Previously in this blog, we’ve mentioned the City of Philadelphia’s requests for additional information. Since we see a lot of these, we are going to create a catalogue of the requests as a reference guide. We hope that this will help our clients, design partners, and contractors better understand what information is most commonly missing from an application. (If you haven’t seen it before, it’s...
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Happy holidays from Philadelphia Zoning! We've had quite a year here, thanks to our clients, legal partners, and design partners. To thank everyone, we're offering this present: A handy reference guide for our most common permitting projects. Enjoy! General Zoning and Permitting Information The source: The Philadelphia Zoning Code The Philadelphia Code can be found here. Title 14 (what those of us not in the legal profession would simply...
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We here at Philadelphia Zoning like to poke some fun at our City's bureaucracy. Licenses and Inspections can be a mystery to homeowners and developers: documents go in; only sometimes do they come out. When they do come out, it's often because they are rejected for arcane reasons. It can be pretty frustrating and eat your time (and it's why Philadelphia Zoning exists: to save...
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Wait, I have to get approval from what? Ah, prerequisite approvals! Who doesn't love that giddy sensation? You know the one: You walk up to the desk at Licenses and Inspections, submit your carefully prepared application, and are told in a dead monotone, "This needs approval from Streets before we'll look at it." There's no way around it: Prerequisite approvals are rough. In this story, you need...
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We here at Philadelphia Zoning like to think we have answers for you. We tell you we can saw through forests of red tape, and we mean it. But sometimes, we get a question that has about a hundred different answers. "How much does a permit cost?" is one of those questions. There are a few reasons why such a simple question has so many different answers. First,...
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Zoning in Philadelphia is a strange enterprise. The ideas behind it are simple, and the people working the desks downtown are generally helpful. But in practice, it can be quite confusing. This little overview probably won’t make the strange details of zoning any less confusing, but it may give you a clearer picture of the overall structure of zoning complaints, requests, and applications in Philadelphia. How...
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The City of Philadelphia recently combined its review boards into the new Department of Planning and Development. The Department now houses the Art Commission, Historical Commission, City Planning Commission, and — of particular note to us at Philadelphia Zoning — the Zoning Board of Adjustment. This seems like a smart reorganization on paper, and there are other departments and personnel involved beyond those boards our company usually...
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