City staff outline major zoning overhaul intended to boost housing variety; builders warn about cost impacts

City planning staff presented a comprehensive draft zoning code update during the Housing Opportunities Commission meeting on March 12, 2025, proposing broad changes intended to increase housing variety and streamline administrative approvals. Commissioners and developers pushed back on sections they said could raise construction costs or reduce feasibility for specific housing types.

The draft replaces existing residential districts (R1, R2, R3, R4) with new categories — General Residential (GR), Neighborhood Residential (NR), Mixed Residential (MR) and Urban Residential (UR) — and generally reduces minimum lot sizes, lot widths and other dimensional standards. Staff said the changes permit small‑lot single‑family homes, duplexes, triplexes and quadplexes in more areas and remove many arbitrary density caps in favor of per‑unit lot area increments.

"We're changing all of them. There's all the names are going to be changing, all the standards are going to be changing in some way or another," the staff presenter said while summarizing the district consolidation and dimensional reductions.

What the draft would do

- Smaller minimum lot and width standards: single‑family minimums in…