Join the City’s Land Use Code team for a chance to provide valuable feedback on the draft direction of the current Land Use Code and help shape its future. Two upcoming Open Houses, one virtual and one in-person, will focus on gathering community input on four key topics that could lead to better outcomes for our city – giving you an opportunity to ask questions and share your thoughts before the language of the Land Use Code is drafted for public review.

During each Open House, we will discuss the following four topics:

Event details:

Additional Information:

We look forward to your participation in shaping the future of our commercial corridors and centers!

Fall Community Engagement Recap

Thank you to everyone who shared feedback with us this fall about the future of our commercial corridors and centers! Your feedback and engagement are crucial to ensuring these Land Use Code updates reflect the priorities of our residents and businesses.

In October six neighborhood visits were held, engaging over 50 residents across all six City Council districts to discuss key issues like accessibility, walkability and zoning. Participants shared feedback on the strengths and challenges of local commercial spaces, highlighting a preference for more pedestrian-friendly designs, mixed-use development and improved safety features. Our webpage’s interactive online map also revealed strong community support for reducing car-centric infrastructure and increasing connectivity for cyclists and pedestrians.

A business engagement event was held in partnership with the Chamber of Commerce to discuss how local businesses can contribute to shaping the Land Use Code updates, with 35 business leaders participating.

The Community Forum held on Nov. 18 at Northside Aztlan Community Center was a successful conclusion to the fall engagement efforts for this project. 70 people attended the forum, where they had the opportunity to learn more about the project and hear a summary of the feedback collected so far through online engagement and neighborhood visits. This forum served as the culmination of a series of public events designed to engage the community at different levels and provide multiple ways for community members to share their thoughts.

New Guiding Principles

The guiding principles for The Future of Commercial Corridors and Centers: Land Use Code Updates reflect key priorities for shaping the future of Fort Collins' commercial and residential development moving forward, ensuring they align with community needs and support sustainable growth. Following a November Work Session with City Council, the Guiding Principles were refined based on Council feedback:

Draft Guiding Principle: Enable more housing and mixed-use buildings, especially along roads with frequent bus service. To address this principle, potential updates to the Land Use Code include evaluating permitted uses and intensities near transit, considering whether the allowed uses in these areas promote or hinder mixed-use development, and reviewing process requirements to understand timing and barriers to achieving the intended outcomes. Additionally, analyzing various parking requirement scenarios and their impact on the development of mixed-use projects will be considered.

Draft Guiding Principle: Create resilient commercial and employment centers that are adaptable to future needs. Potential updates to the Land Use Code for this guiding principle include examining the required ratios of primary employment uses versus secondary supporting uses (such as residential, retail, and childcare). There will also be an examination of any barriers to mixed-use development within the Employment and Harmony Corridor zones, including process-based, form-based, or other code-related impediments.

Draft Guiding Principle: Create clearer building and site design standards that promote transit use, walking, and rolling along roads with frequent bus service. To support this principle, potential Land Use Code updates include exploring and developing form-based standards for non-residential structures. Additionally, developing standards that focus on public realm, pedestrian, and multimodal site design and orientation will be considered. There will also be an analysis of multimodal connectivity standards to ensure connectivity to public infrastructure such as transit, bike lanes, and pedestrian walkways.

Draft Guiding Principle: Improve predictability of the Land Use Code, especially to support small business owners. Potential updates to address this guiding principle include revising the change-of-use process for existing sites and buildings. Strategies will also be explored to help ensure that sites are brought up to modern standards over time without discouraging new business formation.

What’s Next

Following this initial period of public engagement, this project will now move into focus group conversations to gather very specific feedback on technical aspects of the Land Use Code and begin to shape actual changes to recommend to the City’s Land Use Code for commercial zones as the output of this project. By Spring 2025, a Community Engagement Info Session will be held to engage the community in the initial draft of recommendations from the project’s focus groups.

The following is an illustration of the remainder of this project’s timeline:

We hope to see you all at our Community Forum on Nov. 18!

Thanks again to all of you who've visited this webpage to learn about The Future of Commercial Corridors and Centers: Land Use Code Updates, and even share your feedback!

We've begun to answer your questions in the Questions section of the webpage, and have been passing your feedback on our interactive map along to representatives from different City departments involved in City planning and development. If you haven’t explored and added your feedback to the interactive map, you can do that here: fcgov.com/lucphase2map(External link).

Our Neighborhood Visits for Phase 2 kick off soon - these visits (one in each of the City's six council districts) are excellent opportunities to learn more about The Future of Commercial Corridors and Centers: Land Use Code Updates' focus and share your feedback with City staff. You'll find the visit schedule, along with links to RSVP, in the sidebar on the right side of this webpage. For easy glancing, here's the Neighborhood Visit schedule:

We hope you can join us for one of these! 

In the meantime, keep sharing feedback and asking questions here. We'll continue updating this webpage with what we're hearing and learning from the community as we go along.