Business Community Government
City Planning Department proposes development code overhaul to comply with new state laws
As part of a state-mandated overhaul of its comprehensive plan, Gig Harbor’s Planning Department has proposed a series of code changes to make it both easier and more enticing for developers to create affordable housing options, including elder housing and mixed-use structures.
City Development Director Eric Baker and Senior Planner Jeremy Hammar presented the department’s memo to the Planning Commission at the commission’s Oct. 2 meeting. Baker and Hammar discussed a series of changes proposed by the department. Many of them concern zoning changes and code language consolidation.
The city tentatively plans to release a draft of these proposed changes in mid-November and solicit feedback via workshops and other outreach through the end of 2025. After revision based on public outreach, the Planning Commission will review the revised draft in January or February 2026. The Gig Harbor City Council will consider the changes in February or March 2026.
Controlled change
Baker highlighted that the city doesn’t want development to harm the environment. At the same time, the city doesn’t want to impose such stringent regulations that developers don’t bother creating housing within city limits.
Baker said that, even as the city works to make it easier for developers to create housing, safeguards will ensure these new developments don’t impact the waterways surrounding and running through the city, or the city’s roads and sewerage facilities.
If the city sees projects that are “grossly out of compliance” with city code, Baker said, the Gig Harbor City Council can impose an emergency ordinance that immediately goes into effect, or put a moratorium in place that stops all development. Moratoriums can remain in place up to a year, while the city develops and adopts new regulations through public process.
“You have to really get reasons to have a longer one than that,” Baker said.
He also said that Gig Harbor will also keep an eye on what other jurisdictions do, because he expects that they will provide flexibility regarding development. He said that the city wants to watch and see the effects of this flexibility, including unintended consequences.
“Sometimes it needs to be believed to be seen,” Baker said of giving developers the benefit of the doubt. “I think we do need to take a certain leap of faith that the development community, given greater latitude, will be able to develop housing at a more affordable level that will help with these issues.”
Missing middle housing
Baker presented a number of proposed changes to the city’s development code. These changes include making it easier for developers to create co-living and subsidized housing options for elders, who may live on fixed incomes.
This requires the city to change its current zoning laws. The city will apply much of these changes to medium-density residential zones, known as “R-2 Medium-Density” zones.
The Planning Department’s proposed change regarding such areas suggests that the city adopt a minimum and maximum density range “to discourage under-building of serviced land and to enable ‘missing-middle’ formats (duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, townhouses, and cottage housing) at neighborhood-compatible heights.”
“Missing middle housing” is a term Daniel Parolek of San Francisco-based architecture firm Opticos, Inc., coined in 2010. It refers to a housing design concept meant to tackle the problem of missing housing at affordable prices for urban families who may not otherwise be able to meet the financial benchmarks required to own single-family homes.
Missing middle housing includes a variety of multi-unit or clustered housing at scale with single-family homes. These housing options are often mixed-income and meant for walkable urban living environments.
Light reading
Senior Planner Jeremy Hammar dove into several of the key changes in the Planning Department’s 350-page code update proposal that the Planning Commission will review in December.
“Hope you all look forward to that,” Hammar said, receiving a few chuckles.
Hammar said that many of these changes were necessary to properly implement the state’s new housing laws. Part of the issue, he said, is that the laws as they currently stand aren’t objectively framed.
“For instance, there’s items in the design manual where it says “stately appearance,” or “superior design,” or something like that — not objective terms,” Hammar said. “What we are looking at doing is changing the decision criteria rather than the design manual itself at this time to put the criteria on the objective standards within the design manual.”
He also touched on a number of obstacles to the city creating more affordable housing options, like accessory dwelling units (ADUs). The state recently mandated an update to all municipalities’ ADU laws, and the city is in the process of trying to comply with those laws. Hammar said that some of the laws governing ADUs make it difficult to create more, since the setbacks are “quite large.”
‘Gentle density’
The department has also proposed adding “gentle-density” housing options controlled by form in R-1 single-family residential zones. These include corner-lot duplexes that appear to be single houses, as well as cottage housing on larger lots. Cottage housing is a style of construction wherein small residences are clustered around a common space. The department’s memo regarding this option said that these changes would not require the city to increase the base density of R-1 zones and wouldn’t alter neighborhood scale.
Hammar said that the department’s other goal is to streamline processes and definitions for the sake of everyone — developers, city planners, and the public. He said that the code can often be confusing when it comes to all the different planning terms one might encounter.
“For instance, with ‘hard surface coverage,’ there’s some that reference hard surface, some that reference hard surface and impervious, some just impervious, and some that reference just coverage without any indication of what that is,” Hammar said. “We’re consolidating all that in a consistent [way], something easy to find in one place. My goal is to lay it out in a way where it would take no more than two pages, so it could be used as a referential handout at the counter as well.”
In addition to making everything more streamlined and consolidated, Hammar said, it would also be easier to update the code in the future if only one or two sections had to change, versus sometimes upwards of 15 times.
Elder housing and food trucks
He also said that more modern laws, like those governing food trucks and elder housing, just don’t have a natural fit in older code sections. Regulations regarding food trucks currently exist under the Special Use Permits portion of city code, and the city currently regulates them as individual trucks, rather than regulating sites where food trucks can be.
“We’re recommending some sites where a food truck could be, rather than individual trucks, since they tend to be more transit in nature and they don’t necessarily stay in one place or consistently,” Hammar said.
Baker talked about the updates to elder housing, which largely involve ensuring the city has construction standards and location regulations in place. He reminded listeners that the city does not construct housing, “but what we do want to do with this code is ensure that there aren’t artificial barriers keeping [elder housing] from being able to be developed, and that everybody is clear on exactly where they can be, how they can be built, how many units, etc.”
He noted that adult family homes (AFHs) would be a separate, but similar form of housing. These kinds of homes are largely state-regulated.
Mixed-use zoning
Baker also touched on the department’s suggested updates to the code to allow for mixed-use commercial and residential structures, to best utilize existing buildings and space. This update specifically focuses on Gig Harbor North, Downtown, Kimball, and Uptown.
“These are centers of local importance,” Baker said. “A lot of the changes and a lot of the higher intensity zones are located in these center areas where we are expecting not just development of vacant lots, but also redevelopment of existing underutilized properties — car washes, other single-story commercial [buildings] very easily could be turned into mixed-use commercial on the ground floor, residential and above. A lot of these, again, are the commercial and residential high zones.”
The department’s memo noted that this does not include the waterfront districts and the city’s Height Restriction Area.
The Height Restriction Area, last updated in 2016, is an area with specifically designated building heights to preserve scenic views of the water and the city’s overall aesthetic. According to the city’s map, this area extends north to south from around Peacock Hill Avenue down Soundview Drive, and from roughly around Rosedale Street east towards the city limits.
Still, Baker cautioned, even though the department has come up with what the city’s planners feel are good proposals, “our changes that you’re looking at in Phase 2 here are not necessarily going to be the silver bullet.”
“It’s going to take a hundred different actions to be able to truly address affordable housing, and that’s not just at the local level,” he said.