"The market will determine if it ever even happens."
That's how Marshall Township Supervisor Robert Edwards described a provision his own board had just voted to approve, unanimously, on July 28, 2025. He was talking about townhouses. Nobody has proposed building any. But the township's newly rewritten zoning ordinance now allows them, on one specific stretch of Route 910, under one specific set of conditions that most of the people who own homes there probably haven't checked.
Here's the part that matters if you own property on that road, or you're shopping for one: the township didn't rezone anything. It laid an overlay on top of the existing single-family zoning, which means the corridor now has two categories of house that look identical from the street, sit on the same road, face the same traffic, and carry very different long-term value depending on which side of an invisible line they fall on.
An Overlay, Not a Rezoning, and Why That's the Whole Story
The ordinance that created this, officially Ordinance No. 493, was the product of a two-year rewrite that started in 2023 to carry out the comprehensive plan Marshall adopted back in September 2022. The final vote was almost anticlimactic. Supervisors Jack Candek and James Tracy had been absent when the board tried to pass it on July 7, so the vote got pushed two weeks. When it finally happened on July 28, no residents spoke and there was no debate, a quiet ending to a process that had drawn a three-hour public meeting with residents arguing both sides just a month earlier.
The distinction the board leaned on, overlay versus rezoning, is not a technicality. A straight rezoning would have changed what the land is allowed to be used for, permanently, whether or not anyone ever builds anything. An overlay leaves the underlying single-family zoning fully intact. The houses on that stretch of Route 910 are still zoned and used exactly as they were the day before the ordinance passed. What changed is that a new, narrower set of rules now sits on top, available to be triggered if certain conditions are met. Supervisors chose it specifically because it gives the township more control over any future development while changing nothing about how the land functions today. For a homeowner, that's the reason this is easy to miss. Nothing about your deed, your tax bill, or your day-to-day use of the property looks any different. The option is just sitting there.
Fifteen Acres, One Intersection, and a Math Problem for a Dozen Owners
The overlay covers roughly 15 acres on both sides of Route 910 near Mingo Road, an area where about a dozen single-family homes currently stand. Under the new rules, a developer could build townhouses there, but only by clearing two specific hurdles.
- Assembling at least 5 acres, which in practice means buying and combining several of those existing lots, since no single parcel in the overlay comes close to that size on its own.
- Routing every bit of access to Route 910 through the existing signalized intersection at Mingo Road, with no new driveways or curb cuts allowed directly onto the highway itself.
That second condition is the one worth sitting with. It effectively means a lone homeowner in the overlay can't cash out this option by simply selling to a builder who wants to put four townhomes on their one lot. The acreage requirement forces coordination. Somebody has to convince three, four, maybe five neighbors to sell at roughly the same time, to the same buyer, who then has to fund the access-road construction needed to funnel everything through Mingo Road. That's a much higher bar than most people picture when they hear "the zoning allows townhouses now."
The township's own justification for touching this stretch at all was traffic. Average daily traffic on Route 910 between Mingo Road and Highpoint Drive climbed from about 17,350 to 19,000 vehicles a day between 2022 and 2024, a jump of roughly 9.5 percent, and the road recorded 54 crashes, none fatal, between 2013 and 2022. The single-access rule is designed to reduce the number of driveways feeding directly onto an already-busy road, which is also, not coincidentally, exactly the kind of condition that makes a piecemeal, one-lot-at-a-time sale impossible.
What This Means If You're the One Deciding to Sell
If your home sits inside that 15-acre band, a standard comparative market analysis built off recent single-family sales on Route 910 will value your lot as exactly what it looks like: a house on a busy road, priced the way houses on busy roads get priced. That comp set won't reflect the fact that your parcel, combined with a few neighbors' parcels, might now be worth more to a developer than it is to another homeowner. That's not a value you can capture alone, and it's not a value that shows up until someone actually starts assembling the land. It's worth knowing that number exists before you take the first offer that walks in the door treating your home as a standard resale.
If you're outside the overlay but still on that stretch of Route 910, the opposite is true, and it's just as easy to misread. The traffic numbers that justified the overlay apply to the corridor generally, but the development option applies only within that specific 15-acre band near Mingo Road. A house two hundred feet up the road, facing the same traffic count, got none of this. Knowing exactly where the boundary sits, not just that "an overlay exists somewhere on Route 910," is the difference between an informed offer and a guess.
The Rest of the Corridor Didn't Get This
It's tempting to assume the township is quietly setting up the whole of Route 910 for gradual redevelopment. The record doesn't support that. This was a targeted overlay, tied to a specific intersection with signal control already in place, applied to a specific 15-acre footprint the township could point to and defend with traffic data. Supervisors described it as one piece of a broader ordinance rewrite that also touched conservation subdivision design, landscaping and buffering standards, and definitions across the code, not as the opening move in a corridor-wide rezoning. If you're evaluating a property on Route 910 outside that Mingo Road stretch, this ordinance changed essentially nothing about what you can build or how the township will treat a sale.
A Few Questions Worth Asking Before You Assume Either Way
Does the overlay change my zoning today if I own a home in that 15-acre area? No. The underlying single-family zoning and your current use are unchanged. The overlay only becomes relevant if a developer assembles the required acreage and applies to build under it.
What happens if nobody ever buys the five acres? Nothing. Edwards' comment that the market will decide is the accurate description of where this stands. There is no timeline, no requirement, and no pressure on any individual owner to sell.
Could Marshall extend this kind of overlay to other stretches of Route 910 later? Nothing in the current ordinance commits the township to that, and it would require its own public process to add. Anyone drawing conclusions about neighboring parcels based on this overlay is extrapolating beyond what the ordinance actually says.
The full text of the new zoning ordinance is available through the township's code of ordinances, and the vote itself was covered in detail by TribLive, including the traffic data supervisors used to justify the overlay.
If you're weighing a purchase or a sale anywhere along this corridor, the boundary lines matter more than the address does. That's the kind of detail worth walking through with someone who reads zoning maps for a living before you price a home, or an offer, off assumptions the map doesn't actually support. Emily Wilhelm has spent years tracking exactly this kind of local mechanics across Marshall Township and the North Hills. Let's Connect if you want a second set of eyes on what a specific Route 910 property is actually worth.
