Site Planning
& Entitlements
The site plan is where a small format development is won or lost. We do the zoning math, draw the plan to the standard your municipality reviews against, and carry it through staff review, plan commission, and council.
How many homes
will this site hold?
Every small format project starts with one number, and almost nobody can give it to you accurately. Unit yield is not lot area divided by minimum lot size. It's what survives after setbacks, lot coverage caps, shared open space requirements, drive aisle and parking geometry, stormwater, existing trees, and utility easements all take their cut.
We run that math against the actual ordinance text for your municipality — not a general rule of thumb — and hand you a defensible unit count before you commit design dollars.
- Zoning district analysis — permitted uses, density, dimensional standards, and whether your target format is by-right or conditional
- Buildable area study — setbacks, coverage, height envelope, and the actual developable footprint
- Constraint mapping — easements, floodplain, wetland, slope, mature canopy, and utility routing
- Unit yield — realistic home count with the tradeoffs made explicit
What a site plan
package contains.
Scope scales with the parcel, but these are the components that show up in every small format submittal we've made.
Where each home sits, which way it faces, and how it relates to the shared space. Orientation drives daylight, privacy between units, and whether the development feels like a neighborhood or a storage yard.
Most cottage court and cluster ordinances require a minimum common area with dimensional standards — not just leftover lawn. We design it to meet the requirement and to actually be usable.
Stall counts, drive aisle widths, turning radii, and fire apparatus access. Fire department access is the requirement that most often forces a redesign late — we check it first.
Water and sewer lateral routing, whether individual or shared services are permitted, electric and gas metering strategy, and the capacity of what's in the street today.
Impervious surface accounting, infiltration or detention where triggered, and a grading concept that drains without dumping onto the neighbor.
Required buffer plantings, tree preservation and replacement, and the screening conditions that neighbors and plan commissions tend to ask for.
Getting it approved.
Entitlement is a political process wearing a technical costume. The drawings have to be right, and so does the sequence of conversations.
Before anything is formally submitted, we sit down with planning, zoning, engineering, and fire. Staff tell you their concerns in that room. Every concern you resolve before submittal is a review cycle you don't spend later — and staff remember who listened.
Complete application, drawings at review standard, narrative, and supporting studies. We respond to plan review comments directly rather than routing them back to you.
Where the format isn't permitted by right, a CUP requires demonstrating the project meets the ordinance's approval standards. That's a written case, not a drawing. We build it.
Required in some municipalities, advisable in most. Neighbors show up worried about parking, density, and rentals. We present the plan, take the questions, and bring back the concerns worth designing around.
We prepare the presentation and present it. Nobody knows the site better than the team that drew it, and hearings go badly when the person at the microphone has to defer.
Approvals arrive with conditions attached, and some of them are expensive. We negotiate the ones that are negotiable and price the ones that aren't before you're bound to them.
Who pays for the lateral, the drive, the stormwater, the main upsizing? On a project that serves a municipal housing goal, TIF, fee waivers, deferrals, and city-funded improvements are all legitimately on the table — and every dollar the municipality carries comes directly off the price of the finished homes. Most applicants never raise it, or raise it after approval when they have no leverage left. We raise it at pre-application, while the project still has something to trade.
Madison, Fitchburg, Middleton, Sun Prairie, and Verona all regulate small homes differently — different setbacks, different owner-occupancy rules, different review bodies, different tolerance for density. We maintain current regulation profiles for 21 Dane County municipalities because the answer to "can we build this here" changes by jurisdiction and sometimes by ordinance amendment mid-project. See all municipality profiles →
Get the unit count before you get the invoice
Send us the address. We'll run the zoning and the buildable-area math and tell you what the site supports and which approval path it takes.
Start a Site Feasibility Review →