Our Executive Director, Kevin Wright, joined Vice-Mayor Roxanne Qualls yesterday on WVXU‘s Cincinnati Edition to discuss the City’s new Form-Based code implementation and how the new code impacts our neighborhoods! Walnut Hills is one of four pilot neighborhoods in Cincinnati that volunteered to adopt this new type of zoning, and we’re very excited about the opportunities it will provide
According to Vice-Mayor Qualls, the Form-Based code “specifies proportion and relationship to the street and to other buildings. People are choosing more and more to live in our neighborhoods because they want an urban experience and we know the value of the architecture and the original urban form of our communities. Form-based codes respect that and it actually allows for new development that is also respectful of that original urban form.”
Qualls adds that the new code “makes things very clear to developers what they can do in a specific neighborhood. You should be able to get all your approvals in a very short amount of time.”
In the case of Walnut Hills, Kevin Wright states that it “allowed the community to create a vision for their business district and how they want it designed. We took that vision and are attaching a zoning code to it.”
According to Wright, the new code system “creates a win-win-win for community, the City and the developer”. “When we visited Nashville”, he continues, “some developers even admitted being skeptical at the beginning, but once they started developing under the code and saw that the form based code was much easier to use than conventional zoning…developers loved it.”
Click below to listen to the full interview:
