Street Yard

The area behind the street right-of-way, and, in front of any building on private property is known as the street yard. Street yard design standards prevent property owners from paving right up to the front property line. The purpose of a street yard or street yard buffer is to improve the view from the public roadway, to promote ingress and egress safety and to partially screen visually complex urban development such as parking lots, storage facilities, vehicular use areas and unattractive buildings.

Street yard buffer planting requirements often require a minimum number of shade trees shrubs and ground covers other than turf grass spaced within a strip of land attached to the front property line. The panting strip is calculated by square footage or is based upon depth. A common street yard depth is ten (10) to fifteen (15) feet with some communities increasing this to as much as thirty feet. Some codes require this planting place to include all of the land in front of buildings to prevent the construction of parking lots along roadway edges. Other communities base the depth of this planting strip on the depth of the perpendicular property line. Ten percent of the length of the site is not uncommon. 

Exceptions are often granted to businesses that want to use their street yards as a sales display areas. But, they may need to apply for and receive a zoning variance. Used car lots, open air markets and retail plant nurseries are always a problem in community landscape codes in regard to this exception.

Much of this open space of the street yard, is the open space between the front property line and the building wall. The street yard may be a free floating amount of area between the front property line and the building or it may be attached directly to the front property line.  An alternative of the street yard is the “street buffer strip.” This is a certain sized strip of land attached to the front property line in which all existing trees must be preserved.