PHILADELPHIA – Today, the Zoning Code Commission adopted a majority report and a minority report for presentation to City Council as part of Philadelphia’s ongoing zoning reform process.  As the Commission’s consultant stated today, in every City that undertakes Zoning Code revision there is disagreement among reasonable people about combining textual changes in the Zoning Code with a remapping or, instead, passing the Code first and remapping later.  The minority report suggests the first course, as has been done recently in Miami and Denver (described in the attached brief summary), whereas the majority report suggests the second course.

Councilman At-Large Bill Green joined nine members of the Zoning Code Commission in issuing the minority report to City Council, stressing the need to couple the Code revision with revision of the City’s zoning maps.

If the new Code is enacted prior to redrawing the city’s zoning maps, there could be troubling consequences for neighborhoods.  The “automatic conversion” of the City’s zoning maps that would occur under the Majority report’s approach would permit the immediate liberalization of permissible uses and major dimensional changes – which would take place citywide as soon as the new Code becomes effective.  This means, for example, that when the Planning Commission begins analyzing individual planning districts for remapping purposes, it may be confronted with new uses allowed by the “automatic conversion” that are entirely inconsistent with how the neighborhood should be re-zoned – significantly undermining the ability of the Planning Commission and residents to chart a new course for the neighborhood through remapping.

City Council will hold hearings on the Commission’s preliminary report and send any suggested changes back to the Commission.  The Commission then has a chance to consider the suggestions from Council and incorporate them or not, as it sees fit, in its final report, which is sent back to Council for a vote.  In the fourth and final step of the Zoning Code reform process, Council has to vote to approve, vote to disapprove, or table the final report.  Council cannot amend the final report.

Councilman Green issued the following statement reiterating his full support of the revision of Philadelphia's Zoning Code:

“As a member of the Zoning Code Commission, I commend the staff of the Zoning Code and Planning Commissions, my fellow members, and the Mayor for their significant work on this new Code.  The excellent, diligent, and collaborative work that’s been done on the proposed Zoning Code over the past three-plus years has put us in a position to enact the first major revision of the Zoning Code in almost 50 years.  I look forward to moving this process to the next step – review by City Council.

I am concerned that ‘automatic conversion’ opens transitioning neighborhoods to land use changes and development that may be wholly inconsistent with the direction the neighborhood is heading – or where residents and planning professionals would want it to head –  without any public input.  We want to avoid a scenario under which speculators or other opportunists have a window of up to five years to come into a neighborhood and start up an inappropriate land use that will become a vested right.

Many of these unintended consequences can be avoided by making the Zoning Code effective upon the remapping of planning districts, which itself will follow an intensive planning and community input process.  Alternatively, and hopefully, we can attempt to identify and address these issues through the Council process that is now beginning.

I intend to be Council’s strongest advocate for moving this process forward and for Council ultimately enacting a transparent, sustainable, easy-to-understand Code that encourages development and respects the character and charm of our neighborhoods.”