Ridge Ave. RULEBOOK: A User’s Guide to New Zoning and Design Controls

Mixed Use Buildings – YES. Front yard parking – NO | Status: Ridge Avenue Neighborhood Area Overlay ADOPTED, later refined and incorporated into city-wide update .

Roxborough Development Corporation, with funding from Urban Land Institute and the National Main Street Association, invited Mark Keener AIA AICP to assist Ridge Avenue business and neighbors to craft a special amendment to the City of Philadelphia Zoning Code. Over the course of numerous work sessions with the RDC and Planning Commission staff a picture of the future Avenue emerged. The design team documented building types and placement that corresponded and then “reverse engineered” design controls that supported those outcomes. The results were presented in a compact, user-friendly brochure – examples are shown in the page spreads below. Included are detailed draft provisions for use, height, setbacks, façade transparency, signs, exterior lighting, and parking with clear yes/no illustrations for each topic. 

Project Team

Mark Keener AIA AICP: Project Leader | Team: R Brown FAIA, D Robbins, K Winkler, N Desai, D Luckman

Outcomes

As anticipated by project funders, ULI and National Main Street, this exercise informed discussion about neighborhood commercial districts that are controlled by obsolete zoning concerning mixed use buildings, parking lots, auto-related uses, and front setbacks. The provisions of the Ridge Avenue Overlay informed the provisions of new City-wide zoning district CMX 2.5. Adopted in 2015 by Philadelphia’s City Council, the Ridge Avenue Special District Controls constitutes a more perfectly calibrated zoning overlay applied to Roxborough’s commercial core, the eight blocks on Ridge Avenue between Hermitage Street and Monastery Avenue.

The controls apply to all commercially zoned properties fronting on Ridge Avenue and they regulate many aspects of development including land use, façade treatments, building heights and setbacks and parking. In Fall of 2018 the City approved Historic District Designation( Ridge Avenue Roxborough Thematic Historic District).