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: