CRANBERRY TWP — The township discontinued its consideration of a zoning overlay that would have allowed for housing attractive to younger residents at the beginning of their careers or just starting a family.

The “Missing Middle Housing,” or MMH, ordinance was pulled from consideration at Thursday's agenda-setting meeting of the township board of supervisors following months of postponement and opposition by residents.

“That particular bill is dead,” township manager Dan Santoro said. “We still want to accomplish the goals, so we'll work with residents, address their concerns and then reintroduce a new one in the coming months.”

Santoro said residents raised a mixed bag of concerns, including worries over the compatibility of future developments that would use the MMH overlay and nearby housing plans that were primarily single-family homes.

“Some folks said, 'We don't want townhouses across from single-family districts,'” he said. “They viewed it as Cranberry should remain predominately single-family homes. They weren't supportive of more mixed housing.”

Before moving forward with any mixed-housing style ordinance, Santoro said, the township wanted to address such concerns. Part of that, he said, will be ensuring an MMH-style ordinance would remain aesthetically compatible with the primarily single-family home developments.

That would involve “demonstrating to folks that we have the appropriate buffering requirements, the appropriate context-based regulations in place,” Santoro said. “In other words, we're not going to put incompatible uses next to each other. We'll work to make sure there's compatibility between any existing plans and new plans, as we always do.”

Another concern was that MMH developments would be mixed-use plans, something Santoro said was unfounded.

“I think there was a lot of misinformation out there with regard to what MMH was,” he said. “Most of the comments we got were really not reflective of what we were proposing, so I think there was a significant amount of misinformation. Folks thought this was another Meeder development or something like that.”

The Meeder project is a mixed-use development on nearly 60 acres off Rochester Road and Route 19.

Although he said those concerns were based on misinformation, Santoro added such fears also need to be allayed. Because of that, Santoro said a big part of the township's listening to concerns will also be informing residents of what is actually contained in any future MMH-style proposal.

Cranberry still believes it lacks the requisite “middle” housing the MMH proposal set out to address. So, despite the revocation of that proposal, the township looks to move forward in the future with a similar proposal — after its listening campaign.

“We've not thrown in the towel with regard to introducing mixed-use housing in the township,” Santoro said. “We're just going to do that in a way that listens to and addresses some of the concerns we've heard.”