Sherman commission denies zoning change for Villages on Loy Lake

By GvilleTX Newsroom

The Sherman Planning and Zoning Commission denied a zoning change on July 21, 2026, that would have cleared the way for Villages on Loy Lake, a multifamily project proposed on 19.15 acres at 4258 North Loy Lake Road. A commissioner moved to deny the item and the commission voted by voice vote, according to the city's video recording of the meeting.

The request sought to take the tract out of its R-A designation and place it in a planned-development district carrying MF-30 multifamily as the base zoning, according to the commission's agenda packet for the meeting.

Approval on its own would not have put the new zoning into effect. The packet states that the tract was still inside Sherman's extraterritorial jurisdiction, and city engineering notes in the packet said annexation by the City Council had to be approved before the zoning approval could take effect.

City staff took no position on the merits. The packet lists no staff recommendation for the Villages on Loy Lake zoning item, neither for approval nor for denial.

How early the request had come drew attention during the hearing. Commissioners questioned whether the request amounted to speculative entitlement zoning, the meeting video shows. Staff said approval would be up to the Planning and Zoning Commission and the City Council, because no site plan was required at that stage.

The local apartment market came up as well. Staff told commissioners during the hearing that Sherman's open multifamily projects had an 80% occupancy rate, according to the video. Commissioners used that figure while discussing whether the multifamily market was saturated.

Standards drafted into the proposed planned-development district would have permitted buildings up to 55 feet tall and would have barred four-bedroom units, the packet says. Parking was written into the proposal at 1.7 spaces for each two-bedroom unit and 2.25 spaces for each three-bedroom unit.

The packet places the proposed project roughly 2,100 feet from Loy Lake Road and the U.S. 75 frontage road. By the packet's description, that puts the site on the Loy Lake and U.S. 75 commercial edge rather than directly fronting Highway 75.

The address, 4258 North Loy Lake Road, sits north of central Sherman in a stretch of Grayson County that residents of Gainesville and elsewhere in Cooke County reach by way of U.S. 82 and U.S. 75, a corridor that has drawn steady residential and commercial interest.

Sources of record for this report: the Sherman Planning and Zoning Commission agenda packet for the July 21, 2026 meeting, posted by the city, and the city's video recording of that meeting.