With its first-ever application for a backyard guest house on the table, Independence is tightening the rules on where such small dwellings can be built.
The city resolved Monday to institute additional regulations on accessory dwelling units, which are small housing structures, such as guest houses, built in addition to the main structure on residential land.
What you need to know
To do this, the council passed a resolution to send a zoning amendment request to the Kenton County Planning Commission, which will level a recommendation in the coming months. After that, the recommendation will return to council for a final vote.
Currently, accessory dwelling units are allowed in most residential zones throughout the city on lots containing at least 5,000 square feet of land, with some exceptions.
The new resolution would allow the construction of such units in the city’s residential rural estate, or R-RE, zones. It would disallow them in the city’s residential compact subdivision, or R-CPS, zones, residential conventional subdivision, or R-CVS, zones and residential mixed, or R-M, zones. Units would be allowed as conditional uses in the city’s residential large lot subdivision, or R-LLS, zones.
The resolution also calls for accessory units to conform to the city’s design standards, which currently apply to primary, single-family housing units.
“It’s the usual thing we deal with,” said Mayor Chris Reinersman. “It’s weighing property rights against what is the impact on everybody.”
Independence, along with many other cities in the county, reformed its zoning ordinances in 2020. This included new regulations on accessory dwelling units.
Reinersman brought the topic to the council on Monday because the city had received its first-ever application for the construction of an accessory dwelling unit since the 2020 reform.
Any new regulations enacted after Monday’s meeting would not affect the property owner currently building the unit, but the mayor believed the topic warranted discussion among the city legislators.
Reinersman said he was personally “ambivalent” about the issue, and there was discussion among the city council members focused on concerns about the unregulated proliferation of such units, even if most were not in favor of an outright ban. Several of the smaller cities in the county, including Ludlow, Ryland Heights, Edgewood and others do not allow them at all.
Councilmember Tom Brinker said regulations in the smaller cities, which had less space, made sense, but “Independence is a little bit more unique.”
Still, Brinker said, “if everybody decides to build one, you can double the size of a subdivision.”
Accessory dwelling units do not include utility structures like sheds, which Reinersman said the city was pretty loose with. Councilmember Carol Franzen pointed out, however, that “people aren’t living in a shed.”
In the end, the council agreed that some tweaking of the ordinance was in order and largely agreed that the units could be allowed on the city’s larger lots, but not the smaller lots. They also agreed the units had to conform to the design standards in place for primary dwellings.
“A lot of places still have larger lot sizes that are within the city,” said Councilmember Chris Vogelpohl.
After some more discussion, the council decided to pass the resolution that night, rather than put it off to a later meeting, since the amendment would need to go through the county process first before being finalized with the city.
You can view the entire zoning ordinance for Independence at the Kenton County Planning and Development Services website.