In a four-hour workshop, Sussex County Council reviewed recommendations from the Land Use Reform Task Force. The official recommendations were presented to council on October 31. The task force was established to address concerns about growth in Sussex County.
“We spent ten meetings over the course of, give or take, five months working through all of these issues,” Andrew Bing of Kramer & Associates, said. “It was not easy work. But throughout the entire process, this was sort of our five kind of guiding principles that we heard from you when you started this process. In terms of those five goals in terms of implementing smarter sustainable development, ensuring growth is supported by infrastructure, addressing affordable and workforce housing needs, preserving farmland and natural resources and preventing low density, uncoordinated sprawl. Those are the big goals. Obviously, our recommendations were the attempts by the working group to try to address those.”
Bing explained the 19 recommendations the task force felt could address growth in the county. These included aligning future land use maps, establishing growth and conservation areas, comprehensive rezoning and establishing clear standards for rezoning. The task force also recommended defining missing middle housing types, permit missing middle housing in strategic areas, establishing bulk and setback standards for missing middle housing, strategic density adjustments and developing strategic density bonus programs.
The task force recommended amending the Sussex County Rental Program, collaborating with DelDOT, adoption of a master plan zoning ordinance for large-scale development, forest preservation, encouraging the naturalized landscaping in passive open space as well as focusing subdivision design on conservation priorities. The final recommendations included supporting working farms, exploring a transfer of development rights program, improving clarity and consistency of subdivision code standards, prioritizing hearing scheduling for projects that advance county land use goals and modernizing county code to support mixed use.
One area the task force felt needed to be addressed was missing middle-level housing. Missing middle-level housing are housing types that have more density than single-family homes but less than apartment buildings. These include duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, townhomes and cottage courts.
“These recommendations provide a coordinated approach to meet the housing needs while also guiding growth, defining and enabling missing middle housing types, and those include a variety of different housing types that are currently not defined in the code, while also providing standards appropriate for those types of housing, it also adjusts densities In growth areas to support attainable housing and reduce pressure for sprawl and modernizing modernizes mixed use zoning to allow for walkable, vibrant centers that are close to housing and or close combined housing employment in commercial areas,” Bing said. “So, one recommendation seeks to amend to define smaller scale housing types, such as duplex triplexes, stack flats and cottage courts. Rather than grouping them under multi family, which is how they’re currently defined in the code. This would allow the county to apply specific zoning standards to each housing type.”
Growth zones would also be established. These would be areas with access to water, sewer, roadways and transportation already.
“One of my “aha” moments in those ten meetings was someone speaking up and saying ‘The reason you’re seen decades worth of single-family homes built in Sussex is because that is what your code is directing us to build,” Bing said. “That’s such a simple statement, but it was one of those moments where it made a lot of sense. Folks are building what is easiest, most predictable and, quite honestly, most profitable and we are not making it easy on them to build something else.”
No decisions were made regarding the presentation. Council will not study the recommendations, determine priorities and planning before implementation of any of the recommendations. The full report can be found online.
