Providence City Plan Commission, February 20, 2024 meeting
Call to Order and Roll Call
The City Plan Commission meeting was called to order at 4:47 PM. A roll call was conducted to establish a quorum of commissioners and staff.
Approval of Minutes
The commission reviewed the minutes from the previous meeting held on January 16, 2024. A motion to approve the minutes was made, seconded, and passed unanimously.
Comprehensive Plan Update
Staff presented a draft growth strategy map for the city's comprehensive plan update, highlighting priority, enhanced, and managed growth areas. The commission opened the floor for public comment, where residents and neighborhood leaders asked questions regarding historic districts, transit, and density.
City Council Referral: 400-410 Hope Street
The commission considered a rezoning referral from R-3 to C-1 for a mixed-use property housing a veterinary practice. After a brief discussion and public hearing, the commission voted to send a positive recommendation to the City Council.
Minor Subdivision and Unified Development Plan Review: 2 Ware Court
The applicant requested a minor subdivision and dimensional variances to subdivide a lot containing three existing single-family homes. The commission approved the dimensional variances and granted preliminary approval for the subdivision with specific conditions.
City Council Referral: 702-710 Potters Avenue
The petitioner requested a zone change from R-3 to MMU-75 to expand an existing plumbing operation across adjacent lots. The commission voted to recommend approval of the rezoning to the City Council with a condition requiring a landscape buffer.
Minor Land Development Project: 106 Reservoir Avenue
The applicant proposed constructing three stories of residential units above an existing commercial building, requesting a dimensional adjustment for parking. The commission approved the parking adjustment and granted preliminary plan approval with standard conditions.
City Council Referral: 103 Evergreen Street
The commission reviewed a petition to rezone a property from R-3 to R-4 to allow the construction of a 58-unit multifamily building. The commission voted to recommend approval of the rezoning to the City Council with a condition prohibiting short-term rentals.
Speaker 0
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Yeah.
Speaker 1
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I was like,
Speaker 2
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Okay. Good evening. We are going to call this, meeting of the city plan commission to order. Today is Tuesday, February 20. It is 04:47PM.
Speaker 2
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We will take a roll call. Let's go around starting with Charlotte. Here. Charlotte. Nicole Verde.
Speaker 1
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Here.
Speaker 2
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Dave Caldwell. Here.
Speaker 3
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Choyan, manager, card, DVD staff.
Speaker 4
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Bob Ezar, staff.
Speaker 1
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Sharon Garner, legal counsel.
Speaker 2
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And I'm Michael Gazzako, chair. We'll move right into the approval of the minutes of the 01/16/2024 meeting. I hope you've all received the minutes in advance, had a chance to peruse them. Any edits, changes of any kind? Otherwise, we take a motion to approve.
Speaker 4
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Motion to approve.
Speaker 1
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Second.
Speaker 2
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Alright. Let's do just all in favor, say aye. Aye. All opposed? Do I
Speaker 1
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need to abstain? Because I wasn't there. Wonderful.
Speaker 2
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The minutes carry. Now we'll move right into, director's report.
Speaker 4
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Well, I think the, director's report is gonna segue right into item number one. So I figured as much. We probably do that. We still wanted to
Speaker 2
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give you the opportunity if anything else came about. So then we will go right into the first agenda item, which is a comprehensive plan update,
Speaker 4
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And I'll hand that right over to Okay. I'll tee this one up. So as as you know, we we have been working for many months now on the comprehensive plan on the community engagement portion, and now we're into, the the period where we're drafting the report. And, what we would like to do today is to give you sort of a very big picture, what we're calling a growth strategy for the city. This is essentially a map, that in very general terms talks about growth and where we wanna see it and and somewhat about the character of that growth.
Speaker 4
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What's important to understand is that this is not the future land use map. That is is a more detailed map that becomes the basis of the zoning map and the zoning ordinance. The future land use map is is much more, again, detailed and binding on our on our land use policy and our zoning ordinance. But this growth strategy is sort of the the first cut of, talking about growth. We have something similar to it in the existing plan.
Speaker 4
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We call it areas of stability and change. This is very similar to that, but with a little bit more detail. In the coming months, we'll be talking much more about, other aspects of the plan. I think we're, next month, we're gonna get more specific about land use and and probably start talking about the the future land use map at that meeting. But for the time being, I'm gonna turn it over to Jess Lance, director of special projects, and Tim Shea, our our community planning manager, and they're gonna sort of walk through the the thought process and introduce to you this this map.
Speaker 4
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Keep in mind, everybody, I know there's a lot of people here. I'm I'm excited that we have a lot of interest in this. Keep in mind that this is very much a draft. This is the first time that we're showing this publicly, and we welcome any and all feedback.
Speaker 5
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Great. Can can everyone hear me okay? Is the microphone working? Great. Bob, if you don't just mind letting me share screen on the Zoom.
Speaker 5
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Thank you. Great. Okay. Thanks for your patience, and thank you commission for having us again. We're excited to talk about the next steps of of the comprehensive plan update.
Speaker 5
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One moment here.
Speaker 2
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Okay.
Speaker 5
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Perfect. So today, just to break out our agenda a little bit, we're gonna, quickly just ground ourselves in our community engagement process. We're gonna talk about what a growth strategy is, what informs the growth strategy, and then get into the proposal that we have here today. So, we first of all, in December, we gave a presentation to the city plan commission, on kind of summarizing some key findings, talking about our process. So I'd first of all, just recommend if anyone hasn't seen that presentation yet, that is, online on our website at plan.providenceri.gov.
Speaker 5
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So we won't be spending a ton of time talking about that here today. But just quickly recapping, you know, we've gone through a pretty iterative and thorough engagement process, starting from kind of meetings that were intended to be listening sessions to hear about key issues. We went into a really mixed methods engagement process looking at visioning with community members, coming up with ideas, identifying challenges and solutions. And now we're getting into the drafting phase. So we've kinda highlighted in pink here starting the city plan commission, review.
Speaker 5
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But, as as we mentioned, you know, we've had over 75 community events that have looked, they've they've really varied. There we've had online engagement, online surveys. We've had tabling at neighborhood events. We've had more topic based kind of focused discussions in neighborhoods around the city. And, of course, our 15 stop ward workshop tour, but can never fit all those findings on a single slide.
Speaker 5
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But just to give you a quick sense, you know, we've discussed what our vision for the city's future is. We've tried to identify some of those key issues, key issues that came up really frequently around housing, around climate, around transportation. We've talked about ideas, policy ideas that people have had. And then within these topic areas, what are some of the attitudes that community members have to different solutions? So, the bottom here, we have some of the data from our online survey when we ask people agree or disagree about different statements on housing.
Speaker 5
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So we'll we'll you know, you'll see a lot of this reflected kind of in in what goes into the growth strategy today, but I think, you know, a huge takeaway being that the housing crisis is affecting everyone in this city in different ways. Everyone's really feeling it. That's something that we heard loud and clear through this process, whether it's just your lived experience or you have policy ideas about the housing crisis and how we should respond. But but we heard a lot about, you know, more comprehensive ideas of growth and development in people's neighborhoods. You want walkability.
Speaker 5
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We want sustainability. We want safety and cleanliness. And so this is today a first step, at thinking about solutions to those ideas. So first of all, what is it? What is the growth strategy?
Speaker 5
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So as Bob mentioned, it's really a conceptual map. This is not intended to go property by property around the city and say, this one, we're ready for development. This one, not. It's really trying to visualize and guide our land use strategy, kinda answering that question that we asked a lot in engagement of where and how should the city grow. And, you know, it's gonna be implemented in the future land use map, but it's also implemented in different objectives and strategies that you'll find across chapters within the comp plan, whether it's sustainability related, housing, could be parks, open space related, but but this is kind of roughly what it is.
Speaker 5
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So in 2014, our current comprehensive plan, you know, you could think of the map, the growth and stability map as kind of our our growth strategy. So we asked where and how should we grow, and kind of the takeaway was that we want our neighborhoods to remain stable, but we'd like to encourage growth in downtown, in post industrial areas, in some of those commercial corridors, but kind of keep neighborhoods stable. And that was then translated to changes in land use, new strategies that were implemented. And and today, we're gonna try and take another, bite at that apple ten years later. So what informs the growth strategy?
Speaker 5
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It is a lot of things. You know, it's really kind of we're looking our team has done a lot of data analysis on population growth and change, a lot of analysis on development that's happened in the city in the last decade. We have our engagement findings where people talk about their lived experience of how their neighborhood has changed and how that might not necessarily be reflected in data, but, is a little more nuanced. And, of course, we're always looking at best practices in planning and development, you know, not just in Providence, but but around the country. So on topics like density, transit oriented development, we've pulled out in particular.
Speaker 5
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And then, of course, we're also looking at what exists in the city today, what's in the built environment. So here, this is gonna be a little hard to see, but I'm just pointing to to a few examples. So here, you know, is a map looking at population growth across neighborhoods in the city, which takeaway is that there's there's been significant population growth across the city. We've looked at where are new units being added across the city. So these are all projects that came to the city plan commission from 2014 to, 2024 and where where they're located.
Speaker 5
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We've done some analysis looking at amenities within neighborhoods. We looking at how walkable neighborhoods are, where transit service is available, and trying to get a sense of if you if you made more of an index of that, how do we define what neighborhoods we consider walkable, What neighborhoods do we not consider walkable? Where should we try and encourage maybe more density that aligns with goods transit service and walkability? And then lastly, just this on the existing built environment. So, you know, we've done some analysis looking at what is allowed in our zoning versus what exists in real life in the city.
Speaker 5
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So one little map here. This is just looking at some of our our two zones and seeing what existing what the built environment actually looks like in those zones. And we, you know, we find here in in other zones of the city that there's actually you know, you might find a lot of three families in your r two zone or or even more. And that's not just your r two. That's just one example.
Speaker 5
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But the built environment doesn't always match up with what it's sewn for. So I feel like I'm really drawing this out here before we get to the visual, but the just to mention, not everything can be visualized in this concept map. So there's a lot that we're looking at, a lot that really came from community engagement that will be addressed in strategies within the plan, things that kind of moderate growth to in line with best practices, in line with what input we've received. So, you know, things around, how we regulate the actual height and scale, the building envelope of of new development, design standards and guidelines. This is something we've heard loud and clear.
Speaker 5
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If we're gonna encourage more development in the city, if we need to, we need to hold people to a higher standard. We've heard that loud and clear. We're gonna be looking at proposals there. Student housing and short term rentals to issues that come up really acutely in certain neighborhoods where it's really affected, both quality of life, but also the rental market in those neighborhoods. Climate resilience.
Speaker 5
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So this is one especially when we're looking at where we're seeing more repeat flooding incidents, where there's really overpaving that's causing kind of nuisance flooding in streets, how we address that and how we maybe try to incentivize different practices in development. And then, of course, if we're gonna grow, how do we manage how people get around? How do we manage, you know, maybe we do not want as many new cars as we want new people in these neighborhoods. So how do we invest in other, mobility alternatives and regulate them? But getting into the the actual proposal now.
Speaker 5
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So first of all, we've, broken out the scales of growth in this map, in kind of a few degrees. So we have this looks like a lot of text now. It'll all be a little clearer in a moment, but we we've broken out kind of our priority growth areas, our enhanced growth areas, which up to feedback if people think these terms don't quite capture it, and our managed growth areas. So priority growth areas, we're defining as really high amenity areas with the best transit service, the best mobility options where we want to encourage large scale dense mixed use development. And then we've outlined our our growth corridors that are also kind of mixed use.
Speaker 5
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These are commercial and transit corridors where there are nodes or areas within those corridors that we think are suited for mixed use or higher density residential development. And we've outlined this kind of second tier of enhanced growth residential predominantly. And so these are areas, you know, that have varying densities around the city, but we think based on their proximity to amenities to downtown, their mobility options, the existing environment, that they're suitable for higher density residential development. Managed growth, we're considering this kind of lower tier where it's primarily residential areas, different densities, and different neighborhoods. But development in these areas should really just be infill development that kind of matches what exists there, what matches existing development patterns.
Speaker 5
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And, of course, we've called out our historic district. So these are places that have sites of, historic architectural cultural significance where we're really trying to preserve the built environment there through really strict design, controls and guidelines. And our map highlights the historic districts themselves, but we also have specific properties around the city that we include within our our landmarks district. So a little bit little bit of nuance there. Lastly, before we get into the map, we've included in this map institutional areas where we're encouraging our hospitals and universities to grow.
Speaker 5
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We're have our general industrial areas where we're are restricting kind of residential development because we're allowing industry manufacturing, to grow in those areas. And then we've pulled out here blue green industrial, what we're calling it for now. But, you know, along our waterfront, along the port where we're encouraging industrial growth, but we really wanna prioritize a different kind of industrial growth, prioritize clean, sustainable, resilient economic development. So I won't I'll try not to draw this out too much longer, but here's a base map with our neighborhoods highlighted. Talked about those historic districts that have the highest design standards, mostly preserving what exists in those places, some on the East Side, Elmwood, West End Armory, and Broadway.
Speaker 5
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We have, this is our priority growth areas, so areas that we consider having the highest amenities, lot of mobility options. So here we've highlighted downtown, the North Main Street corridor. We've actually highlighted the hospital district in, Upper South Providence just over the highway. A little hard to to make out the way we've laid it out here, but also the Winnoskotucket Valley corridor and the Olneyville Square area. Here are what we consider to be growth corridors, again, that there are nodes and areas along these corridors where we think there's mixed use, higher density residential development is suitable.
Speaker 5
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And then this is the second tier, what we're calling enhanced growth areas. So pretty proximate to a lot of amenities, good mobility options. And here, we think excuse me. There's already prevalence of high density housing. So here, we think it's suitable for higher density residential development.
Speaker 5
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So here, we've outlined this kinda inner urban ring of neighborhoods essentially. So Federal Hill, pieces of the West End, parts of Upper South Providence, parts of Smith Hill, and then pieces here of Fox Point, College Hill, and then kind of that pieces of the Angel Waterman Corridor. You'll see there's a blank there that gets filled in in a moment. But managed growth areas, again, this is primarily residential areas, the rest of the city, development in line with what exists today. We've highlighted institutional zones, so universities and hospitals.
Speaker 5
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And then these are some of our areas for industry, areas that should be without residential development, again, highlighting that, waterfront port area where we're trying to encourage more sustainable, cleaner industry. And that is the map. So, we can talk through, obviously, have some yeah. I'm sure you'll have some comments, some questions, just briefly on next steps. Bob mentioned we have a presentation in March at the city plan commission meeting.
Speaker 5
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Then later on, we will be publishing the draft plan, presenting it to CPC. We're planning a series of neighborhood feedback events for the audible groan that I might have heard there. We're only we're gonna do kind of four five, excuse me, five drop in events at community spaces. Look. We're in discussions with libraries right now to spend kind of a whole afternoon, evening, Northeast, Southwest, central, where we can put out a lot of these proposals, put out our summary of engagement, and people can come and comment, say what they think was captured, wasn't, and then we'll have that public hearing with the city planning commission before it's handed over to the city council.
Speaker 2
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Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Tim and Jess, both of you. Again, I I applaud your efforts, and