This is an RSA 3 single-family attached only housing.
As you can see, the larger neighborhood, there are still pockets of single-family housing,
but there really are not in our area. So what you'll see here, this is our property right here.
It's a large rectangular, sorry, not rectangular, but more triangular parking
property. We are nestled in, again, the large one variance here, another variance here,
and another variance here for three large apartment buildings. Up the street are all
those larger LaSalle buildings that you saw as well. What there are is there are three holdover
homes, three individual row homes here, and these are one and two twins. So we can start to see them
as we zoom in. Our twin is this property right here all the way to the corner. Again, it's about
8,000 square feet, but given the angles and whatnot, the setbacks, essentially the only
thing that could be built on here is a single twin in the place, size, and location that it is now.
um in in the place size and location that it is now
um so again here's just another view i know this was uh one of the main concerns of the rco was
um you have a big apartment building here you still have this house which is uh its property
is like this um this will remain we do not own this property and we're that is not part of the
project. We will, we are proposing to demolish this project or this house right here and build
a 16-unit apartment building that would be commensurate with actually smaller and less
dense than the neighboring properties. So there's been significant back and forth here.
You might have been shocked to see this is actually a 2019 application and 2019 original
appeal. So here I've kind of outlined for you, and I think this aerial does the best view.
These are the last three remaining single-family row homes. This is that large apartment building
behind us. Here's the LaSalle building. This is Armstrong Street right here, and this is East
Worcester, sort of a major thoroughfare up in north and south through the LaSalle neighborhood,
major bus routes less than half a mile to the train and this is that enormous
vacant industrial project right now.
So again just a final view this garage right here belongs to that single-family house here
outlined is our building there's a detached garage at grade here so the grade is actually
higher along East Worcester. So this detached garage is lower. It's currently approved as a
single unit additional dwelling. So we have approval for three units in the building.
This was a variance from 2015 and another unit in the fourth building right there.
So again, just to give you the aerial view of what we're talking about,
This is Belfield Avenue, North 20th Street, and East Worcester, which I assume most people are familiar with.
And then you have the Worcester Apartments, which are part of LaSalle.
This is all a large LaSalle development, as is this.
Here's the nursing school that they have up there and all of their other facilities.
So, again, this is a large 8,000-square-foot lot.
um the original application which i presume you will hear a lot about from the i'm going to keep
talking while i go through these photos so you can see this is our town home right our twin right
here the second twin would be right there this is that large uh lasalle development just to the
north of us um so as you go up this is now looking down worcester that our property would be right
here and here and you can even see this is you know calling for juniors and seniors to uh to
take part this building wraps all the way around there's no setbacks um there's parking on both
sides of the street all the way here here's the second apartment building uh the one in behind
in behind the um three row homes and then this is uh basically standing at that corner
and looking north instead of south towards our property.
This is a LaSalle building, as are these.
Now, this is actually a gated community for LaSalle.
There's a security guard in there who did not appreciate my attempt to convince him
that I needed to take pictures for you.
So, no pictures.
and then this is Armstrong Street our garage which is approved for one unit is essentially
where you see this truck right here you'll see a picture of it and this is the industrial site
to the south of us so here's the best picture here's our existing garage there was an existing
curb cut there it still exists our twin is on this side and the other twin is on that side
There has been a lot of concern, and I understand from the RCO, the primary concern from the community has been demolishing one twin from its attached twin.
Obviously not a zoning matter, but this would certainly be done by hand in accordance with all demolition rules and regulations and is part of the standard practice in Philadelphia.
Um, sort of just a couple more views up and down Armstrong, um, trying to move along now.
sort of just a couple more views up and down.
This is what's directly across from our, uh, property on the other side of East Worcester
Street.
This is a huge, um, green space owned by LaSalle, uh, with no development on there.
Um, so, uh, originally, oh, here's, uh, so this whole area is all RSA three and RSA five goes back sort of, uh, west and north of our project.
All of this, aside from the houses right here and the one twin right here, is all now large-scale, multi-family, multi-density, which you'll hear our land planner testify that we are actually less dense and not as intrusive as those existing buildings.
So here's the project. You can see the aerial view.
we are proposing to demolish the garage and our twin. Here's the beginning of that large
building. Here's the existing buildings behind us. And here's the single-family twin next to us.
In part of the original discussions with the RCO, our building was pulled back so as not to be
so imposing here. Our height is actually code compliant. So we would not be, you know,
there's a three-story twin house next to us, we would not be sort of higher and more imposing
than that twin next to us. What we have done is the access is along Armstrong Street, and you
see here sort of a courtyard entry into the building. We also have a rear open space back
here. Another concern of the RCO was we have a fenced-in trash area here. It is screened from
any visibility or note. You would actually also have a wooden top. We would have private trash
collection. The private trash truck would pull up along Armstrong, walk in through a gate, get the
trash, pull it out, dump it, and put it right back in. The whole process would be less than five
minutes. So originally this project was for 22 units with a breakdown of mostly one and two
bedroom units and with four commercial units on the first floor. We believed that a lot up and
down East Worcester Street would be quite viable for commercial units. There was four small
commercial units right here at street level. There's a lot of commuter traffic, a lot of LaSalle
traffic here. The consideration there was that having a small cafe, corner store, something like
that would be quite an amenity for the neighborhood and very successful. You will see as I get to the
RCO, the RCO is in adamant opposition to the project. They were, so when this was previously
represented by another attorney and presented in person back in 2019 there was a belief that
the use of the commercial spaces and the number of residential units was some sort of bad faith
offer by the by the owner which he will testify to in order to try to purchase
this house here as you will hear that was certainly not the case he had every intention
of lining up commercial tenants and this is actually a more viable project with commercial
tenants at this area so we will walk through that the refusals are extensive if you look at them
as they stand the basis for that is essentially we've agreed to get rid of all of the
um commercial refusals so what you see and i've done here just for the ease here um i've crossed
out personally all the refusals that would be taken care of uh per provisos that we have agreed
to uh in order to address the concerns of the neighborhood and the concerns of the planning
commission we actually met with the planning commission staff and we've adept we've adopted
uh all of their comments as well um chairman chico i see your mouth moving i'm not sure if
you were meaning to speak to me i was i'm sorry it wasn't i apologize i was just thinking out
loud moving my lips i apologize this case did we have this case in front of us in 19 uh no so i'm
No, so I'm about to get to that because it's relevant.
about to get to that because it's relevant because it looks familiar it looks familiar that's why i'm
Because it looks familiar. It looks familiar. That's my mask. All right.
Yeah, so what happened, and I'll keep moving along. The original application is from January of 2019. The original refusal and appeal are from March of 2019. And the matter was presented to the RCO.
The RCO was unhappy with a number of things, which led to quite a few of our revisions and approvisos.
In December of 2019, this matter was continued attorney-moving party by the prior attorney.
There was sort of a breakdown of communications, I understand, which still remains apparent with the RCO.
and this was just continued and in fact I think the RCO believed it was disbanded and or withdrawn
which it was not. We then, I got involved last year during the pandemic, requested a hearing
with this board so we presented this case on September 22nd last year. The board was
just about prepared to vote and asked for any additional testimony if there was any
and Mr. Richardson from the Councilwoman's office appeared on behalf of the neighbors
and stated that the neighbors were entirely unaware of the project
and we were somehow trying to circumvent the process in moving forward.
So this board asked if we would continue the hearing at that time
and reconvene with the RCO, make sure they knew exactly what the project was
and that we would move forward.
So that's where we stand now. What you see in front of you is a letter kind of confirming, just from last month, the provisos that we have put in place.
We're reducing residential units from 22 down to 16. All of the units, so the neighborhood was concerned about another apartment building coming in.
So we are making all of the proposed units condos.
We have removed all of the commercial uses.
All of the upper floor residential balconies will be removed.
The trash will be screened, as it was always, but we wanted to make that an explicit proviso because it was an issue for the neighbors.
And then one of the comments, we actually met, as I said, in early March with the Planning Commission staff and tried to adopt all of their comments in the revisions.
The only one that was really appropriate for a proviso was that the building's amenity space would be moved from Armstrong Street to Worcester to try to activate that area.
yeah is the trash going to be commercially is it a commercial trash pickup or is that
it'll be a private commercial trash pickup so it will actually because of that it'll be one
of the smaller commercial trash trucks it won't be one of the large city trash trucks well there's
the reason why that matters and I'm glad you brought it up is that there's a concern by the
RCO that trash trucks even though trash trucks do go up and down Armstrong Street that we would
somehow overburden the use of those trash trucks so this will be a smaller private collection
so as i said this board requested that we continue the case even though we had met and presented the
case to the rco and received a detailed you know opposition letter this board requested that we
continue the matter and reach out to the rco what you're seeing right now i will not walk you through
but it is the first of probably two dozen emails I have with the RCO, all with Ms. Brodus,
who I believe is on the call today, so you'll hear directly from her. In short, I have 66 pages
of emails with Ms. Brodus. The RCO, for reasons of their own devising, refused to meet with us.
They refused to have a phone call. They refused to have a Zoom meeting or any kind of electronic meeting. They refused to have an in-person meeting. They informed me that they were proceeding on the papers or a paper submission.
um i was unable to and prevented from speaking to anyone so i don't know if there were any concerns
or any issues um miss brodus you know informed me that speaking you know emailing with her was
not the same as speaking with the community but i don't know who the letters were sent to
So what you see now is, here's the original letter from the RCO in opposition from 2019, June of 2020.
letter from the RCO in opposition from 2019, June of 2019. And here is an important community
notice that went out. It is unclear to me who this was served on. I received it just
late last week. You know, it does have some of our updated information, but is sort of,
you know making the case against the property as it is and again i don't know who it was sent to
who who the community is um and then just today at one o'clock the rco sent a follow-up letter
uh kind of basing its uh negative opinion of the case on on you know its prior determination
nation um yeah what we have done in you know i i think we've done everything we can in trying to
move this forward um i believe that you know the hardship here to try to move this forward is
you know this neighborhood has completely turned around you know we've seen this all over the place
we see it uh daily along washington avenue along frankfort and what in fishtown um you know
neighborhoods that were once one type of neighborhood no longer are that kind of
neighborhood. And in the last 10 years, it has shown that the immediate neighborhood around
this property is no longer a single family housing neighborhood. It is now a much denser
multifamily development neighborhood. And that's what, you know, that's what we are presenting to
be in line with that. In addition, we have presented two petitions of support that I won't
walk you through, but they're in there from 39 different individuals. Again, I don't know if
they were sent the community request or not from last week, but they did support this project
as it was revised and amended.
The refusals that we have them are in line
with putting a multifamily project here.
Again, this is a large, overly large 8,000 square foot lot
with setbacks for a single family house
that would be allowed under the zoning.
There really is very little buildable space
because of the um let me see if I can get to it this might be a better um because if you can see
this kind of triangular shape of the property uh it makes the setbacks very awkward and very
difficult to build with um so this is you know not an issue we created uh nor is the changing
neighborhood an issue we created. Both are grounds for a variance. Here we are presenting
no front yard setback or side yard setback. That would be along Worcester or along Armstrong.
Again, that's in line with all of the large scale developments that are near us. And this is
actually significantly less intrusive than those. We are required to provide 16 parking spaces
because it's a one-to-one ratio we have by reducing from 12 units to 16 we have attempted to
you know cure that somewhat we are offering 12 parking spaces with a full ada van accessible
space that will all be at ground level off-street parking so you know i've already kind of belabored
the point about the changing of the neighborhood and you know i'll leave the rest of that discussion
to um i just have two witnesses today nancy templeton our our expert land planner and uh
laran grossman who's here on behalf of grossman holdings llc the owner um but again you have
an odd shape of the property where single family is the only um the only allowed use that basically
prevents you know any real use and leaves most of this property undeveloped um we have maximized
the parking to the extent that uh the property and the site allow uh we would if this site were
not triangular but were in fact rectangular we could easily meet the parking requirement and
and would have loved to right i mean everybody loves to be able to put as much parking as they
can in their uh in their apartment building um so this is this is just unfortunately and what
you'll hear from mr grossman is that this is not it's not functional as a single family house
anymore especially given its corner location and it's no longer really valuable as a as a
single family property um you know there there will be a single curb cut that curb cut
um you know there there will be a single curb cut that curb cut there is an existing curb cut in
front of what was the garage and is now that unit so there's no change in street parking there's uh
street parking on both sides of this um street and you know again unfortunately we thought at
the conclusion of the september hearing we would be able to resolve a lot of these issues
But as it came out, the RCO was unwilling to meet with us, speak with us, or really have any contact other than kind of some rote email exchanges.
I did also reach out to the councilwoman's office to ask if they wanted us to meet, you know, to have a formal meeting in line with what this board requested of us with a different RCO in the area and did not receive any response from the councilwoman's office.
So at this time, you know, we would just like to like to proceed to a vote.
So with that, unless you have any questions for me, I'd be happy to introduce my two witnesses and move this forward because I am cognizant of the time here.
Let's get your two witnesses and then we'll ask the board if they have any questions.
So your two witnesses just to adopt your testimony. I'm sorry.
Well, I will ask them just to go into a little bit of detail, but we will be very quick.
I will move it along as fast as I can.
I understand.
Well, it's not just, I mean, I don't know how much more they can add to what you've already given us.