Amid a shortage of affordable housing in Chattanooga, the city government is seeking to rework its residential zoning code to accommodate denser housing, a move city officials hope puts more units on the market in a growing city.
The ordinance, if approved by the city council, would enable developers to apply for residential zones with more units allowed on the property. It’s up for a public hearing before the council Tuesday.
Dan Reuter, executive director of the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Regional Planning Agency, said in a phone interview that the revised ordinance is a yearslong effort to modernize the city’s zoning code, which Reuter said hasn’t been updated in half a century.
“There’s a market of people that want to live in Chattanooga, and so we just have to be very open to the idea that we are a city. We are an urban place,” Reuter said. “We just have a lot of older, what I call, legacy zoning that has been around back when Chattanooga was more of a suburb.”
That legacy zoning limits developers’ options in terms of building for density.