Whitemarsh Township Releases Draft of Comprehensive Plan

Whitemarsh Township recently released a draft of its Comprehensive Plan. If you aren’t familiar with what a comprehensive plan is, it is a plan developed once every 10 years to guide a community, especially land-use.
You can download the draft here.

A few interesting things:

  • The media income of Whitemarsh Township is $113,956 (the county’s is $86,472). Whitemarsh residents has a median disposable income of $85,870 (income after taxes)
  • Only 6.0% of Whitemarsh residents use public transportation to get to work
  • Only 741 people both live and work in Whitemarsh. 8,100 residents commute outside of Whitemarsh
  • Just over 15,000 people commute into the township for work
  • The median home value within Whitemarsh Township is $386,789
  • There are 22 zoning classifications within Whitemarsh, of which 10 districts are variations of residential zoning. These 10 districts constitute 84% of the township

The red meat of the draft plan starts at page 23. It goes through the vision, goals, policies, and actions.

Starting page 29, it goes through a 2028 future land use plan. This section outlines what land uses could be implemented in the future.

Page 41 mentions Whitemarsh’s potential use of form-based zoning code.

Page 50 mentions cluster development, which is way to preserve open space. For example, if a developer wants to build a bunch of houses, the houses would all be situated close together on one portion of the property. The rest would be open space.

Page 53 starts the section on transportation. This section can’t really be considered a serious effort. After reading this, goes to page 76 and read the goals associated with it. There is no major effort to improve traffic (such as pushing for another connection to highways via Whitemarsh). That might be an unachievable goal, but with the Department of Transportation headed by a Whitemarsh resident, this is the best chance.

The entire draft plan is 200+ pages. The page we point out are what we think people will be most interested in. The link to download the document is at the top of the article.

Let us know what you think in the comments.