The City of Phoenix Planning and Development Department will launch “Revisiting ReinventPHX” in 2025, which will include a review of the existing Transit Oriented Community plans.
The City of Phoenix Planning and Development Department (Planning) spent October making the rounds at various public meetings to discuss two separate initiatives that may impact residents who live along the city’s light rail corridors – and those who would like to.
One is a zoning ordinance text amendment that was formulated in response to a new state law. The second is a “revisiting” of ReinventPHX, which created development plans for districts along the Phoenix portions of the Valley Metro Light Rail.
HB2297 prompts zoning ordinance text amendment
At the Oct. 7 meeting of the Encanto Village Planning Committee (Encanto VPC), an Oct. 8 Phoenix City Council Policy Session and the Oct. 16 meeting of the North Mountain Village Planning Committee (North Mountain VPC), Planning presented cases Z-TA-3-24-Y and Z-136-24-Y.
The text amendments were created in response to House Bill 2297, which was signed into law April 10 of this year and requires that certain municipalities update zoning and other regulations to come into compliance with the law no later than Jan. 1, 2025. At the Oct. 8 meeting, Planning director Joshua Bednarek touted the city’s recent housing accomplishments (including approving 64,297 rezoning units between 2019 to 2024), and deputy director Tricia Gomes presented the bill provisions.
HB2297 requires that the city designate “not more than 10 percent of the total existing commercial, office, or mixed-use buildings within the municipality” for adaptive reuse and/or multi-family conversion. It further requires municipalities to allow by right (i.e., no public hearings): Adaptive reuse of existing “economically and functionally obsolete” commercial buildings by non-residential uses; Conversion of commercial sites to multi-family uses, with a minimum 10 percent “affordable” or “workforce” housing required; Allow the highest density within one mile of the site; and building height must be five stories, except where it is within 100 feet of single-family zoned properties, where the height may be limited to two stories.
Two of the biggest potential impacts of the bill, the city said, are that small scale commercial buildings may be at greater risk for demolition and redevelopment, and it eliminates public input into projects that will have an impact on the community.
Gomes said that the city has an Adaptive Reuse program, in place since 2008, and that commercial zoning districts already permit multi-family zoning, but not at the scale required for state law compliance. She added that there is strong policy support for multi-family development in Village Cores and Transit Oriented Communities (TOCs), but Planning staff found that not all village cores are ideal locations, they are employment centered areas that need to balance jobs and housing. And some village cores are still emerging and need to focus building use on destinations, retail and restaurants.
The adopted TOC policy plan areas have already been identified as areas needing more housing, more height and density and many of the properties are already zoned to meet or exceed the new law. So, to meet the state’s requirement, Planning is recommending to Council the creation of boundaries for where this type of development can be pursued by putting into place an Adaptive Reuse and Multi-family (ARM) Overlay District that will encompass the existing TOCs, generally bounded by Peoria Avenue on the north, State Route 51 on the east, South Mountain Avenue on the south, and 83rd Avenue on the west.
Exceptions to the ARM would be for Downtown Code and WU Code zoned properties, which already have existing permission for greater height and density, and the Gateway TOC and 50th Street Station Areas, due to the proximity to the airport.
While the proposed area of the ARM Overlay District comprises 6.1 percent of the city’s total land area, it includes more than 20 percent of the properties within the city zoned R-5, C-1, C-2, and C-3, which are the primary districts where commercial, office and mixed-use buildings are permitted.
The city says that the ARM Overlay District does not add or prohibit any additional uses; it simply allows multi-family development and adaptive reuse to develop with more density and intensity, by right, within districts that already permit it. The proposed ARM Overlay District would not supersede overlays or special planning districts including those with Historic Preservation or Historic Preservation Landmark zoning.
The Encanto VPC in an 8-4 vote recommended denial of the ARM. Among the arguments against the measure: affordable and workforce housing is needed across the city and that future adaptive reuse projects that include this kind of dense housing should be allowed elsewhere. The other side of that argument was that many residents who rely on public transportation, specifically light rail, generally cannot find affordable housing in close proximity to it.
The North Mountain VPC voted unanimously to recommend approval of the ARM, but they also provided direction to the city: consider the future expansion of the overlay district to include Village Core areas and future Bus Rapid Transit corridors.
These are just two of the text amendments that the Planning Commission will consider at its Nov. 7 meeting, with Council action taken Nov. 13. The state has set a Jan. 1, 2026, deadline for the city to address HB2721, “Missing Middle Housing.” A briefing on that process will be held in December.
Residents can read the staff reports for Z-TA-3-24-Y and Z-136-24-Y online at www.phoenix.gov/pdd/planning-zoning/pzservices/pzstaff-reports or watch a replay of the Oct. 8 Policy Session presentation, where the mayor and councilmembers weigh in, at www.youtube.com/@cityofphoenixaz.
City revisits ReinventPHX
Adopted in 2015, the ReinventPHX plans set out to “establish a community-based vision for the future and identify investment strategies to improve the quality of life for all residents.” This process established a new, transit-oriented model for urban planning and development along the city’s light rail system and included the Gateway, Eastlake-Garfield, Midtown, Uptown and Solano TOC Policy Plans (www.phoenix.gov/pdd/tod).
“The ReinventPHX plans have aged well, considering Phoenix’s rapid and sustained population growth and a global pandemic that impacted all aspects of life, including real estate,” said Nick Klimek, a Planner III with the City of Phoenix Planning Department. His current focus is Transit Oriented Communities, and he presented at both the Encanto and North Mountain meetings.
In his presentation to the Encanto VPC, Klimek noted that Phoenix TOCs represent eight percent of the city’s land; house 14.33 percent of all residents and 18.28 percent of all service workers. Encompassed within in the village are the Midtown TOC, which since 2015 has had 38 rezoning cases approved (19 of which have been built, with five under construction, for a total of 4,487 dwellings built); and the Uptown TOC, which has had 25 rezoning cases approved (16 of which have been built with three under construction, for a total of 2,127 dwelling units built).
He added that the plans “remain a strong blueprint for how the city will make land use and investment decisions in the communities served by light rail.” Two additional TOC plans have been implemented since 2015, and with the further expansion of light rail, four more plans are in the process.
All the plans included strategies, recommendations and short-term actions that could be taken toward “2040 Visions,” and they further identify whether government, businesses or the community should lead any given action, Klimek said. As the city reflects on the plans and studies its progress to-date, Planning will launch “Revisiting ReinventPHX” in 2025.
“This review will help us form a clearer narrative about how the vision is developing and indicate the degree to which the plans may need to be revised versus how they are being executed,” Klimek added.
Future emphasis will be on city-owned sites for housing and developing “character areas” to better align with WU Code development standards. The Walkable Urban (WU) Code is an urban and transit-oriented zoning code adopted by City Council on July 1, 2015, as part of ReinventPHX.
“The city currently has two ‘form-based codes,’ that take slightly different approaches to regulating development,” Klimek explained. “The WU Code uses a series of ‘transects’ to govern scale and intensity, while the Downtown Code uses a series of ‘character areas’ and both are good at promoting neighborhood compatibility.”
While the Revisiting ReinventPHX program is still being developed, the city anticipates exploring options to meld “character areas” into the WU Code more purposefully by developing and refining them with consultants and the community prior to adoption through city council action.
The updates will be led by consultants and funded by a $1.2 million grant the city received in April of this year from the Federal Transit Administration to help with efforts to “improve access to public transit and create a transit-oriented, walkable, livable and sustainable community.”
Residents will have the opportunity to weigh in on how the plans have been implemented to-date and what they feel should be prioritized moving forward beginning in spring 2025.
“Our staff will present to each VPC with a ReinventPHX Policy Plan or TOC policy plan (including the 19North Policy Plan) twice annually,” Klimek told us. At the meetings “staff will share findings on the progress made toward the ReinventPHX and 19North Action Plan items and facilitate discussions at the VPCs about what actions the committees would like to prioritize moving forward with our selected consultants from 2025-2027.”
