Explaining some legislation: the South Stoughton Road Plan and tiny house villages

This is an item from my weekly update that got too long to include in the update. I suspect most people don't want to read this, but some people will want the details. My apologies for two emails in one day.

At the Common Council meeting last week, I introduced a piece of legislation that is related to a possible "Tiny House Village" on the South Stoughton Road frontage road. From reading it you would probably never realize what it does, so I wanted to explain it here in more detail. 

Upfront, I want to be very clear: this legislation does NOT grant any approvals to a possible Tiny House Village. There has not been a proposal submitted and we have not started any approval processes or neighborhood discussions. This is a procedural item to help make future discussions and debates less confusing and easier to follow. It is not a debate on the merits of a possible tiny house village, that would happen later and only when we have all relevant information. You can mostly ignore this item but I don't want anyone to think that we're "pulling a fast one." 

The item is titled "Amending the Stoughton Road Revitalization Project Plan to add a note to the "Proposed Land Use Classifications" Map to allow consideration of a specific land use proposal." It literally only adds a 5th footnote on a page to a 104-page plan from 2008 for the Stoughton Road corridor. The footnote basically just says (paraphrased) "there may be some non-industrial uses permitted in a small area that is otherwise industrial, but it would have to be a detailed proposal and go through the full approval process"

Background on Plans and Zoning

To explain why this matters I need to talk a little bit about zoning and planning, and how they're different. This is all the 50,000-foot view of things and by necessity I will be simplifying in (quite a few) ways.

Zoning is the legal definition of how a parcel of land can be used and what form buildings on that parcel can take. This is things like "you can have a bakery here" or "you can have a drycleaner here", or "you can have a building up to 4 stories here". Madison has about 50 different types of "zoning districts" defined that set up all the rules for what is permitted in that district, and most of the land in Madison is classified by one of these existing types of zoning districts. Occasionally, however, there are places or projects where none of the existing zoning districts have quite the right rules. In these cases, one option is to create a "Planned Development" district, which basically means for a specific area, the City can create a unique-to-that-area zoning district. 

It's possible to change a location's zoning - a "rezoning" - but the rezoning has to be consistent with the City's plans.

The City's plans are higher-level documents that lay out the future of an area, including "future land use maps". These are not quite zoning maps - the map in a plan might say in the future an area will switch from being agricultural to "low density residential". However, there are like 10 different zoning districts that could be used for "low density residential" and the plans never say which one should be used, that's all sorted out later. 

The key thing to know is that any rezoning is required to be consistent with the City's plans, which for this area would include the South Stoughton Road plan. The land that folks want to put a Tiny House Village on is not zoned for a tiny house village, and so that land would have to be rezoned. However, any zoning that permitted a tiny house village would probably not be consistent with the South Stoughton Road plan, so the plan would also have to change.  

Changing the plan while also changing the zoning is not unheard of in Madison and it's possible to do. However, it's more involved and it takes more time from staff, from commissioners, from neighbors, and from pretty much everyone. Changing the plan and the zoning at the same time gets into multiple moving parts that have to be timed right and it's procedurally more of a hassle. You run the risk of conflating multiple issues during debates. 

Furthermore, I really do not want to make changes to the South Stoughton Road Plan right now, because in 2024 we'll be redoing the entire plan when we create the "Southeast Area Plan" in the new planning process, which will be a whole-of-city-government project. City staff is already busy with the Northeast Area Plan and the West Area plan and any SSR plan changes right now are a distraction from that work. But, if there is a submission for land use approval and rezoning for a tiny house village on South Stoughton Road in 2023 (and I think there will be), there will have to be a plan change. 

Back to the legislation

To avoid having a debate over both the plan and the zoning, what City staff and I came up with was a way to avoid making a substantive change to the plan while also setting out a very narrow procedure to discuss tiny house villages. This way, we don't have to consider possible changes to the 'future land use map', all of that stays as-is and any business in the area sees no change. I really want to avoid any unintended consequences like might happen if we start to change the future land use map and put different classifications for some areas but the tiny house village is never actually built. 

The way the footnote is written should avoid all of these issues. It takes a debate about possible bigger plan changes off the table, leaves everything as they are, while still setting up a process for consideration of a tiny house village and basically only that.

When we have a debate about tiny houses, the debate will be better because it will only be part of a full land use proposal, which are very detailed documents. From our early discussions with Occupy Madison, the group who would be behind the tiny house village, it sounds like what they will need to do is propose a "Planned Development" zoning, which requires an extensive set of information and multiple approval steps and multiple public hearings and plenty of opportunity for feedback and discussion. 

Where are we now

Occupy Madison has closed on the property and owns the land on S Stoughton Road. They may already be using it to build tiny houses, because that is permitted under the current zoning, but no one is allowed to live there. 

The change I've proposed will be at the Plan Commission this week and then at the Common Council at the end of the month. I expect that it will pass. 

I do not know when Occupy Madison will submit their formal proposal for a Tiny House village on S Stoughton Road. For all I know they could do that on Monday or they might not submit for several months, so I don't know if anything will happen with it during my remaining time as alder. 

I know that this is something that some folks in the neighborhood will feel strongly about, and we'll have folks on both sides. My goal has been to make sure that when we have a discussion on tiny house villages as a neighborhood and as a City, we do it with the best information possible and are able to have a civil discussion on the issues at hand. I think that's best done by ensuring the discussion about tiny house villages is not about amending the plan and is only about their land use application. I have no control over when that land use discussion will happen and so I don't know if I will be a part of it or if it will be my successor. My hope is that I am setting things up now to help make that the best possible discussion.