What West U's Rules Let You Build on a Lot

The date the building site was established with its present boundaries. A site established before 24 October 1987 is an old building site; anything else is a new one. In the Single-Family District an old site may be as small as 5,000 square feet, while a new site must reach 8,250 square feet, 75 feet wide and 110 feet deep.

The old-site minimums vary by district: 50 feet of width and 100 feet of depth in the Single-Family District and in the Rotated Corner Overlay District, and 75 by 105 feet for 7,875 square feet in the Old Building Site Overlay District. Two further exceptions in the zoning table reach down to 4,500 and to 4,300 square feet for sites meeting specific historical conditions. Which category a site falls into is a fact about its plat history rather than about its current owner, and it is the first thing to establish before asking whether a house or a lot is what you are selling.

The zoning ordinance sets floors rather than a coverage ceiling, and the arithmetic is the same thing read backwards. At least 45 percent of a building site must be open area and at least 35 percent must be pervious, and in the front yard the minimums are 60 percent open and 50 percent pervious.

Open area is defined as area unoccupied by any structure and open to the sky, apart from permitted projections, so a 45 percent minimum leaves at most 55 percent of the site available for structures. Pervious area is a separate and stricter test, because it is about water rather than about buildings: a paved terrace is open to the sky but is not pervious. The two limits bind at different points on different sites, and on a small site they are usually what decides the footprint, which is the practical form of the house-or-lot question.

A principal building is capped at two and a half storeys and 35 feet, falling to 25 feet within the rear yard. Accessory buildings are capped at 25 feet, and a site may hold at most three of them. The framed area of all buildings on a site may not exceed 80 percent of the site's area.

The rear-yard height step is the constraint owners least expect, because it shapes the back of the house rather than its overall size, and a plan drawn without it will fail zoning review rather than building review. Framed area is defined in the ordinance's own schedule as all floor and ground area under a solid fixed roof, with listed exclusions, so it is not the same measure as the floor area a listing quotes. A site may also hold one dwelling unit plus one set of accessory quarters of up to 600 square feet, and no more.

It is a condition on the permit rather than a formality. Under Chapter 82 of the city code, once a permit for development or predevelopment activity is in play, every large tree on the site becomes a protected tree, and the tree conditions written into that permit must prohibit removing or damaging any of them apart from three narrow exceptions.

The thresholds are lower than most owners assume, and they are measured as circumference rather than diameter. A large tree is one with a circumference of 19 inches or more. A significant tree is a large tree of 36 inches or more, and a significant tree is protected anywhere in the city whether or not a permit exists. Trees authorized for removal normally have to be replaced by replacement inches on the same site, and each replacement tree needs a growth space of at least 200 square feet with no dimension under ten feet, which on a small site competes directly with the house you were hoping to build.

The city publishes its own timeline. Plan review for a new home runs about 10 to 15 business days, the urban forester's review of the tree disposition adds about 5 to 7 more, and if plans are rejected and resubmitted the plan-review clock resets in full to another 10 to 15 business days.

The sequence has a hard gate in it. The building official may not issue any permit for development or predevelopment activity until the applicant has filed a tree survey the urban forester has approved and until tree disposition conditions approved by the forester have been written into the permit. Before a new-home permit is released the city also requires an active water account in the contractor's name, sidewalk and driveway deposits, utility disconnections with a letter from the gas utility, and an approved final demolition inspection. Inspections in this sequence are conducted on Tuesdays and Thursdays only.

Any reconstruction, rehabilitation, addition or other improvement whose cost equals or exceeds 50 percent of the market value of the structure before construction starts. Cross that line and the city's flood damage prevention rules treat the work as new construction, which is a different and much more demanding standard than a repair.

The same 50 percent threshold defines substantial damage, and a structure that has incurred substantial damage counts as a substantial improvement regardless of what repair work is actually performed. Two narrow exclusions apply: work that is the minimum necessary to correct existing health, sanitary or safety code violations identified by the code enforcement official, and alterations to a historic structure that will not preclude its continued designation. Everything else is in. This is the ordinance's own version of the question this site is about: a renovation large enough relative to the building it improves stops being a renovation in the eyes of the flood rules, which is one of the points at which rebuilding starts to look cheaper than repairing.

Inside a special flood hazard area, the lowest floor of new residential construction must sit two feet above the base flood elevation or at or above the 500-year floodplain elevation, whichever is higher. Outside it, the lowest floor must still be at least two feet above the crown of the nearest street.

Both standards are set by the city's flood damage prevention article, and the second one is the surprise: it applies to construction outside the special flood hazard area, which is most of the city, so a rebuild almost anywhere in West University Place inherits an elevation requirement. Inside the hazard area a registered professional engineer, architect or land surveyor has to certify the elevation to the floodplain administrator. Service equipment (electrical, heating, ventilation, plumbing and air conditioning) must be designed or located two feet above the base flood elevation, and fill placed below that elevation requires compensating floodplain mitigation. All of it is cost, and all of it is priced into what a builder will pay for a site.