City Moves Ahead on New Unified Development Ordinance
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
The City of Anderson’s new draft land-use rules offer a municipal manifesto, a 279-page attempt to remake the city’s rules around walkability, design quality, development standards and a more deliberate idea of what kind of place the city wants to be. Written by Houseal Lavigne consultants in conjunction with the city, the study proposes a Unified Development Ordinance (UDO) that would replace the city’s existing zoning, subdivision, and related land-use codes with one streamlined document tied to the Comprehensive Plan adopted in 2025.
On Tuesday, city council voted to send the ordinance to next week’s planning commission meeting for review before a final vote.
The draft’s guiding argument is that Anderson has outgrown piecemeal regulation. Instead of treating zoning, parking, signs, buffers, lighting, and development review as separate bureaucratic kingdoms, the new ordinance knits them together into one framework that emphasizes compatibility, public space, and an urban form that is at once more orderly and more humane.
One of the study’s major themes is that development should behave like a neighbor rather than an interruption. The code demands more screening for mechanical units, tighter limits on visual clutter, a stronger relationship between buildings and sidewalks, and more attention to what the draft repeatedly calls social gathering space. In that section, the ordinance requires certain developments to dedicate land for gathering, then “activate” it with improvements such as seating, gazebos, outdoor dining, dog parks, playgrounds, fountains, or even amphitheaters.
The parking chapter shows the same approach, though in more granular form. It tries to reduce unnecessary asphalt while preserving access, requiring internal connections between lots, setting minimum and maximum parking standards, and allowing shared and joint-use parking in some situations. It also asks developments to justify parking demand through traffic studies once they cross certain thresholds, including projects projected to generate 100 peak-hour trips, 1,000 daily trips, or 50 residential units.
The draft is notably prescriptive about the choreography of movement. Driveways are limited and separated by roadway type, vision triangles are protected, sidewalks are required along frontages where they do not already exist, and bicycle parking becomes a formal part of the development equation. The code’s larger ambition is clear: to make cars fit into development, not let development collapse into car storage.
Its treatment of architecture and signage is equally pointed. The sign chapter addresses public welfare, scenic views, and visual restraint, but it also gives businesses a precise palette of signs, sizes, and placements. Monument signs, wall signs, awning signs, sandwich boards, yard signs, and temporary banners all get their own limits, while the ordinance seeks to prevent “sign clutter” and keep the streetscape coherent.
The study also leaves little doubt about what kind of city it wants Anderson to become. Planned developments would be asked to align with the Comprehensive Plan, produce distinctive places, preserve natural features, and include prominent social gathering spaces. The effect is not merely regulatory. It is cultural: a subtle argument that cities reveal their values in the thickness of their curb cuts, the height of their lights, the way they screen a trash enclosure, and whether they leave room for people to gather without buying something first.
The UDO is more than code revision, it is a statement of intent, and a fairly ambitious one at that: that Anderson can be more legible, more attractive, and more coherent if it is willing to tell developers, in a thousand carefully drafted ways, that the city is not simply a site to build on but a place to be made.
The draft’s deeper agenda is not just to tidy up Anderson’s code but to change the city’s look and feel. That means more rules about what buildings face onto, how they meet the street, and how much visual noise the city is willing to tolerate.
One of the most telling sections is building design. The draft requires entryways, courtyards, recessed storefronts, mosaic surrounds, façade articulation, roofline changes, and material variation, especially in the districts where people will see and use the buildings. It is trying to make blank walls, flat roofs, and repetitive façades harder to build, particularly where a structure fronts a street or abuts residential areas.
The townhouse and neighborhood-residential rules show the same instinct. Garages cannot dominate the front of the house in the way many suburban developments have allowed; in some cases they must be recessed, and in others they are prohibited on the front façade entirely. The ordinance also sorts exterior materials into tiers, rewards higher-quality finishes, and bans corrugated metal, vinyl siding, unfinished concrete block, and synthetic stucco on façades.
The fence and wall section carries this concern down to the edges of lots. It limits heights, materials, and opacity by district and yard type, while also demanding maintenance so that fences do not sag, rot, or become visual debris. Retaining walls are treated like architectural events: they must be engineered, terraced at certain heights, landscaped, and, when tall enough, capped with safety barriers.
There is also an ecological and landscape-preservation thread. The tree ordinance distinguishes specimen trees, established trees, young trees, and invasive or noncontributing trees, then tells developers exactly how many replacement trees are required when trees are removed. On larger undeveloped sites, the code requires tree canopy retention, with 15 percent minimum retention for nonresidential and mixed-use development and 20 percent for residential development.
That same landscape logic runs through buffer rules, where the city frames vegetation to soften incompatible uses, manage stormwater, and preserve the city’s visual character. The new code does not treat trees as decorative afterthoughts, but as part of infrastructure, part of property value, and part of the city’s argument about what kind of place Anderson wants to become.
The public-space rules are just as revealing. Social gathering space is no longer an optional amenity but, for many projects, a required ingredient, with the city explicitly naming courtyards, pavilions, community gardens, amphitheaters, athletic courts, playgrounds, and outdoor seating as legitimate urban features. The ordinance’s preferred future is one in which development makes room for people to linger, not just pass through.
The sign chapter rounds out that picture by trying to keep commercial corridors legible and uncluttered. The draft allows monument and temporary signs but forbids billboards, pole signs, flashing signs, roof signs, and other devices that it sees as disruptive or unsafe, while also imposing limits on lighting, electronic message boards, and sign maintenance. It is, in essence, an anti-chaos rulebook.
Existing nonconforming signs would be allowed to remain only until August 14, 2033, providing a ten-year amortization period to bring old signage into compliance. That detail says a great deal about the ordinance as a whole: it is not trying to shock Anderson into a new aesthetic overnight, but to steer it toward a more intentional cityscape.
