Zoning Board of Adjustment: What Happens After Your Hearing Philadelphia Zoning specializes in Zoning Variance coordination. Whether it is a regulated use registration for a new business or a height bonus for a home addition, in order to get approval from the City to execute a development plan which is not expressly allowed by the Zoning Code, you must obtain letter granting you special approval from...
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Congratulations! If you are wondering what your next steps should be when getting prepared for a Zoning Board of Adjustment (ZBA) hearing, then congratulations! You are almost finished with the zoning permit process. But before you start popping champagne, you have to get ZBA (Zoning Board of Adjustment) approval first. A disclaimer: Just because you follow all of the criteria leading up to and including the...
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An additional information request is sent by Licenses and Inspections whenever one of their plans examiners wants to know more about your project. Getting this letter is not an indication of failure, it is actually considered a standard response as requirements for permits can be as unpredictable as the weather. However, in the off chance you do not receive a request for additional information, you deserve...
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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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When we started out at Philly Zoning, we got a version the same question every week: Where's my permit? Once someone gets started on a permitting project, they want to know how far along the permit is, and how they can check its progress. We give our clients weekly updates to answer that question, but we also think it might be helpful to provide an overview...
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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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One of the most sensible and also counter-intuitive parts of the zoning process in Philly is the community review. Any time you want to use your property for something that the zoning code doesn't allow, you must seek a variance from the City of Philadelphia (as we've discussed). When you seek a variance, a community organization in Philadelphia gets to review the proposal before the City...
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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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