The importance of entitlements within the design process

The entitlements process can be long and challenging. You won’t find architecture magazines singing its praises, or starchitects touting entitlements as the key to their genius. But I would argue that entitlements, pragmatic as they may be, are crucial to good design. The entitlements process offers plenty of room for creativity, working to the advantage of developers, cities, and the broader community. 

Even when a project doesn’t involve proposing changes to the rules, it is necessary to demonstrate applicability and compliance with all zoning criteria. Here, creativity opens up possibilities for working within the rules to enhance the design. Good design also allows for flexibility, solving the problems of today while also leaving room for adaptability when conditions change in the future, as they inevitably will. 

For two recent VDT projects in Denver—Edison at Rino, a 277-unit apartment community, and Park 17, a 190-apartment community—the zoning rules were clear. We designed both projects as “as of right” projects, working within the zoning limitations.

For Edison at Rino, that meant sticking to the height limits and setback requirements. There were no parking requirements, no floor area ratios to follow, and no density restrictions. If development were only about maxing out the building envelope, filling out the site to fit as many units in as possible, Edison at Rino could have simply looked like a large box on a plinth and still satisfied zoning rules. Instead, we studied alternative ways to utilize the site, focusing on sun paths and views to find the solution that would leave the most space for courtyards while granting every unit great access to daylight and views, all without compromising privacy. We settled on a modified X shape, organizing the units into intersecting volumes, with three wings enclosing outdoor areas for the residents.

For Park 17, in Denver’s City Park West neighborhood, we had to follow more stringent criteria—in addition to height limitations and setback requirements, this area of the city had form-based codes that placed additional requirements on the upper-story setbacks, including preserving a view corridor across the entire site further limiting the overall building height. Because 17th Street is known as “Restaurant Row,” we had to activate certain frontages at the ground plane.  We used these requirements to define the project’s massing.

Park 17 relied on the Prescient modular design-build system, which combines the power of building information model software with component manufacturing and prefabrication. By default, Prescient tends to favor orthogonal buildings, but the site was triangular in shape. Through our design process, we were able to achieve grid changes and setbacks that responded to the zoning limitations, fit the unusually shaped site, and resulted in a varied and responsive massing. 

Our current Bell Tower project in Denver is a planned unit development (PUD): the zoning rules had been customized a decade and half earlier for a project planned by the site’s owner. (The Great Recession had scuttled that project.) Our client inherited these entitlements when they were pursuing the site. When we analyzed the entitlements, we found that they didn’t go into specifics about how vehicle traffic, parking, loading, trash collection, and utilities would work.

Changing the PUD would have been prohibitively, time consuming, and costly in this case. So we came up with ways to address these challenges and then worked extensively with the city of Denver to show how our solutions remained within the spirit of the PUD. We understood what was important to the stakeholders when they created the entitlements, which established the size of the floor plates and preserved view planes. We were able to work within those constraints while meeting functional requirements that the entitlements didn’t consider. The result is a highly progressive design despite the constraints of zoning rules.

Sometimes, of course, it makes sense to negotiate entitlements. For EnV, a multifamily development in Chicago, the zoning requirements limited the site to only 220 units, a number that was reached by dividing the square footage of the site by a factor called the minimum lot area (MLA). The MLA for a studio apartment was smaller than the MLA for a regular dwelling unit, so our client could have built up to 50 percent of the development as studios to maximize the number of units. However, building that many studios didn’t pencil out. 

We negotiated with the city for many months, offering concessions, culminating in a meeting in which, by committing to a LEED-certified building and various other measures, we were allowed to lower the percentage of studios to a manageable number while still building as many units as if 50 percent of them were studios, thus adhering to the spirit of the zoning ordinance. As a result, EnV has 249 units, in a mix of one-bedroom units, two-bedroom units, and studios. We didn’t have to sacrifice design, either—the building’s cantilevered, transparent balconies give it a distinctive profile in the skyline, in contrast to the inexpressive form of many new high-rises.

Entitlements can be an arduous and protracted process. However, with creativity, it is possible to maximize benefit for the client, build in flexibility for the future, strengthen the connections between the building and the urban fabric, and offer high quality design. Humble as they may be, entitlements play a vital role in architecture, laying the foundation for the great designs, even if they never capture the cover of a glossy magazine.

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