Proposed zoning changes may boost Burke housing development

Over the last year or so, Burke County Manager Brian Epley has talked often about the need to make the county’s zoning codes more developer- and builder-friendly.

The board of commissioners began the process in earnest at the monthly pre-agenda meeting Monday.

Deputy County Manager Alan Glines detailed a list of changes to the zoning code, and the commissioners voted unanimously to keep the item, a zoning text amendment, on the agenda for decision on May 19 at the board’s regular monthly meeting.

Glines said zoning codes tend to become outdated through the years, and portions of the current one have done just that.

“It’s meant to serve the needs of this community,” Glines said, “and there are times that it needs to be adjusted and changed to changing conditions.”

He added the amendments would “make it easier to use, clean up some extraneous graphics, and to provide some relief for the housing situation.”

The most impactful proposed changes are reductions in the minimum lot sizes for new construction.

Currently, single-family homes with no public water and sewer are required to have lots of at least 1 acre. The county only serves a couple thousand water customers, so the majority of new homes would fall under this category.

The new ordinance would cut that limit in half, allowing developers to fit more homes on a given tract of land. The size limitation gets smaller the more utilities a lot has available.

For lots with public water or public sewer, the minimum size drops to .40 and .30 acres, respectively. If a lot has both water and sewer, the minimum would fall to .25 acre.

Similarly, the minimum size for duplex lots would drop from 1.5 acres to .70. Duplex lots serviced by water and sewer would only need to be .45 acres.

Rural mixed-use zoning would fall from a 1.5-acre minimum to 1 acre. That classification allows for residential, agricultural, and low-intensity commercial uses.

Although the county’s ordinances aren’t as strict as those of some municipalities, loosening them might help jump-start some development. The county is facing a housing shortage that will likely worsen over the next decade. Builders and developers often cite restrictive zoning as a serious roadblock to housing expansion.

In addition to the zoning changes, Glines said clarifying the language in the ordinances and eliminating redundancy will make the rules easier to read for the public.

Glines emphasized the changes are a good starting point, but that other alterations to the zoning code are in the works and will come before the board in the near future.

“This doesn’t cover everything that we want to do,” he told the board. “This is sort of like a first phase. We’d like to work on subdivisions and consider any other special uses that would need to have particular attention.”

Glines added he hopes to gather a group of county residents, planning board members, homebuilders, and developers to provide input on future changes to the code.