Detroit, Michigan

Zoning Ordinance
   

For the City of Detroit, Duncan Associates drafted a comprehensive revision of the City's 30-year old zoning ordinance. Detroit, the nation's sixth largest city, was plagued by a series of urban problems during the 1960s and 1970s which seriously hurt its image. Since then, it has struggled to regain its position as a world class city as development has crept further and further away from the central city. With the coming of the 1990s, new development projects began to relocate to the city of Detroit.

Residential developers are acquiring downtown locations. Major entertainment and employment centers are also rethinking central city locations. These, and other changes on the Detroit scene, have accelerated the need to revise its outdated land use planning and regulatory tools. Updating and modernizing its zoning code is a critical part of that effort. The new code includes several new zoning districts, a new site plan review process and new procedures aimed at expediting the development review process and updating the sometimes vague review and approval criteria now used in decision-making. Among other City-identified priorities are reformatting and streamlining to increase ease of use, using graphics tables or figures where appropriate or helpful, limiting conflicts with new laws and court rulings and revising the nonconformity regulations. Key policy direction came from an interdepartmental working group which consists of staff from the Planning Commission; Board of Zoning Appeals; Department of Building, Safety and Engineering; Planning and Development Department; and Law Department. The code update project was organized around four key tasks: diagnosis of current ordinance, annotated outline and two drafts of the revised ordinance.

Period:     February 1998 - May 2000               Contact:    Rory Bolger
Team:       Duncan Associates                                           Project Director
                Clarion Associates                                             313.224.6225 
                Mark Wyckoff                                                 
                JJR Incorporated
                Community Development Services