North Augusta may consider allowing taller buildings downtown (2024)

A future downtown North Augusta that boasts a string of commercial business, with housing above, is something that the city council is hoping to incentivize through one slight change in the zoning rules that govern the core of this district.

Council on May 28 reached a consensus that limiting a building to, at most, two stories — as the 35-foot height restriction does — is too restrictive if the vision for Georgia Avenue is one where living meets with shopping and dining.

“I think we all have a vision, and everyone envisions having that nice retail on the bottom,” Councilman Eric Presnell said. “But with developers, they've got to make it worth their while.”

That means volume, he said; it means having the revenue-generating housing to support the commercial side of the project.

The city adopted its new development codethe end of last year, the first major re-write since 2007 and one that officials have said throughout its drafting is meant to introduce more flexibility in new development without skimping on the rules set up to encourage different areas of North Augusta to grow more intentionally.

“That was the thing that drove me so crazy in 2007, was to think that we’re the same town and we’re going off a code without the flexibility,” Mayor Briton Williams said this week. “That really was the genesis of ‘hey, let’s get through this.’”

The idea of possibly raising the height restriction along Georgia Avenue from Clifton Avenue up to Spring Grove came from a more administrative discussion about correcting what planning director Tommy Paradise said he believed were downtown uses that were incorrectly recorded in the final code when it was approved last year.

Paradise said the uses for the core of downtown — Georgia Avenue — and those for the rest of downtown — West Avenue; Riverside Village and Georgia Avenue north of Spring Grove, up to Lookaway Hall — got flopped in the final draft: a builder looking to put a single-family home on West Avenue wouldn’t be able to do so, he said, and an apartment complex could go up on Georgia Avenue if things remain as they were recorded.

Council this week easily agreed that the changes should be made for those outer areas of downtown — for West Avenue and its like-zoned areas.

But the council also had some consensus that eliminating multi-housing entirely from the core of Georgia Avenue wasn’t necessarily the goal — nor was it something they indicated should become a free-for-all.

It’s something “to mull over,” Councilman Kevin Toole said.

"It feels restrictive to me to eliminate any residential in that district, especially when we allow residential over commercial but we’ve got a height restriction in downtown that’s going to limit how much of that you can do. That, to me, is going to make that property much less marketable,” he said.

As the proposed changes are written, residential above a commercial business would be the only permitted housing for that central part of Georgia Avenue; multi-family housing, as just an apartment complex, would be eliminated as an option, as Paradise said he believed was intended for the final draft of the development code.

Though housing above retail does allow multi-family housing, the building height restriction limits just how many units could be overhead — one story for retail and one story for living.

That makes for “a very small, limited audience” in talking with developers, Presnell said.

“Multi-family over retail… I like that, but with a greater height restriction to allow more flexibility in people being able to do that in a financially viable way,” Toole added.

Council indicated that if the height restriction were to undergo revision, it likely would not be done away with altogether but instead bumped up by maybe one story.

City Council is scheduled to hold a first vote on the corrective changes only on June 3. An adjustment to the height restrictions is not included in this but could be made into a separate directive for the planning commission to analyze. If so, it would then come back to Council for a decision.

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