When Statesboro City Council meets at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 15, members will get the first reading of a multifaceted amendment to the city's Unified Development Code. Among other changes, the amendment would allow "tiny homes" as small as 400 square feet in certain areas.

The 5:30 regular session at City Hall, which includes a few other action items, follows a 4 p.m. council "work session," scheduled to conclude with a 4:45 p.m. ribbon cutting for the Youth Council's "Chess Park" project on the Willie McTell Trail.

When adopted by the council in September 2023, the Unified Development Code, or UDC, replaced the city's old Zoning Ordinance and related regulations. Then the UDC underwent a few relatively small changes or corrections during the first year because of some things that had been overlooked. 

Now the city's Planning and Development Department is proposing some additional changes after seeing a resurging number of variance requests.

"There are a number of changes included to try to address issues such as fire protection and things of that nature as we continue to grow," Planning and Housing Administrator Justin Williams said Monday. "There are also some … administrative things that aren't quite working, they've triggered variances, and that's what we want to try to avoid with having a good, working code. So we're removing some of those obstacles to development."

With a housing boom that has led to roughly 1,500 housing units "going vertical" — in other words, actively under construction — in Statesboro as of this week, the city's planners have encountered some situations they did not anticipate even two years ago when the UDC was being developed with help from consultants.

For example. the new code provided for mixed-use developments and even required space for neighborhood stores or restaurants within new residential neighborhoods that qualify as "planned unit developments," or PUDs. But the city staff and consultants didn't anticipate the size of PUD plans some developers would be bringing.

So, the requirement that at least 20% of the "gross floor area" of a PUD must be devoted to residential and at least 20% to "non-residential uses," such as retail businesses or office buildings, would mean that at least two acres in a 10-acre development should be in non-residential buildings. But for a 100-acre PUD, this turns into a 20-acre "non-residential" requirement.

"And you know, depending on how big you're going in terms of your development, that (20%) could be the Publix shopping center, and we don't think that's fair," Williams said. "That's a bit more than we were expecting. I don't think when we adopted the UDC we could have predicted the larger-scale development needs that were planning toward Statesboro. Nothing that large had happened, and now we've got multiple requests of that size."

Without removing the basic 20% mandate for smaller planned unit development, the proposed amendment inserts: "For developments exceeding 100 acres in size, the concurrency requirement is reduced to 10% of the gross floor area for both residential and commercial uses."

Fire code insertion

Another section of the amendment would require that all  apartment  buildings and townhome buildings with more than two units, whether being newly built or when undergoing substantial renovation or reconstruction, "be equipped with a sprinkler system that complies with the most current edition of the International Fire Code."

This section has been added at the request of Fire Chief Tim Grams and the Statesboro Fire Department, in an effort to make sure that all of the many townhome units now under construction offer proper fire protection, Williams said.

Tiny homes

But the provision for "tiny homes" has been added after some City Council members, beginning months ago, expressed interest in allowing these little houses — which have in recent years received media attention as a national trend — in Statesboro.

Before the UDC was adopted a year and a half ago, the smallest allowed size of a house in Statesboro's city limits was 1,050 square feet. The UDC has allowed for houses as small as 750 square feet, potentially, in some areas.

Now, the newly proposed addition to the "definitions" section of the UDC defines "Dwelling: Tiny Home" as a building covering an area between 400 and 749 square feet, designed purely as a residence "and generally as part of a larger development containing common areas within the medium-density and high-density multi-family residential districts upon approval of a special use permit."

Further, the definition specifically prohibits anything that qualifies as a recreational vehicle under national standards from being used as a tiny home and requires tiny houses to meet all applicable building codes the city has adopted. They would also have to meet the site requirements set forth in a section of the UDC that already allows for slightly larger "cottage court" houses.

These are just highlights from the amendment, which also will make some smaller changes and remove a code section with some outdated language about mobile homes that  was superseded by the UDC.

If a majority of the council approves of the amendment's first reading without significant changes, it could be enacted on another motion and vote of the council at the next meeting.