IOWA CITY – Earlier this month, a major site plan received approval for new townhomes on E Foster Road in northern Iowa City. The project will consist of 19 townhome units across 5 buildings on an undeveloped 6 acre parcel owned by Foster Road Developers LLC. No renderings of the buildings could be found online or within city documents.
Planning Context
The parcel, across from the Vintage Cooperative of Iowa City, is zoned RS-12 (High Density Single-Family Residential Zone) which is intended to allow higher intensity, but house scale residential development that serves single to two-family uses. While the RS-12 zone allowed townhomes prior to the city’s recent zoning amendments, the zone prohibited townhomes contained within buildings under a single parcel, which were instead considered multi-family uses. Since the current project appears to contain 5 townhome buildings under the same parcel, it would not have been allowed previously without subdividing each unit into its own parcel.
Read our full analysis or original overview of the Title 14 Zoning Amendments.
Though townhomes are considered an important form of missing middle housing, the E Foster Rd project provides few advantages over conventional single-family development from an urbanism perspective. The townhomes will be located in a largely greenfield neighborhood with difficult topography and street connections for urban form development. With water drainages, forest, and uneven grading the parcel contains limited buildable area resulting in a housing density of only 2.92 dwelling units per acre. Housing density of this scale is equivalent to detached single-family homes situated on nearly 15,000 square foot lots. The nearest transit stop is already a half mile away and with such low density it will be difficult to create a supportive environment for transit expansion into the neighborhood.
Though townhomes are often less expensive for residents than detached homes, the location’s challenges and excess land will likely result in higher costs as Iowa City continues to struggle with housing affordability. A similar project that provided townhome units as infill development within the city’s existing infrastructure would be far more beneficial for Iowa City’s urban form and addressing ongoing housing shortages. Yet, it is positive to see the zoning reforms begin to impact the production of housing units and it seems certain that any prior development of the E Foster Road parcel would contain fewer units than the present project.