Building Form Zones

If you’re familiar with Zoning Codes, you may be familiar with the idea of ‘zone districts’ (identified on the zoning map). Zone districts are mapped areas of the City that indicate to the user what land uses can be developed on the properties beneath. 

As an example, the R2 zone district permits uses that are oriented to the development of residential neighborhoods and the C1 zone district permits commercial (typically). Often times, these zone districts are broken into sub categories based on the ‘intensity’ of the uses permitted with each zone district. For instance, the R1 zone district permits small-scale housing while the R3 zone district permits multi-family housing. R2 would traditionally be seen as a mix between the two. The zoning code establishes the dimensional rules for each of the zone district categories you see on the zoning map. As you can imagine, these dimensional rules can be quite restrictive for R1 zoned properties and more flexible for R2, and the most flexible for R3.   

The new zoning draft goes even further to break our established zone districts into smaller zones called “Form Zones”. For example the R2 zone district maybe divided into 'core', 'transition', and 'edge'. In stead of apply standard dimensional standards to all properties within R2, these areas that have unique restrictions that are directly tailored to the established pattern of buildings in different areas. This concept of zoning is called a “form based” approach. Instead of creating dimensional rules for uses and building sizes based on industry standards, those rules are tailored to the “forms” that are already established in the area by the buildings already built.

From now on users of the code will follow the standard zone district to determine permitted uses (e.g. R-2) and the form zone to determine the dimensional regulations permitted for construction (e.g. R-2 Core, R-2 Transition, R-2 Edge). Again the big difference now is that the dimensional regulations are meant to be compatible with what came before versus what could be.  

The consultants studied all of the neighborhoods in the City of Golden to create form zones that followed the rhythm and character when developing the form zones. Did they get it right? Are the boundaries they’ve indicated on the revised map reflective of the established development? Let us know what you think. Is there anything about the proposal that you particularly like?