What are the setbacks from the street? What style of house is most common? How dense is the neighborhood? These are the kinds of questions Planning Board members and residents will be invited to explore as the town prepares for new state laws requiring municipalities to allow more growth.
Planning Board members will help identify characteristics in about 20 areas, or neighborhoods, in town that have a distinct look and feel.
Board members left the Oct. 8 meeting with an assignment from DeCarlo Brown, town planner and economic director, to note details of their own home and neighborhood and record them to capture 36 details that distinguish one neighborhood from another.
The Planning Board will hold a training on sampling for the survey project at its Oct. 22 Planning Board meeting. Any member of the public interested in helping with the survey is welcome.
The townwide project is the first step in changing the local zoning ordinances as the town complies with new state laws on housing density, Brown said.
“The community will eventually need to make choices on protection versus restrictions while being consistent with state law,” he said.
The areas could eventually have new zoning rules tailored to maintain the character of each neighborhood and keep as much of the small town feel as possible as the town grows.
The York Hospital building on Portland Street, for instance, was designed to blend in with surrounding homes and apartment buildings through such features as Colonial style windows with 12 panels, according to a June 2003 news article.
State laws passed in recent years to ease the affordable housing shortage require municipalities to allow more growth in all areas of the community. One of the laws, LD 1829, requires every town to allow more densely developed lots in growth areas as long as adequate water and sewer utilities are available.
“These changes present an opportunity,” said Brown at a June Town Council meeting. “If we just allow the state to have these provisions without some type of decision-making on the local level, we will have a building environment that doesn’t reflect our own values.”
The neighborhoods are groups of properties that share similar characteristics, according to Verna Sharpe, the town’s assessing agent. The new neighborhood map used in the Assessing Department reflects the development and growth of South Berwick since the previous property revaluation 20 years ago.
The new map follows patterns “obvious to anybody driving by a neighborhood,” Sharpe said.
The map is expected to come on line this month in the GIS online property maps found on the Assessing Department page of the Town website
