The City of Flagstaff will be holding an open house on an amendment to the zoning code related to high occupancy housing the evening of June 5.
The open house will be from 4 to 6 p.m. Thursday, June 5 in the council conference room at City Hall (211 W. Aspen Ave). It will cover proposed zoning code text amendments intended to simplify zoning for high occupancy housing to better fit with the updated regional plan that's currently in progress.
City zoning code manager Tiffany Antol presented these amendments to the city鈥檚 Housing Commission during a May 22 meeting.
鈥淗OH is definitely one of those topics where I know a lot of people have a lot of concern," she said, "but we鈥檙e trying to offset those concerns that these are changes we really need to make, and fundamentally we鈥檙e not altering the point and principle of why this text amendment was drafted in the first place.鈥�
The changes come alongside the 2045 Regional Plan update, which is currently in progress and expected to be brought to Flagstaff voters in 2026.
The amendments discussed in Thursday鈥檚 event are titled PZ-25-00028 High Occupancy Housing and PZ-25-00041 Single Use Residential and Adaptive Reuse Incentive, according to the city's website.
Efforts on the HOH amendment started in June 2024, with the goal of having their adoption finalized ahead of the regional plan. Some of the changes are because of changes in the new regional plan that would make the current HOH zoning code difficult to implement.
The city adopted a zoning code amendment related to high occupancy housing (HOH) in Nov. 2020 that went into effect in March 2021 to address student housing developments. This included different types of HOH -- mixed-use HOH, HOH with four or more units, single family, duplex and triplex.
The proposed amendments are related to the large (four or more units) and mixed use HOH classifications rather than the other, smaller types.
The proposed amendment would remove the requirement that high occupancy housing developments would need to be built in the pedestrian shed of an activity center or regional activity center, depending on their size. Antol said this is because HOH developments already need city approval as part of the conditional use permit (CUP) process. That process requires HOH developers to be in conformance with the regional plan and any specific plans, which also include limitations on location.
The locations of activity centers will also likely continue to change, as is already the case in the 2045 Regional Plan. Antol noted that this makes the current standards difficult to implement and opens the city to additional Prop 207 claims聽-- she said several properties in Flagstaff have already been exempted from the current HOH standards.
鈥淟imiting them to only activity centers is really no longer necessary, besides the fact that activity centers change separate from the zoning code in a wholly separate process,鈥� she said. "The zoning code itself really shouldn't depend on categories that are outside of its own control because then the code fundamentally changes without having been reviewed or analyzed for that change."
The limitations for HOH developments within historic activity centers will now be applied using historic zoning overlays, as that category of activity center will no longer exist.
The amendments also make adjustments to the HOH density tables. These currently have different allowed totals of both units and bedrooms per acre depending on whether it鈥檚 inside the resource protection overlay (RPO) or an activity center.
鈥淲e鈥檙e just going to clean up that table, make it pretty simple across the board and not make it what ifs,鈥� Antol said.
With the amendment, the density tables will have one maximum, removing separate requirements for developments within the RPO.
The change will allow projects to exceed the number of units per acre (29) as long as they don't exceed the number of bedrooms per acre (72.5). This encourages development of smaller units (one bedroom and studio, 鈥渨hich we鈥檝e been looking for鈥�) without allowing student housing projects, which Antol said would exceed the limitations on number of bedrooms.
The city will also no longer require high occupancy developments to provide alternative floor plans, which doubles the design fees for developers and isn't a requirement for any other type of development.
After the open house on Thursday, June 5, the HOH amendment is expected to be brought to the Planning and Zoning Commission and City Council in August and September.
More about Flagstaff's High Occupancy Housing requirements is available at聽. A recording of the presentation to the Housing Commission can be found at , beginning around 25 minutes.