After weeks of heated debate, the Downtown Master Plan was approved Sept. 15 by the Auburn City Council.
The Auburn Planning Commission met Tuesday, Sept. 29, for its first work session on the implementation of the plan. The commission met to review the master plan, examine new City Council recommendations and discuss the future of what the commission calls Auburn’s Urban Core, which is comprised of the city’s downtown business area and several surrounding areas.
Auburn’s Development Services Building Conference room was crowded, with several forced to stand as the meeting began at 4 p.m. on a weekday afternoon.
The commission was tasked by the council with exploring regulating construction of student housing as a separate category from other residential land use construction.
The planning staff has been researching Columbia, South Carolina, as a reference for how communities home to universities regulate student housing, according to Forrest Cotten, planning director for the City of Auburn.
“[Regulating purpose-built student residential housing differently] is just the way they’ve chosen to go about dealing with this issue that every college community is dealing with, has dealt with or will deal with,” Cotten said.
Warren McCord, an Auburn planning commissioner, said there have been past efforts to regulate student-oriented housing. Those efforts were based on square footage and kitchen type.
“What that led to were some unintended consequences," McCord said. "We ended up with a lot of units that were no longer meeting the demands of the students.”
Several of the commissioners voiced concern that partitioning off student-oriented construction as a separate entity could lead to segregation of real estate.
“It kind of smacks of having a segregated [building code] in prime real estate near the university campus that could go out of date, and all of the sudden you have a problem there,” said Phillip Chansler, planning commissioner.
McCord said the commission must also take into account design.
“You end up stacking students into multilevel bunk-houses,” McCord said. “It can have an effect of ghettoizing the students. I think there is some advantage to having some integration between the students and the community, particularly in terms of the commercial part of the community.”
The commission made no decision on the council’s recommendation of regulating purpose built student housing separately.
Discussion of building height again arose as the commission reviewed a City Council recommendation to explore lowering the building height maximum for residential buildings in the Urban Core. The council asked for the commission to explore lowering the maximum from the current height of 75 feet. down to 60 feet.
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