08/31/2026
Zoning rewrite nears public input phase; Parking, naming districts, what goes where among topics
By Deb and Joe Fitzgerald
Sometime this fall, the city will hold public open houses on its rewrite of the zoning ordinance. Preliminary indications are that these will happen in late September to mid-October at the August session, but no firm times have yet been set.
If you go to one of these meetings, a useful question to bring is not “what is my new district called.” It is “what can be built on my street under the new rules that could not be built today, and what can no longer be built.”
At the meeting, you will almost certainly be pointed in the direction of lots of new, colorful maps. Understanding what they are trying to tell you is easier if you know what the Planning Commission has spent the summer discussing, and sometimes arguing about.
The first zoning ordinance rewrite work session, linked below, set the stage in late June. The two recent sessions, one in July and one in August, covered a lot of ground: which uses are allowed where, how much parking a restaurant has to build, what you can put in your back yard, and what the new zoning districts should be called. That last one might sound like the least important item on the list. It turned out to be the one that generated the most discussion, and it is probably the one that will matter a lot to how the public receives this project.
The city has been working on this since 2020. The stated purpose of the current phase is what staff calls “fixing the foundation”, which includes everything from modernizing definitions and simplifying language so that fewer decisions rest on staff interpretation, to reorganizing the document so an ordinary person can easily find things in it and replacing the current patchwork of zoning districts with a cleaner set.
What it is deliberately not is a policy overhaul. Bigger policy questions about what the city wants to become are supposed to be handled later, in the update to the Comprehensive Plan. The districts are being drawn to describe what already exists on the ground.
That distinction is worth holding onto, because it explains many of the tough discussions that occurred in these two meetings.
First, the naming problem. Today’s residential districts are numbered R-1 through R-8, plus a few others. Most people assume the numbers mean something, that R-4 (with it’s bigger numbers) is denser than R-2, and so on. Staff pointed out that the assumption does not hold. R-8’s permitted uses are broadly similar to R-1 and R-2; the difference is lot size. The numbers are a ladder that does not go anywhere in particular.
The draft replaces them with a small number of named districts sitting on a spectrum. Naming them has proved unexpectedly difficult.
“Traditional neighborhood” came from a real planning term (traditional neighborhood development) which appears in state code in connection with urban development areas. Its opposite in the planning literature is “conventional suburban development”, which is how “suburban” ended up at the other end. But commissioners raised objections on these replacements for the R’s from several directions. One commissioner noted that traditional neighborhood planning has a well-documented critique as elitist, and that invoking tradition invites the question of whose tradition, and what values are being carried along with it. Another said “suburban” simply reads as sprawl.
Someone proposed low, medium, and high density instead, and that got shot down twice. First, because it is not accurate: all three districts are made up of low-density housing forms, single-family homes attached and detached, duplexes, small-scale multifamily. Labeling them low, medium, and high would be labeling gradations within low. Second, because low, medium, and high carry “status.” As one commissioner noted, those words conjure aspirational and property-value distinctions that the districts do not actually contain, but people will hear them anyway.
There is also the fact that density is not really the variable that separates these districts. They differ along many variables, like street layout, by housing type, by lot size, and by density all at the same time, which is exactly what makes a one-word label hard.
Then there is an irony that a new state law requires cities of a certain size to have at least one district where a single-family home can be built on a lot as small as 3,000 square feet and 30 feet wide. That requirement is driven by housing affordability. It is also, functionally, why one of these districts exists. Calling it “traditional” attaches an old-fashioned name to a brand-new mandate.
Staff’s response was pragmatic. Every word carries baggage. Whatever you choose, different people will bring different assumptions. What actually governs is the district’s intent statement, the paragraph inside the ordinance that says what the district is for. Staff suggested the effort might be better spent making those statements precise than hunting for a perfect label. A commissioner agreed the intent statements are already clearer than any name on offer, and pointed out that the current names are no better: “R-1” tells you nothing, and “multiple dwelling district” is not much of an improvement.
The counterargument, also from the room, is that the name is what the public sees. People will look at the draft map and either think “that makes sense” or think “I do not understand this”. If it turns out to be the second, the city starts every subsequent conversation from a defensive position. One commissioner volunteered to informally ask realtor friends what terms would actually be useful for describing density, streetscape, and building types, and floated a broader suggestion that commissioners have those conversations individually and bring the results back.
Commissioners were asked to send new district name suggestions to staff by Labor Day, with a compiled list circulating before the September 15 work session.
What is happening, then, to your property’s zoning? This was the central question at the July session, and it will be the central question at the open house.
A number of parcels currently zoned R-2 and R-3 are being folded into a single district. A commissioner asked whether that amounts to a down-zoning, meaning a reduction in what an owner is permitted to build.
Staff gave a two-part answer. First, a large share of the acreage involved is not developable residential land in the ordinary sense, in that it includes the JMU campus and Arboretum, a city school site, and some large undeveloped tracts. Second, for the developed neighborhoods, the new district is meant to match what is actually there. Bluestone Hills and pockets near Central Avenue and South Avenue are zoned R-3 today but built out as detached single-family homes. Staff noted that residents regularly arrive at Planning Commission convinced they live in R-1, because that is what their street looks like.
It’s worth paying attention to this bit. For the large undeveloped tracts, staff said the more restrictive district was assigned on purpose, on the reasoning that a developer will come in and request a rezoning anyway, and the rezoning is where the city has leverage to negotiate traffic improvements and a mix of housing types. That is a deliberate policy choice rather than a mapping accident. It means development on those tracts moves from something that can happen by right to something that requires a public process. Depending what you think about housing supply and of public review, that is either the most important thing in this rewrite or exactly how it should work.
A commissioner raised the chicken-and-egg version of the same issue: several of these areas would need better street connectivity before denser, walkable development would make sense, and nobody has said which comes first.
The more recent August session spent its second half on parking, and this is where the changes are most concrete.
The current rules have two practical problems. Parking terminology doesn’t match the rest of the ordinance because use names differ noticeably between the parking section and the district sections. This means residents have to interpret your way through. Several minimums are keyed to things nobody can verify quantitatively at the counter in City Hall. Manufacturing parking is based on the maximum number of people on site at one time. Hospital parking involves bed count, attending physicians on staff, and all employees.
The draft moves everything into one table keyed to the use table, using quantities that can be shown on a plan before construction.
The notable headline change is for restaurants, which go from one space per 100 gross square feet to one per 250. That is a large reduction on paper. In practice most local restaurants sit in shopping centers already governed by the center’s ratio, so staff expects limited effect. The argument for the change is to ease adaptive reuse. If an older commercial building sits empty and a restaurant wants the space, the parking requirement can be what kills the deal.
Offices, medical offices, and personal services require one space per 300 square feet. Lower-intensity commercial uses like vehicle sales and animal services go to one per 500. Industrial is one per 1,000, storage one per 2,000. Church parking requirements were simplified considerably.
Housing gets one space per dwelling unit, except in the districts that contain most of the city’s student housing, where the proposal is 0.85 spaces per bedroom. The reason is that the current structure penalizes smaller units: a one- or two-bedroom apartment requires more than one space per bedroom, while a three- or four-bedroom requires less. A developer who wants to keep bedroom count steady while offering more one- and two-bedroom units has to find new parking to do it. At four bedrooms the new ratio is nearly identical to today’s, so the overall reduction is small.
[For the nerds among you, here are numbers, if you care: under the current R-3/R-4/R-5 parking regs, a one-bedroom unit requires 1.5 spaces per bedroom and a two-bedroom requires 1.25, while a three-bedroom requires about 0.83 and a four-bedroom 0.875. So the penalty on smaller units that some developers complained about is real and measurable. And 0.85 per bedroom on a four-bedroom unit yields 3.4 spaces against today’s 3.5, which is exactly the “nearly identical” claim staff made. Want more 1 and 2 bedroom units built in the city? This can help.]
One category was left blank: schools and colleges. Staff asked for direction, and the conversation revealed that nobody was certain what purpose the current required review serves. The current code contains no ratio at all for elementary through high school. It says school authorities program the parking to meet state standards and then submit to the Planning Commission for site plan review. That is the entire requirement. There is no vote and no recommendation forwarded to Council. Commissioners compared it to the capital improvement plan review, in that it serves as a structural requirement that makes elected officials look at something with no actual consequence or action attached. The emerging preference was to handle school and college parking through rezoning or permit conditions rather than a fixed ratio, on the grounds that any number written today would likely be obsolete within five to seven years.
Two smaller parts of the parking discussion are worth noting because they show, quietly, that the current ordinance is not working. Shared parking agreements, which let two businesses with different peak hours use the same lot, expire after ten years in Harrisonburg. Staff said no other community does this and proposed matching standard practice.
More to the point, the mechanism has been fully used exactly once, apparently because the uses most interested in sharing are ones the regulation requires to have all of their parking all of the time. And the retail volume discount (1 per 200 sq ft, dropping to 1 per 250 above a threshold) uses a 10,000 sq ft trigger. Staff noted the ratios themselves are standard, but 10,000 is exceptionally low, in that in other localities, this is typically 100,000 (a Kroger runs about 50,000.) So the provision that was supposed to keep large centers from multiplying parking linearly has effectively never applied.
The most interesting exchange came when staff asked the commission a genuine question: what is the minimum parking requirement actually for? The answers were convenience, and avoiding spillover fights over on-street parking in residential areas. One commissioner pushed back, acknowledging the position is unpopular, and said he struggles to find local examples where too little parking causes real harm while examples of the opposite are everywhere. The complaint he hears, he suggested, is usually not that there is no parking but that there is no parking directly in front of the house or the business. Staff added that the ordinance currently ignores nearby public parking, on-street supply, and transit access, all of which other communities account for.
Drive-throughs got a related conversation. A queue at a local restaurant spilled past a busy intersection into a public street this year and required police to direct traffic, which staff noted is not a sustainable solution. Zoning offers few tools beyond requiring stacking space (which is the zoning term for how many car-lengths of on-site queuing a drive-thru has to provide between the entrance and the pickup window.) One commissioner observed that asking applicants to size for the worst case they can imagine produces the same parking overbuilding problem as parking minimums, and questioned the underlying arrangement in which a private business’s queue becomes a public street problem.
Some smaller changes will affect more people. Residential driveways would get a new maximum width at the property line, the lesser of 30 percent of lot width or 24 feet, with flaring allowed farther back. The purpose is to limit curb cuts and the points where drivers and pedestrians conflict.
Accessory structures (like sheds and similar buildings) are currently limited to the rear yard in the draft, though staff had previously agreed to allow side yards on non-corner lots. A long-standing rule limiting accessory structures to 30 percent of the required rear yard is being carried forward. Staff was candid about why, in that they expected pushback if they removed it and did not have a strong affirmative case for dropping it.
Home-based childcare remains permitted by right at both the small and large scale, mirroring state categories. Standalone childcare centers would require a special exception in residential districts, which staff defended on the grounds that centers function like commercial uses, with large footprints and clientele drawn from across the region.
Corner stores are a related case. The commission converged on keeping commercial uses out of residential district ordinance text and instead rezoning selected parcels to Neighborhood Commercial. That is cleaner ordinance drafting, but also means every future corner store requires a rezoning, which is the most expensive and least certain path available, and the one least accessible to small operators.
Accessory dwelling units are not included in this phase. A new state law taking effect July 1, 2027 limits how much localities can restrict them, and the city plans to take that up in early 2027 after this rewritten ordinance is adopted. If this phase slips, that work compresses against a hard deadline.
The Planning Commission meets next on September 9 and holds another ordinance work session on September 15. Staff is separately reviewing this same material with city departments. Public open houses are being planned, with staff describing at least two opportunities for people to drop in.
Staff has floated the idea of workshops with laptops so owners can look up their own parcels, along with a plain-language list of what actually changes. Both would be very helpful
