Victor Annexes the Birch Crossing Parcel, Then Zones Out the Apartments
Victor's council annexed the Birch Crossing parcel but zoned it for single-family houses, rejecting the workforce-apartment zoning D&B Partners needed.
VICTOR — The Victor City Council voted 2-1 on May 27 to annex the Birch Crossing parcel, a 13.38-acre county island east of downtown, and zone it for single-family houses, closing off the 158-unit workforce-apartment project D&B Partners, LLC had spent three months trying to build there.
The decision followed two Victor Planning and Zoning Commission (P&Z) hearings since March. D&B asked to annex three parcels between the eastern end of Birch Street and Baseline Road and to zone them RM-1 and RM-2 for apartments. The council instead assigned RS-7, which permits detached single-family homes on 7,000-square-foot lots and duplexes on 9,000-square-foot lots, the zoning the commission had recommended on April 16. Council members Sue Muncaster and Stacy Hulsing voted in favor. Emily Sustick voted against, asking to continue the hearing until the city attorney, who was on vacation, could answer her legal questions. Amy Ross was absent.
According to the developer, the council was turning down a kind of project it had previously approved, including on this very land. Victor signed off on Sherman Park at about 26 units per acre, a mile out at the town's south fringe; Birch Crossing sits a third of a mile from Main Street, at 15.9 units per acre. The council also approved these same three parcels for a 160-unit project in 2023, under Snavely Property Company, which withdrew to build Sherman Park instead. "We're not asking for anything new," principal Joe Finley told the council.
The Comprehensive Plan backs the location. It designates the parcel Downtown Neighborhood, a category that lists apartments among its primary uses at 8 to 16 units per acre and names seven zones that fit: RS-3 and RS-5 single-family, RM-1 and RM-2 multifamily, plus mixed-use (NX), civic (CIV), and parks (REC). D&B kept offering the city more than the code required. RM-2 carries no income limits, but the company volunteered to rent-cap half the apartments at 120 percent of the area median income (AMI), to deed-restrict a share of the units to qualified local households, and to bar short-term rentals on most of the site. It agreed to extend Birch Street through to Baseline Road, completing a stretch of the downtown grid the city has wanted for years; to pave Baseline; and to loop the water main for pressure and fire flow. It offered to build a pool and splash pad open to the public during staffed hours and to help pay for a lifeguard in a town with no public pool.
"If this project isn't right on these parcels so close to the downtown core," Finley asked the council, "then where would a project like this that provides affordable housing be right for Victor?"
The council's answer ran through the plan the developer was citing. On paper, the parcel can hold apartments. On the ground, it is mostly vacant, a county island ringed by Victor city limits. RS-16-zoned land lies across Baseline Road to the east; an established low-density neighborhood wraps the other three sides: single-family homes to the north and south, and recently built duplexes immediately west. Jordan Hoehnen, the city's assistant planner, told the council that those western duplexes sit on land already zoned for apartments, and urged it to weigh "the bird's-eye view of the zoning map versus what the actual built environment is." Rezones are discretionary, he added, and the plan guides those decisions without dictating them. Of the plan's seven recommended zones for this area, RS-7 isn't one of them.
It isn't the first time the council has zoned outside the plan. In April 2023, the same body rezoned 3.52 acres of city-owned Sherman Park from Parks and Recreation to Commercial Mixed Use, also off the list, to enable a 90-unit workforce-housing project that the city had recruited the same Snavely Property Company to build through an RFP and a joint venture with the Joint Housing Authority. The deal locked in 55 of the 90 units (61 percent) at deed-restricted rents of 80 to 120 percent of the area median income, with 23 of those units at the 80 percent floor. Sherman Park sits at the town's south fringe, the kind of edge the commission this spring said density should taper toward. D&B had told the council it was open to working out "the zoning that would be appropriate"; the council went to RS-7 without taking the developer up on it.
For Muncaster, the gap between the map and the neighborhood pointed to the plan itself. Victor last revised its Comprehensive Plan in 2021. The plan called for the empty and underused land near downtown to be redeveloped at a higher density. Instead, that land was built out before the vision took hold, and at a lower density than the plan imagined. Two three-story apartment complexes have gone up since, Larkspur at the north end of town and Sherman Park at the south edge, and residents have seen what that scale looks like. "We don't have the data to make good decisions," Muncaster said. "I really don't buy that we have to do what the comprehensive plan says when so many things have changed." She summed up her position in two words she wrote down during the hearing: "Too much, too soon."
The Planning and Zoning Commission had reached the same conclusion over its two hearings. Its objection was the buildings' mass and scale, not the number of homes; the staff report records the commission as "not outright against density by number of units." Carol Nowakowski pressed the point at the council hearing, holding up Mountainside Village as "one of the places that does offer tranquility with density." "A three-story apartment building feels entirely different than a cottage court," she said. A neighbor called the apartment "a monstrosity."
D&B Partners has the next move. The site is three parcels under separate ownership, held by D&B under contract, presumably contingent on the multifamily rezone the council didn't grant. The apartment plan is finished; D&B had called RM-2 zoning essential. The company told the council it would not seek a denial and would work toward zoning that fits, pointing to a reconsideration rather than a walk-away. A reconsideration could request RS-3 or RS-5, denser single-family zones on the plan's list, or lighter conditions so the parcels can be sold and built on individually. The annexation and RS-7 zoning hold only if D&B accepts them and records the plat, a decision it has a year to make.
The city, meanwhile, is preparing to redo the plan both sides invoked. Victor's treasurer and planning director have each said in recent meetings that they hope to begin the long-postponed Comprehensive Plan revision this fall. Birch Crossing is the kind of case driving that push, a parcel where the plan's map and the neighborhood it governs no longer line up.
What to watch: Whether D&B records the annexation under RS-7, asks for reconsideration, or walks away from the contract, and whether Victor opens the Comprehensive Plan this fall. The larger question outlasts the parcel: whether that rewrite catches the map up to the town that has been built around it.