Common Council approves package of housing, demolition ordinance changes

The changes approved Tuesday night include: 

• Allowing for more options in the placement of an attached garage in residential districts 

• Allowing open porches to be in a part of a lot’s required side yard setback (the distance between the side of the building and the lot line) 

• Making the side yard setback the same for single-story buildings and buildings that are more than one story 

• Increasing the allowable interior size for an attached ADU to be up to 1,000 square feet 

• Increasing the allowable footprint for a detached ADU to be up to 1,000 square feet, consistent with the requirements for other types of accessory buildings in residential and mixed-use districts 

• Eliminating the limit on the number of bedrooms in an ADU 

• Allowing for more flexibility in how units are arranged within two- and three-unit buildings 

• Removing the Usable Open Space requirement while still maintaining existing stormwater management and landscaping requirements 

• Allowing demolition requests of properties deemed not to be historic after a Landmarks Commission review to bypass Plan Commission consideration and proceed directly to the demolition permitting process 

Why the Changes Were Introduced 

Many of the changes proposed in the housing package passed Tuesday night were the result of policymakers asking City staff to take a close look at the zoning code and identify examples of reasonable home improvement or expansion projects that the code did not allow or made more difficult than necessary. 

Some of the real-life examples of sensible projects that City staff have had to reject in the past due to the zoning code include: 

• Converting an office space in a mixed-use building into an apartment home, due to the previous Usable Open Space requirements 

• Adding a second story to a one-story house due to a one-foot larger minimum side setback for two-story houses 

• Adding an 8th apartment during the internal remodeling of a small downtown building already containing 7 homes 

Ultimately, City staff believe these changes will allow more options for homeowners while also further supporting the development of more “missing middle” housing across Madison. Additionally, these code changes make it easier to build and modify single-family homes. 

The changes to the demolition process, meanwhile, will maintain a review of a property’s historic value by the Landmarks Commission, but if the Landmarks Commission determines a property does not have historic value, the demolition will be reviewed administratively instead of having to also go through the Plan Commission.  

The Plan Commission will still review proposed demolitions of buildings that do have historic value. This change will streamline the demolition application process by removing a redundant step of the process – since 2021, nearly 3 out of every 4 properties that saw their demolition applications approved were found to have no historic value – while also codifying the standards used by the Landmarks Commission into the City ordinance.

The code changes also add more clarity to the standards that Plan Commission uses to determine whether to approve or deny a demolition request.

You can find more details about each of the changes in the staff reports submitted to the Common Council for the zoning code changes and the demolition code changes.

Simple changes like those passed by the Common Council during Tuesday night’s meeting are part of the strategies outlined in the mayor’s Housing Forward update, which was released earlier this month. As part of the Housing Forward update, the City of Madison set a goal to create 15,000 new homes over the next 5 years. You can follow the progress toward that goal and review how much housing has been created in recent years on the City of Madison’s new Housing Tracker. 

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