New residential guidelines in Huron County will be meant to show that projects can be done in a way that is sensitive to the surrounding community.
The guidelines are being put together to spur development as the county deals with a housing crunch.
Senior Planner Denise Van Amersfoort also points out a good design can go a long way towards addressing concerns and another goal of the new guidelines was to avoid adding extra costs.
“The goal is to demonstrate with this guideline that higher density residential projects can be done in a way that's really sensitive to the existing context and a good design can go a long way with addressing concerns that we have typically heard,” said Van Amersfoort. “Certainly a component of a complete community is to have a variety of housing units in terms of the type of units, the size of units, ownership or rental, also affordability, we want to provide that variety.”
Van Amersfoort said there are many different levels of intensification and their goal would be to match projects with the surrounding community.
“We wanted to consider accessibility, how can we be climate-ready in our building moving forward and identifying options, not that any one project would have to include every option, but there will be probably two or three for each project.”
