Three Story Buildings

Thursday, July 16, 2026 Meeting at 5:30 City Hall

A developer is proposing a 3-story condo development at Gardner/Main, where Running Waters is currently. They are allowed to have 3 stories as a result of the recently passed zoning. This is a new right. Despite significant public resistance throughout the zoning's development. When the public learned of the development, they raised significant opposition to the design. 100s against, 2 or 3 for. Uncertain what could be done, the City Council passed a resolution blocking 3-story buildings temporarily, so that the Planning Commission can re-evaluate.

The Planning Commission is meeting on Thursday, July 16th at 5:00 PM, in City Hall, to discuss the matter. Advocates for or against granting a right to 3-story buildings in Harbor Springs should attend. To date, there has been virtually no public support for changing our town to allow 3-story buildings. The Planning Commission continues to insert the right into each zoning draft. It needs to explain why to the public or end the effort to raise building heights.

Agenda: Thursday Night July 16 at 5:30 pm

1. Public Comment

2. New and Old Business

3. Memo from City Attorney

4. Site Plan Review – 289 E Main St.

5. Site Plan Review – 300 W Lake St., Harbor Market.

6. Zoning Code Discussion – Central Business District

The Moratorium Ends Beginning Of September

We are ALL stewards of this precious treasure of a town, and with that comes responsibility and complete honesty in all decisions being made. With little, if any, public support for taller buildings, does anyone feel the Planning Commission and City Council have handled this issue of building heights in a proper manner?

The Main/Gardner project and the collective objections to it are proof that the job of the city and community coming together to find consensus has failed.

We have to ask…..

1. Limit building heights in the Central Business District to 28 feet.

2. Reopen the zoning ordinance height provisions for thorough public research and discussion.

3. Restore community trust by ensuring transparent and consensus-based decision-making on building heights.

4. Please fix it.

Thank you.

Nan Mautz, Harbor Springs Resident

What does Legal say?

From the minutes of the last Planning Commissioners' meeting, the Planning Commission requested that the City Attorney provide an opinion on whether the currently enacted moratorium affects the ability to take action on the pending request, and clarification on whether parking reserved for upper-floor residential use is permitted.

The new zoning was developed to simplify the zoning. But the first project before the Planning Commission immediately led to the Planning Commission turning to City Council to determine the legal meaning of what was written in the zoning. If the zoning is so complex, we need a lawyer to interpret what the Planning Commission approved; is it simpler?

An Economic Observation Worth Considering

The case for two stories downtown is usually made on aesthetics. There is an economic version that gets less attention, and it runs through the region rather than through Main Street. Harbor Springs is small. The economy that supports it is not. West Traverse, Little Traverse, and Bear Creek share our schools, our shoreline, our merchants, and in most cases our zip code. People buy and build in those townships for a reason, and the downtown is a large part of that reason. Downtown is not primarily an engine of its own square footage. It is the amenity that makes the surrounding land valuable. The scarcity is the product.

Adding height produces a gain that is easy to measure: more square feet, more taxable value on a few parcels, more increment for the DDA. It may also carry a cost that never appears on any single project’s pro forma, because the gain is concentrated on a handful of lots while the cost, if it exists, is spread thinly across thousands of properties and shows up years later. A protected core creates value, growth follows into the ring around it, and then the core is loosened one reasonable approval at a time to capture some of that growth directly. No one decides to trade the character away. It erodes through a series of individually defensible decisions, like new zoning.

The accounting is incomplete, and that height is one of the few decisions with no reversal path. Worth asking before any vote: how much value does a third story actually add on these parcels, what is downtown character worth to property values across the townships, and if the goal is housing or growth, is the most expensive land in the region really the most efficient place to put it?

The Community Says Preserve and Protect

The City of Harbor Springs 14 years ago - how has it changed, and why does showing up at this Thursday’s meeting, July 15 at 5:30 pm matter so much? You may think “you got it” but if the population of Harbor Springs does not want the town to become a series of three-story buildings, you have your chance NOW. Why change the town with so little public support? What is the compelling interest?

Preserve and Protect: The United Methodist Church

While a 3-story building is easy to define, the harm to character and preservation is more subtle. Is it just as important?

The building proposed on Main and Garder Street will block the afternoon sunlight into a nearby Church.

Avoidable progress?

Here is a short 13 minute film, that tells you more. Keep the volume low. Our thanks to the members of the church that spoke out.

Watch the video on YouTube

A Stolen Water View

A few years ago, at the time of the Main Street three - and four-story Mossburg Buildings construction, the most devastating blow was felt by the 119-year-old Earl H. Mead designed United Methodist Church, which sat on the diagonal corner of Main and Gardner.

For over eleven decades, parishioners standing on the church steps, or looking out through the side sanctuaries, through the stained glass windows that actually open, enjoyed an uninterrupted, sparkling view of Little Traverse Bay. That blue water view was the literal and spiritual anchor of the church’s placement in the town.

Now, the urban buildings completely choked out that horizon. The vast expanse of shimmering water was replaced by walls of balconies, huge, modern black-framed windows, and rooftop air-conditioning units and elevator shafts for the luxury condos on top. The church, once a beacon overlooking the bay, was now boxed in from the lake by real estate speculation.

The shading of this intersection diminishes the entire pedestrian experience of entering Harbor Springs, darkening a gateway that has defined the town’s human scale and coastal character for over a century.

Planning Commissioners are not obligated to approve a development that imposes irreversible aesthetic, cultural, and economic injury on a community. The loss of historic light, the erasure of a restored landmark's defining feature, and the continued degradation of the town's irreplaceable identity are damages that, once done, cannot be undone.

The planning commission exists precisely for moments like this one.

To the Community, City Hall, our new City Manager, the Harbor Springs Planning Commission and the City Council: The Legal Basis

Under the Michigan Zoning Enabling Act (MCL 125.3504(2)), a special land use must be compatible with adjacent uses and consistent with public welfare — and Michigan courts have recognized that loss of light to historic structures can defeat that standard. Any denial must be documented in a formal written finding (MCL 125.3502(4); JS Beck Rd LLC v. Charter Township of Northville, 2024) — but that requirement works in our favor: this harm is specific, measurable, and easy to document.

Under Olsen v. Jude & Reed, LLC and MCL 125.3605, a successful challenge requires unique harm — not generalized aesthetic concern. Here, that standard is clearly met:

• The United Methodist Church recently completed a costly restoration of its Earl H. Mead-designed stained glass, reinstalled December 8, 2025.

• The Packard Building's eastern facade dates to the building's original construction in the early-to-mid 1920s and has never been renovated or altered. These are the original windows — nearly a century old, unmodified, and irreplaceable in the same way the church's restored stained glass is irreplaceable. This is not a modern storefront with modern glazing that could be easily replicated elsewhere; it is a surviving architectural feature of one of Harbor Springs' oldest commercial buildings, once home to the town's Packard dealership.

What the Record Needs

• A shadow study showing the shading’s exact timing and extent on the church’s west transept window and the gallery window

• Documentation of the restoration investment and reinstallation date

• A finding of incompatibility under MCL 125.3504(2)

• A finding that this loss, layered on top of the Mossburg Buildings’ impact, would irreversibly alter the historic character of this gateway

The Point

We acknowledge directly: the former 2005 zoning would have allowed a tall building on this corner. Someone may raise that point — that the old rules wouldn’t have protected these windows either. But that is not the point.

By-right zoning, then or now, does not strip the Commission of its duty to protect public welfare. A century-old restored window and a gallery’s only eastern source of daylight are not speculative concerns — they are permanent and provable. What we are certain of is this: the planning commissioners and city councilors who came before, across the decades, would have protected these stained-glass windows and the sunshine pouring through them — windows that Earl H. Mead so painstakingly designed and built. The zoning envelope was never the limit of their judgment, and it should not be the limit of yours.

We ask the Commission to weigh this history carefully. The site’s earlier stewards protected this light and this corner for decades, even when the rules might have allowed otherwise. We believe today’s Commissioners and City Council members can do the same.