Baytown, TX Zoning Overlays & Bonuses: Downtown Design Guide (2026)

Sec. 24, Form District Standards, is Baytown's downtown design guide. Subsec. " Inside those districts, building placement is not discretionary. The front facade of every primary building must sit within a build-to zone set as a percentage of lot frontage for each sub-area, corner and through lots must meet the build-to requirement on every frontage, and every primary building must have its entrance on the front facade within that zone. Corner-lot street designations are decided by the Planning Director in DTA and fixed on the site development plan in SJ.

Scale rules follow the same design logic: any building 25 feet or taller must design its front facade to read as at least two stories, and any building with a street-facing elevation wider than 150 feet, or taller than three stories, must comply with the Large Building Facade Composition standards, meaning a change in architectural expression that breaks the wall into apparent segments no wider than 75 feet, plus a horizontal expression line separating the ground floor from upper floors (a second line above four stories).

Habitable half-story attics inside a pitched roof are allowed without counting toward the maximum story height if the habitable floor area stays under 50% of the building footprint and dormers do not exceed 15 feet in individual width or 50% of the facade in total. Building height itself is measured to the eave (or roof deck, if flat), with parking-structure height limited solely by the sub-area's maximum feet, and additional height limits can apply where a form-district lot abuts a different sub-area or a non-form district. Where the form-district standards conflict with other City ordinances, Subsec. 24-1(B)(2)(b) states the form-district standards govern within the district.