On Tuesday, March 11 2025, I presented these recommendations to the Grand Rapids City Commission during the public comment period. It seemed well-received, so I hope they choose to take action.
The 2024 Grand Rapids Community Master Plan took four years to complete and provides an aspirational, albeit vague, vision for the next twenty years. The accompanying comprehensive zoning code rewrite requires 18-24 months to complete. Do we have the luxury of waiting two years, or are there simple, impactful changes we could make now?
The 2022 Housing Needs Assessment revealed a deficit of 14,106 housing units, a 59% increase from the study two years prior, which showed a need for only 8,888 units. This equates to an annual need of 2,821 units. Why is the gap growing instead of shrinking? New building permits in GR have averaged about 400 units per year since the 1980s, which is only 14% of where it needs to be! 😲 If this trend continues, the two years it takes to rewrite our zoning ordinance will result in a further deficit of 4,842 units. Another way to look at this is that each day, we need 7.7 additional units, but we’re only permitting 1.1. So our housing gap continues to increase by 6 units per day. 😟
Annual Building Permits in Grand Rapids since 1980
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Mayor LaGrand’s initiative, Mayor’s Mondays, alternates between conversations on housing, justice, and infrastructure rotating between wards each week. At the 1st Ward meeting on housing on 1/27/25, the Mayor informally polled attendees about eliminating greenspace requirements—an idea I enthusiastically support!
As a small, infill developer, I engage with the zoning code far more extensively than the average citizen, and several common barriers to increasing density seem to arise frequently. Here’s my proposal for what the City and Planning Commissioners should do now:
Remove all greenspace requirements (Red line Sec. 5.5.06 H)
Eliminate the minimum lot area of 2000 sqft/unit for multiple family units in TN-LDR zones. Ideally, eliminate all minimum lot sizes. (5.5.06 A.)
Reduce setbacks:
A. Change combined side yard setbacks for interior lots from 14’ to 10’. (5.5.06.E.)
B. Reduce the rear yard setback to 5’. (5.5.06.F.)
or
C. Reduce side yard and rear yard setbacks to 3’. This is already permitted for accessory structures and can be safely done under the Michigan Building Code by ensuring walls less than 5’ are built using a fire-rated assembly. While this change may be more contentious and isn’t quite the “no-brainer” as the other options, I’m including it in the hopes of sparking a constructive conversation.
Increase the permitted story height from 2.5 stories to 3.5 (5.5.07A).
2/19/24: I took the liberty of drafting redlines of the current ordinance text with my proposed changes, so interested parties could see the precise adjustments I suggest. Additionally, Planning Department Staff may find this a useful and time-saving resource.
Why these four policy proposals? My friend and StrongTownsGR colleague Adam over at UrbanGR recently analyzed an entire block in his neighborhood and found that these ordinances are rather redundant. They tend to force the same building patterns in slightly different ways.
- Greenspace requirements make it illegal to build on 40% of residentially zoned property.
- Density requirements limit most properties to 2-3 housing units.
- Setbacks restrict building on about 55% of the lot’s area.
- Height limitations cap the amount of livable space that can be built.
These outdated policies are preventing developers from providing the housing our city desperately needs. 😢 By implementing these targeted changes, we can address our housing deficit and prevent it from worsening. Moreover, these policies tend to reinforce each other; eliminating just one without addressing the others is likely to leave developers stymied by the remaining bottlenecks.
The City Commission should add this discussion to its agenda, request the Planning Commission draft zoning ordinance text amendments to modify these policies, and then vote to approve them. This could happen in less than two months if prioritized. I’m happy to assist however I can. My application to be appointed to the Planning Commission should still be on file!
A City Commissioner’s Perspective
Yesterday, I asked a question about concrete steps we could take during this 24-month gap between the CMP adoption and our aligning ordinances to comply. Commissioner Belchak, speaking on GRTV’s City Connection LiveStream, answered by referencing the city’s upcoming landbank with 106 properties. While I have reservations, given Michigan’s history with landbanks, this could be a positive step. However, even if all 106 properties were developed with single-family homes, that’s just 3.8% of our annual need. Embracing the reforms I propose above could double or triple the impact of those properties, so why not make this once-in-a-generation opportunity as impactful as possible? 💪
A Deeper Dive for Nerds 🤓
So what’s the why behind these specific zoning tweaks?
Greenspace & Setbacks
Shakespeare once opined, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” suggesting that a name does not change the true nature of a thing. Yet, we have two separate names for essentially the same thing. And both ‘greenspace’ and ‘setbacks’ smell like a corpse flower to me like. 🌹➡️💀🌸
Back in August, I attended a City Planning Commission meeting to provide feedback on the draft Community Master Plan. Here’s my written letter if you’d like to read it, but I’ll summarize the relevant section below.
Lots in the TN-LDR zone in GR are typically between 36-50 feet wide and about 100-125 feet deep, usually around 5,000-6,000 ft². One of the properties I’m developing is 44×124, totaling 5,456 ft². The minimum 2,000 ft² per unit means I can build a maximum of two units. This incentivizes developers like me to build big houses. So two, 4-bed units are legal, but four, 2-bed units are not. The total is 8 bedrooms in both cases, which seems like an arbitrary distinction.
Greenspace often overlaps with setbacks, and in this case, the setbacks are more restrictive than the 40% greenspace requirement. The real issue arises when considering off-street parking, sidewalks, and accessory buildings like garages or ADUs. Given that GR aims for over 81% of households to be within a 10-minute walk of a park or active green space, it seems unreasonable to burden each lot with another requirement. While we could require each new house to have its own well and septic system, we recognize the efficiency of connecting to the city-provided infrastructure. Shouldn’t greenspace be the same? Let’s share greenspace with our neighbors instead of prioritizing plants over people. As of the end of FY24, we’re currently at 81.3% of households, surpassing the goal!
I sketched out the lot, showing the legal buildable area in green and the illegal areas in red. The light red represents the nonsensical extra 4’ required by our ordinance’s “combined total yard setbacks of 14’,” when the minimum for each side is just 5’.
Nobody within the Planning Department has been able to explain why 14’ is necessary when each side requires just 5 feet. Planners often justify setbacks by citing things like needing light, air, or emergency responder access. But if 5 feet on one side is sufficient, 10 feet should be the total. For this specific property, I’m building a side-by-side duplex. Since my maximum total frontage is 30’, each unit is 15 feet wide. If I could utilize that extra 4 feet, I could increase the width of each unit by 13%, which would feel significant. However, since the foundation has been poured and the house framed, that inefficiency is now built into those units for probably the next 100 years, which seems like a shame. At 400 housing units per year, do we want to build another 800 inefficient housing units when it’s within our power to make a change for the better right now?
A sample GR lot highlighting the harsh realities imposed by setbacks.
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While I think we should eliminate side-yard setbacks (or set them to 0) to allow for Zero-Lot-Line houses like those popular in Boston, NYC, and Paris, such a significant change might be better considered during the comprehensive rewrite. A recent article highlights how slow it is to transform an entire city merely through regulating new construction, and it includes this insightful quote:
“Land use policies therefore have to anticipate and allow changes decades before the actual land uses might actually change.” (Emphasis added.)
If we someday want to see rows of townhouses lining our city’s streets, it’s important to start allowing those to be built now!
The US Census estimates GR’s households to be 79,944. If we get 400 new units built per year with updated codes, that’s just 0.5% per year which means it would take around 200 years to perpetuate through all households!
You can read more about the problems with setbacks here. The smaller the lot, the bigger the problem. And the Zoning Amendments of 2024 allowed for smaller lots, so this problem is exacerbated.
Density
The 2,000 ft² density requirement has the effect of largely nullifying the Zoning Amendment the City Commission adopted last year. Page 9: Sec. 5.9.20. Multiple-Family Dwellings. B 2
In the TN-LDR Zone District, a multiple-family development of six (6) or fewer units is a permitted use when located on a Link Residential or Network Residential Street.
Unless a lot is 12,000 ft² (hint: few are!), it’s not legal to build six units. Even if they’re just 6-studios. And yet, it’s perfectly legal to build and rent a 6-bedroom house to 6 unrelated individuals. Fixing this glaring error is as simple as purging all mentions of minimum square feet per unit requirements from our ordinance. 😩➡️🚫➡️🤗
Height Limitations
Why should we increase building heights from 2.5 stories to 3.5? Because it allows developers to build less expensive buildings, which translates into cheaper housing costs for residents. ⬆️🏢=⬇️🏠💰
Two economists from Purdue and California State Polytechnic University, Mike Eriksen and Anthony Orlando took a much deeper dive on optimal building heights and published a paper called “Returns to Scale in Residential Construction: The Marginal Impact of Building Height.” In their abstract, they conclude:
We find that height regulation often has large, negative effects on housing affordability, with increasing magnitudes for more expensive land markets.
They later explain that:
…unconstrained developers will minimize average construction costs for residential buildings by building 3, 7, or 12 stories. (Emphasis added.)
Permitting by right the number of stories that minimize cost is a logical way to reduce average housing costs. Conversely, forcing developers to one of the peaks makes little sense. 🪙
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While increased height is allowed under a Special Land Use, this option is neither common nor cost-effective for small infill developments. In a city that’s largely built out, building up is the only realistic option. We find ourselves stuck in a feedback loop where taller buildings are prohibited to maintain “neighborhood character” because neighboring parcels don’t have them. This self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates itself and ultimately prevents any change and evolution in our neighborhoods. 😔
Based on resident feedback during the CMP engagement sessions, we decided to: “Allow duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes, and ADUs by-right in zoning districts where single-family housing is allowed.” Resident Feedback from Round 3 summarized in Round 4 Boards
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Per the Final Master Plan: duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes are allowed wherever SFHs exist today! 😍
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For quadplexes to be built, the zoning rewrite will almost assuredly increase the permitted height of buildings. Given that it will take 200 years to cycle these changes through our existing housing stock, I hope we continue to be ambitious and fact-based and allow building heights of 7 stories by right in the rewrite. However, it’s a fairly easy leap to allow 3.5 stories right now. According to our ordinance, 3.5 stories is essentially what a layperson would consider a three-story building with a regular gable roof.
If I were the Zoning Czar, I’d point out that because any structure with three or more units pushes developers into the more complex and expensive International Building Code (IBC) instead of the chapter and easier to implement International Residential Code (IRC), quadplexes are likely not enough to justify this added expense, especially when one can build a duplex with a detached ADU under the IRC (3 housing units).
Our zoning ordinance will improve when it’s based more on facts and less on feelings. 📚🤔🔍