Nía Holt was hired last month as the Village’s planning and zoning administrator, taking the vacant seat left by Meg Leatherman in November. Holt said she hopes to work with Council and Village staff to achieve ongoing housing goals and to consider ways the local zoning code could be improved. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)
Holt hired as new Village planning and zoning admin
- Published: July 1, 2026
It’s been about a month since the Village of Yellow Springs welcomed its newest staffer — Nía Holt has stepped in as the new planning and zoning administrator.
The Dayton-based planner fills a vacancy left open since last November when former planning admin Meg Leatherman left the Village for the private sector to work as a planning and construction manager for Premier Health Partners.
Still getting settled in her Bryan Center office, Holt’s already gotten an earful from village residents — that we need more downtown parking, that we need less, bikes should be better accommodated, rentals are too expensive and the for-sale homes are in bad shape.
“I definitely want to hear from people and learn from each person’s perspective, but be patient with me as I’m learning,” Holt said in an interview with the News earlier this week. “I know there are going to be competing points of view, but there’s also going to be some overlap. How can we work together to find that?”
Holt comes to the Village with more than a decade of professional planning and economic development experience.
For nearly four years following grad school, she worked as a planner for the Louisville Metro Government. There, Holt helped the city meet some of the charges of a recent housing report. Along with others, she conducted a major review of Louisville’s zoning code and made adjustments to such provisions as minimum lot sizes that made new build costs prohibitive.
“It was a balance in preserving the character of neighborhoods, but also allowing those who live there to get additional income,” Holt explained.
Then, in late 2020, she returned to her hometown of Dayton to reunite with her family, and served as the City of Riverside’s zoning administrator for three years. After that stint, she ascended to the role of the city’s community development director.
When she got to Riverside, the city had just updated its land use plan. Holt was tasked with facilitating a change in the way the city enforces its property maintenance rules — what she described as a swing from proactive enforcement to an approach that was more resident-friendly.
Holt said that meant giving homeowners a little grace — as opposed to imposing an immediate penalty — on cutting their overgrown grass or painting their homes if they could show they were at least working toward a solution.
The best part of her job as Riverside’s planner: “Engaging with people and the community — having open houses, going to schools to talk to students about zoning.”
The latter bit included reading the children’s book “Ava Tanner the City Planner,” by Corrin Wendell, at all four Riverside elementary schools to get kids jazzed about the wondrous world of municipal design. Holt said that something like that could be possible here in Yellow Springs, but cautioned that it took a great deal of work and coordination.
When she became the community development director of Riverside — overseeing the planning department — she focused more on the city’s economy writ large: business retention, connecting residents to development grants and more.
Though Holt said she’s still parsing out the nuances between approaches to urban and rural planning, she sees a number of parallels between her past experiences and what’s ahead of her here in Yellow Springs.
“People want to be heard,” Holt said. “And you can’t just hear what someone said and move on. You need to actually respond to their concerns. Does a project need traffic mitigation? OK, would speed bumps work? A different traffic pattern?”
She continued: “That was a lesson from a neighborhood plan I helped with in Walnut Hills community [in Dayton]. It’s the people who live in and have an understanding of a neighborhood who are the experts about their community. You need to get Grandma Josephine and the small businesses and the developer and the neighbors to come together to make decisions and come to a consensus. Then you can move forward on a plan.”
And a lot of plans are in motion here in Yellow Springs that will soon call for Holt’s scrutiny:
There’s Columbus-based real estate developer Windsor Companies’ intentions to build more than 100 apartment units on properties formerly associated with Antioch College; the final plat plans for those apartments are anticipated to be submitted within the year.
In the northwest quadrant of the village, there may soon be a 190-unit subdivision expansion to Spring Meadows, involving the proposed construction of 120 attached single-family units — 12 condos with 10 dwelling units in each — and 70 detached single-family homes. Planning Commission approved a preliminary plat application for those plans in November.
In the western-most part of Yellow Springs is the 35-acre Center for Business and Education — a good majority of which is unoccupied, and which the Village has sought to commercially develop for more than a decade.
Empty storefronts, Airbnbs, vacant homes, costly rentals and accessibility are also not infrequent topics brought before Planning Commission and Village staffers.
Holt will make her first stab at helping the current Village Council address some of Yellow Springs’ housing-related ambitions at a day-long retreat on Thursday, June 25 — which had not yet occurred by press time, but will be covered for next week’s issue of the News.
According to documents made available before Thursday’s housing retreat, Holt will give a “SWOT analysis” of the Village zoning code — honing in on the code’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
“Basically seeing what in the code is salvageable,” Holt said.
In a memo to Council for the group’s consideration on Thursday, she wrote, “Several modest amendments to the zoning code could address housing attainability without fundamentally changing the village’s development character.”
She continued: “Examples of potential amendments include permitting accessory dwelling units by right when objective standards are met, reducing or eliminating parking requirements for smaller housing types and mixed-use developments [as well as] allowing greater flexibility for pocket neighborhood developments.”
As Holt suggested, these amendments would heed the recommendations outlined in the Village’s last Comprehensive Land Use Plan updates in 2020 — many of which called for additional housing, and few of which have been fully addressed.
“Making more housing a reality was up front in every interview with the Village I had,” Holt said. “I’m excited to get back into that realm.”
How best to do that, Holt believes, is to focus on in-fill — “probably the better way for Yellow Springs to grow and grow responsibly.”
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