The city of Hartford has taken its share of hits this year, largely due to its tenuous fiscal position and the mismanagement of Dunkin’ Donuts Park. But one area where the city deserves credit is its new planning and zoning regulations, which many agree will make development in Hartford an easier task.
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The city of Hartford has taken its share of hits this year, largely due to its tenuous fiscal position and the mismanagement of Dunkin' Donuts Park. But one area where the city deserves credit is its new planning and zoning regulations, which many agree will make development in Hartford an easier task.
As Hartford Business Journal News Editor Gregory Seay reported in our Sept. 5 issue, the city since the start of this year has been using a revised playbook to assess and approve zoning and land-use applications, which aim to make it easier to push developments through the approval process.
Among the biggest changes is a revision to the city's parking-space requirements for all new downtown development. It eliminates the requirement that downtown developers include parking in their projects, a mandate that added about $50,000 per parking space to the development price tag, according to Sara Bronin, chair of the city's Planning and Zoning Commission.
Instead, the city is only requiring new downtown developments to provide parking for bicycles as well as charging stations for electric vehicles.
Downtown Hartford is already a sea of parking lots so eliminating the need for more parking spaces is a smart move. In fact, a consultant's report found that 9,000 downtown parking spaces go unused daily, not counting another 4,000 spaces reserved for corporate officials and special events. Meantime, many vibrant cities long ago de-emphasized automobiles in favor of mass-transit options, walking and bicycling, which the city of Hartford has begun to do with its new regulations as well as the adoption of the CTfastrak busway that links the Capital City to West Hartford, Newington and New Britain.
The new regulations also provide more flexibility in the way the city reviews and approves land-use applications, allowing city planning staff to sign off on certain development proposals without waiting for the city's Planning and Zoning Commission.
The city has also embraced the development-review concept, known as “form-based code.'' Under it, individual buildings and other elements of large, master-planned projects are reviewed as a single package, rather than individually, saving developers time and money.
The business community often cites Connecticut's regulatory environment as a major impediment to job growth, so cities and towns that make it easier to get through the development approval process have a competitive advantage. For the higher-cost city of Hartford having more flexible and development-friendly policies on the books is particularly important.
Most of the attention right now is centered on how the city will get through its major fiscal challenges, but that doesn't mean Hartford officials should only focus on dealing with its budget deficits. The more the city does now to improve its business climate, the stronger it will be able to come out of the gates once it has a plan in place to regain fiscal stability.Â
