Anchorage commission to weigh lifting Creekside limits and Lore Road rezone Dec. 7

Anchorage's Planning and Zoning Commission will weigh two land use requests at a Monday, Dec. 7 hearing. Cook Inlet Housing Authority wants 2001 design limits lifted from 9.46 acres near Muldoon and DeBarr roads. A Lore Road landowner wants a land use plan change and rezone that would open a 4.29-acre lot to a 12-lot subdivision.

The commission recommends; the Anchorage Assembly decides. The hearing starts no earlier than 6:30 pm in the Loussac Library Assembly Chambers.

Cook Inlet Housing wants four Creekside parcels to keep general business zoning without special limitations set by a 2001 ordinance. That ordinance allows only uses approved through a business planned unit development, bans pawn shops, car lots and storage yards, and requires a 100-foot Chester Creek buffer and street-facing, campus-style buildings.

"The SL, instituted more than two decades ago, imposes prescriptive design requirements and time-consuming entitlement processes that limit development opportunities," Vice President Tyler Robinson wrote in the authority's application. The authority has built more than 250 units of housing and commercial space at Creekside over 15 years, he wrote, and one tract remains vacant.

The authority says a June 23 Assembly ordinance made the tracts Town Center, a land use plan designation that general business zoning implements. It also says the city no longer allows special limitations, but the ordinance it cites, as drafted, bans only new ones. Removing existing ones takes a rezone judged on three tests: consistency with the comprehensive plan, no objective risk to health or safety and no conflict with other codes.

The Estate of Kovey K. Stewart asks to change the land use plan for 3407 Lore Road from single-family and two-family homes to compact mixed housing, and to rezone it from R-1, which allows up to five homes per acre, to R-2M, which allows five to 30.

The Platting Board takes up the Featherwood plat Dec. 2: 12 lots on a cul-de-sac, plus 30 feet of public right-of-way along Lore Road and Spruce Street, where the roads were never formally dedicated.

S4 Group argues the current plan designation is an error. Its narrative says the parcel was built out with apartments and a house in the 1930s, that much of the nearby land is already zoned R-2M and that the project supports Mayor Suzanne LaFrance's "10,000 Homes in Ten Years" strategy.

According to the applicant's summary, about 20 to 25 people stopped at its booth at the Abbott Loop Community Council's June 25 picnic, asking about traffic, drainage to the east, trees on the east line and construction noise. Neighbors were told that buffer landscaping required where R-2M abuts R-1 makes clear-cutting the eastern trees unlikely, the summary says.