- land-use
- governance
A variance is a waiver from a specific zoning requirement — a setback, a height, a lot-coverage limit — granted by a board of zoning appeals for one parcel because strict application would create a practical difficulty or hardship peculiar to that property. An area variance relaxes a dimensional standard; a use variance, rarer and harder to win, permits a use the district otherwise bars.
A variance is the narrowest of the land-use approvals: it does not change the district (rezoning) or authorize a listed use (conditional use), it just bends one rule for one site. In a large-project record variances tend to be the tell in the details — the setback or buffer a campus needed to have relaxed, the standard it could not meet as-designed — and a stack of them can reveal how far a project departs from the zoning the parcel was granted. (Note this is a zoning variance, distinct from an NPDES water-quality variance, which is an unrelated permitting instrument.)