillover effects on property owners.
“The devil is always in the details,” coalition member Barry Michelson told The Stamford Advocate. “And the details matter.”
Michelson and the Stamford Neighborhood Coalition object to the text cleanup on several levels, but the heart of their argument hinges on changes on how property owners can convert commercial buildings into residential buildings.
Local zoning rules already allowed office buildings to become apartment buildings wholly or partially after obtaining special permission from the Zoning Board through a provision called Section 10-H. Subsequently, the new Section 10-H tweaks the old rules for conversions by loosening the guidelines. Property owners can convert their spaces into slightly denser housing, as per the new changes, and a property owner’s obligation to provide designated affordable housing is also slightly higher because of the change.
The new rules permit these conversions without a public hearing, diverging from the old 10-H guidelines. However, the updated section still mandates administrative Zoning Board approval if a developer seeks exemptions to zoning requirements for items such as parking or outdoor space.
“This is only allowed if (with) the building that you have, you cannot meet those requirements with the existing building,” Blessing explained to the board at a meeting. For example, pursuant to Zoning Board approval, owners can add one story to converted buildings.
In a memo to the city’s Planning Board, the Land Use Bureau maintained that “this change will have limited impact” because it only applies to existing buildings.
“Encouraging conversions utilizes existing site infrastructure, reduces office vacancy, improves the appearance of buildings and, importantly, increases the amount of available housing,” City Planner Vineeta Mathur said in the memo sent Feb. 15.
Michelson and fellow coalition member Steve Garst said the “substantive” tweaks to conversion rules were made without sufficient public input. Though the Zoning Board held hearings where the public could speak, Garst contended that residents didn’t know about the changes and weren’t given enough time to respond.
“People are living their lives, and they’re not chasing around after land-use decisions to see what’s going on,” Garst said.
Blessing said he sees no such substantive change. He instead said the building conversion provision in the zoning regulations applies to a narrow group of properties throughout the city and is scantly used by property owners. When it is, Blessing said that owners use it in tandem with other zoning bonuses provided by the city, such as those for historic preservation.
“In the last five years, we had eight conversions from office space or commercial space to residential,” Blessing told The Stamford Advocate. “Of those, six did not use Section 10-H.”
Because the zoning changes implemented by Section 10-H apply to the entire city, the Stamford Neighborhood Coalition must gather 300 petition signatures for their appeal to be valid. However, a recent ruling from the Connecticut State Supreme Court works to the group’s advantage in their attempt.
The court in March tweaked how the city interprets zoning petitions in matters that impact the entire city. Before the recent decision, signatures from two joint property owners amounted to one signature on a petition.
However, the high court implicitly lowered the threshold by changing how signatures are counted. In circumstances where two people jointly own a property and both sign a petition, their signatures count separately. One household could effectively produce two signatures if it had two owners.
The Stamford Neighborhood Coalition estimates that more than 600 people signed its petition. The city Land Use Bureau must count the petition signatures using city tax records to determine its validity. If the coalition’s petition meets the 300 signature threshold, their appeal will go on to the Board of Representatives.
