City zoning question

[Robert Farris]

There is a foreclosed tri-plex I was interested in buying and was talking with the bank to make the deal happen but I went to the City Building/Zoning dept. and was told me that they have rezoned that area to a single family area and that the tri-plex can no longer be used as a tri-plex.

They said the house was grand-fathered in and as long as the inspections were kept up that it would have been ok, but since the house was sitting in foreclosure for longer than 6 months with no inspections done, the house converted back to the newer SFH zoning rules.

So basically, the tri-plex is useless as a rental.

Has anyone dealt with this kind of issue before?

Is there anything I can do to change this? 

[Matt Devincenzo]

Originally posted by @Robert Farris:

@Charlie Fitzgerald, thanks for commenting. I'll check back with the city and ask them about a social use permit.

What exactly is a social use permit?

 I believe that was supposed to say "special" not social. This situation is not uncommon especially in older parts of town where big homes were made into multiple units in the past.

I have some properties in a historic district that has the same 6 mo rule. There are no apartment or MFR zones in the district today. There are a few properties that have existing non-conforming uses like this and when they're unused they fall into two categories. The first is what the City mentioned, that you basically have to "restore" it to the SFR status. This works for homes that were split into separate units in the past.

The other is properties like a 10 unit apartment that was constructed in the 70s before the historic district established this rule. It was vacant for a year and should have lost it's zoning, but the only way to actually do that would be to demo the building and build 3 SFR on the underlying lots. This is beyond the City's powers and so the property basically maintains it's status unless it's destroyed.

You may want to look into it more, because while the City's standard answer is it lost its zoning that may not actually be the case. It might take some leg work to talk to someone that can make that decision, but it is a possibilty depending on the individual property's charactaristics.