How to find what a property is zoned for in the city's website? What are some tips on working with the city to get your project approved? How to go about rezoning a parcel? Scott Krone, principal at Coda Design + Build and Coda Management Group is a developer with over 30 years of experience and shares his knowledge.

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Let's go over an entitlement example please.

When someone brings us a property, the first thing that we do, and we're determining if we're going to move forward with it, is we look at what are the entitlements. Entitlements are a fancy word of saying, what is the zoning, what are you entitled to do on a property. A lot of people think that they have to go to someone in the city and get this information, when, in reality, it's already out there in public forum. As developers, we will always go and look to what it is, and then, we will trust, but verify. We will then go back to the city planners and say, this is what we saw, we want to make sure that we're in agreement. It's our way of trusting and verifying with the city official.

I selected a location that we recently worked on in the City of Dayton, and I picked this one because there's a lot of different things here. There are tabs called residents, businesses, government. Typically, we go to government, because that's where the different departments are broken down. Here you see planning, neighborhood and development, public works, community communications, community development, boards, commissions and committees, these are all different ones. Public Works has sewers and water lines, planning, neighborhood and development, this is probably where the information is going to be under, because this is how they plan for things.

We click on that one, and it comes up with the zoning coded map, it has an interactive zoning map, this one is really nice. Others might be on a PDF. We will click on that, and then, we put in the address, the property comes up, and we can click on show more results.

To clarify a couple of things: 1) Every city website is going to be completely different, unfortunately, from one another 2) What we're looking at right now is either a property that you are looking at purchasing or expanding to make sure that it's zoned properly or could be rezoned, correct?

We try not to rezone, but if we do, that’s a whole different process. Right now, we're trying to determine what it is that we are allowed to do. When we look at this one, 535 East Third Street, it's bouncing back and forth between these two, I’m not sure why. I’m going to zoom in to see the streets, because then that way I’ll know where we are. We are now under the UBD District, but UBD means nothing to me, I have no idea what that is, they've come up with this general term. It might be unified business district, it might be, etc. But that is what we're going to be looking for when we do it. If you look under this category, there's a PD 108, this is a planned development, and that was 108th planned development HD 2. These are all different districts that are zoned, if we zoom back out, you can see the different zoning sections, they all have different colors to make it interesting. I2 is typically industrial, a second version of industrial. There's a CBD, which might be the commercial business district as opposed to unified business district. So those are all the things that we look for in terms of the breakdown.

Scott Krone

[email protected]

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