By a vote of 6 to 1, the St. Paul City Council has approved a plan to rezone 2½ miles of Snelling Avenue from the Midway south through Highland Park for transit-oriented construction.

The new Snelling Avenue South Zoning allows for denser and taller development and mixed residential-commercial buildings with parking in back from Concordia Avenue to Ford Parkway.

Roughly 20 percent of the land along the busy commuter corridor would be converted from business or multi-family residential zoning to “Traditional Neighborhood” zoning, which allows a mix of uses in one site.

The plan, initiated in part by the launch last year of Metro Transit’s “A Line” rapid bus service along Snelling, found a strong supporter in council member Chris Tolbert and a strong opponent in Dai Thao, who cast the sole dissenting vote.

Thao, who represents the Union Park area, expressed concern about potential health impacts from added traffic and density, such as asthma.

“We do have two major projects pending, the Midway (soccer stadium) site and the Ford site,” he said. “I’m not sure if this site’s going to have affordable housing or not.”

“There’s a lot of other places around the city where we could have density,” Thao added.

Council President Russ Stark said denser construction makes public transit feasible.

“I would make the argument that emissions will be greater if we force development to happen outward in our region,” Stark said.

Tolbert said the rezoning does not mandate or trigger fresh development, or require changes of existing real estate, but sets design standards for future developers.

“When we rezone areas, it’s so that we could improve them when that investment in the neighborhood does happen … so it’s to the quality we expect,” he said.

He noted that along Snelling Avenue, residential cross streets full of single-family homes will remain residential, and only busy commercial corridors will be rezoned “Traditional Neighborhood 3,” which allows the densest and tallest building heights within the zoning category.

“Some of the information that’s been out there is that this whole (area) is going to T-3, which is absolutely false,” Tolbert said.

The plan had the support of the Highland, Union Park and Macalester-Groveland neighborhood district councils.