Key Points
- Wilton officials are racing to meet a July 1 state deadline requiring changes to local zoning regulations for certain small residential developments.
- A new state housing law will significantly limit the town’s ability to review and approve some projects through the traditional public hearing process.
- The ARB is helping craft more specific design standards in an effort to preserve local control over the appearance and character of future middle housing developments.
Why It Matters: Connecticut’s new housing law could reshape how and where some residential developments are approved in Wilton, reducing local discretion and prompting town officials to redefine what control they can still exercise through zoning and design standards.
With a state-mandated July 1 deadline looming, Wilton’s Architectural Review Board (ARB) is undertaking a review of the town’s design guidelines for certain types of residential projects that, by state law, must be fast-tracked for approval with minimal local review.
At the request of the Planning and Zoning Commission (P&Z), the ARB agreed during its Jun. 4 meeting to help P&Z develop a checklist that the town’s zoning compliance officer can use to ensure proposals for residential buildings with between two and nine units on lots zoned for commercial and mixed uses — called “transit community middle housing” — are compliant with the town’s zoning code.
That’s because, under Special Session Public Act 25-1, an Act Concerning Housing Growth, P&Z will not have the authority to approve middle housing proposals through the traditional public hearing process, but will only be able to provide cursory reviews of them — a significant shift in local control over certain residential development proposals. Barring egregious health and safety risks, the only way for P&Z to retain some measure of local oversight is to ensure the requirements are explicitly spelled out in the zoning regulations.
As municipalities throughout Connecticut scramble to update their zoning regulations to meet the requirements of PA 25-1 — of which the middle housing requirements are only one — everyone is trying to find answers.
“[There’s an] awful lot of unknowns and everybody’s in the in the same boat,” Director of Planning and Land Use Management Michael Wrinn told the commissioners.
Factors to Consider Include Site Context, Building Design and Landscaping
P&Z discussed the middle housing requirements at its May 26 meeting, when Wrinn presented draft language to the commissioners after several months of intensive behind-the-scenes work by staff. To assist the ARB with the process of reviewing and drafting what will eventually become a new chapter of the zoning code, Wrinn prepared extracts from applicable zoning regulations and design guidelines, along with sample language.
Because middle housing is intended for commercially zoned land, Wrinn encouraged the ARB to “drill down” into existing commercial zoning regulations — for example the Greater Wilton Center Master Plan — to determine whether their requirements would be applicable to small residential buildings as well to as the larger commercial buildings they were originally intended to address.
“When we look at the Wilton Center master plan design regulations and the architectural piece of that, are all of those specifications something we’d want to see on a building like this?” Wrinn asked.
The commissioners discussed a wide range of factors to consider, including roof height and pitch, materials, and ensuring building designs complement the aesthetic of the surrounding structures.
“Do [developers] want to harmonize or do they want to contrast?” ARB Chair Kevin Quinlan asked “My thing I kept thinking of is responsiveness to context … do we give them free rein?”
ARB Vice-Chair John Doyle noted that middle housing developments consisting of townhouses, duplexes and triplexes, cottage clusters, and “perfect sixes” — three-story residential buildings with a central entrance and two units per story — would likely need to be connected to the town’s sewer system, given that small commercial lots would not have sufficient space for septic fields.
“We still have to deal with that whole sewer issue, regardless of how many units are going to put in [a commercial parcel], because we’re basically at our limit,” Wrinn said. “As long as [a proposed development] is below what’s there today, they’re okay, but if this raises that sewer run out of that, then it’s a problem. They won’t be able to go in.”
Doyle also noted that small commercial lots also present challenges for sufficient setbacks and space for driveways and parking, which ARB should also address.
“What you’re trying to do is have some kind of a rhythm on the street,” Doyle said. “You’re going to end up with a lot of 8-30g [median-income developments] with 16 units in there if you don’t make it easy enough.”
Quinlan pointed out that existing guidelines fit many size projects, which will make their job easier.
“I think we have a great framework already and a great review process already, and this is just another type of animal to review,” Quinlan said. “I think we should sort of stay to our guns and stay in our lane and use all the great criteria that we already have and apply it toward the nuances and uniqueness of this.”
Wrinn agreed that existing checklists were helpful, but stressed that the guidelines need to explicitly address requirements for residential buildings with nine or fewer units.
“We want to give the zoning officer something that he’s going to look at and say, ‘Okay, you, the applicant, picked one of these four materials, you’re fine there. You hit the roof line, you’re fine. You have a roof pitch of such-and-such a pitch.’ Or, ‘You’ve broken up this area that’s more than 30 feet wide with an indentation that’s two feet deep,’ something like that,” Wrinn said. “Those are in the regulations, the design guidelines themselves, but I think we have to look at those design guidelines with an eye towards a smaller project like [middle housing].”
Commissioner Kathy Poirier pointed out that the way the town’s zoning codes are written make it difficult to reduce some things to a checklist format, which favors specificity over the flexibility offered in the code.
“This code was not written as a checklist, it was written as a form-based code,” Poirier said. “So that was more like, ‘We’re giving you a little bit of play, and then you’re allowed to mold it.’ And so that doesn’t fit with a checklist.”
Next Steps
Wrinn asked the ARB commissioners to review the relevant sections of the design guidelines and mark up where they think more specificity is warranted for transit-oriented middle housing, and then he will reach out to them to see what they have been able to come up with. Quinlan suggested that the commissioners might also want to schedule a work session to “slug away” at a consensus draft.
ARB and P&Z are under a tight deadline to get a draft checklist done in time to allow P&Z to schedule a public hearing and vote to approve the revised zoning regulations drafted by the July 1 deadline.
At the May 26 P&Z meeting, Wrinn noted that the regulations could be revised once they have been passed, and that this would not be the final word on the subject — particularly as no one is sure how these new regulations will be tested in practice.
The effort reflects a broader challenge facing municipalities across Connecticut as they try to determine how much local control they will retain under the state’s new housing law.
“That’s the head scratching part that we have to deal with is, how much can we check off? And how much can we regulate to say, ‘Well, instead of this pitched roof here, we’d like to see another flat roof over the entrance instead of that mix?’ I don’t know if you’re going to be able to do that,” Wrinn said. “We’re still trying to get an answer to that. I don’t think we’re going to see that answer until someone goes to court.”
