of plan recommends no change to the existing rsa 5 zoning at this location however the proposed
dimensional variances are consistent with nearby properties city planning commission recommends
that the board grant the variances thank you uh mi 2021-002085 1157 excuse me 1157 south durant
Street my vote is yes. Confessor Plaza my vote is yes. James Snell my vote is yes.
Thomas Holloman my vote is yes. Thank you. Thank you I'm gonna ask everyone to
bear with me for about two minutes I need to go offline for a second for a
couple minutes I'll be right back.
Thank you.
Thank you. Sorry about that.
Before we go any further, I want to go back to case 11 and 12, which I spoke to earlier.
um mi 2021 dash zero zero two two five four sixty three ninety nine drexel avenue and mi
2021 dash zero zero three four two zero six three nine nine drexel avenue there's a request
for a continuance by both parties to the two appeals against L&I challenging a buy-write
permit for both for the 6399 Drexel Avenue. These requests are denied. These cases will be called
at the end of the two o'clock list. Thank you. So we'll go back to our regular list. Number two
on our list, MI 2021, that's 002-084-1618 West Erie Avenue. Mr. Bertil, I believe, is the attorney
of record. Mr. Bertil is coming back in as a panelist now, Chair. Thank you, Mr. Bertil.
Please spell your full name when you get on, and I'll swear you in.
good afternoon mr chair members of the board how are you oh thank you please spell your full name
and i'll swear you in steve bertill b-e-r-t-i-l claire harrison harvey and bransburg 1835 market
street suite 1400 you kind of faded out so i'll spell your last name for the reporter b as a boy
e-r-t as in tom i l do you swear or affirm to tell the truth whole truth nothing but the truth
uh yes i do can you can you hear me better now yes we can uh mr plaza has some questions for
you yes hi um you agree to wait the reading of its refusal and stipulate to its accuracy
uh i do and have you emailed an exhibit packet with the required documents proof of ownership
proof of tax compliance copy of the refusal or referral photos and plans five days prior to this
Sharon? Yes, to all of them. And have you met with the RCO and have a letter? Yes. Thank you.
Excuse me. This is Sharon. To the board, in the summaries, it says that we haven't received
the letter we now have. It is support provided that you limit it to four units. Thank you.
And support is from whom? Sorry. The Upper North Neighbors Association.
The Upper North Neighbors Association.
Thank you.
Sorry, I don't mean to interrupt, but the coordinating RCO is actually the 13th Democratic
They did send in the letter.
Theirs, I believe, is in opposition.
Maybe that didn't get to, and I'm not sure if they cc'd Ms. Saleto, but I'll forward
that to her as well.
upper north neighbors is an effective rco and i know they sent that in but um i don't know if
the democratic wards letter got to miss saletta or not but it sounds like it didn't so i i can
get that over to you thank you please proceed okay uh apologies for the confusion there um
as i stated earlier my name is steve bertill i'm here representing the owner of 1618 west
area avenue mr colleague green with uh he's on the call with me and i'll call him um later to
adopt my testimony also um we have um our architect uh mr devon lawney from lawney engineering
um who can testify um regarding the uh the floor plan when we get to that point um so what we're
here seeking is a request for relief for the adaptive reuse of an existing five unit rooming
house to a four-unit residential building. The property in question is 1618 West Erie
Avenue. It's currently zoned as RSA 5. It's situated on Erie Avenue, fronts on Erie Avenue
between North Smedley Street and North 16th Street. Excuse me. The property has a pretty
unique history um and it's one of the few uh rooming houses in the city that are are legal
um as we know that there there was a problem in the city with a legal rooming house but this
isn't one of them and i'll walk the board through that um right now um as you can see this this
property has actually been a rooming house since 1939 um based on these zoning records um i know
it's hard to see some of these older records when you scanned them they kind of become tough to see
but if you need me to zoom in just let me know um as you can see here it was uh approved as a
rooming house uh excuse me excuse me counselor we can't we can't see anything oh my apologies
here let me start sharing that is my fault there
Can you see that?
Thank you.
so as i was stating the um the property was approved as well actually let me back up too
so you can see the property again because you didn't see that because i wasn't sharing
this is the the property in question um six it fronts on area avenue which is this here
We don't see the property. We only see your exhibit.
Okay. Sorry about that. I don't know why I'm having trouble with the sharing.
Let me just stop sharing. This was working earlier today.
Screen two. Now, is that better?
No, we don't see anything now. Now we have an aerial shot.
There you go. All right. Sorry about that.
So you should be seeing an aerial shot with Area Avenue and a mouse moving back and forth.
Yep. Yes.
Okay. All right.
All right. So as I was stating, the property is located on Area Avenue.
this is between 16th and Smedley. The property in question is currently a five-unit rooming
house. What I was stating earlier was that the property has been a rooming house since 1939.
And I just wanted to jump to show you the records there. Are you still, are you seeing the records
as i'm sharing this thing yes okay awesome all right so as you can see here the property's been
Okay, awesome. All right. So as you can see here, the property has been approved as a rooming house since 1939. And then subsequently, it was sort of rememorialized for that use, because I believe the owners were doing some additional work to it back in 1976, but they reconfirmed that it was a rooming house, a five-person rooming house.
uh approved as a room
The property stayed in existence and the use wasn't abandoned.
And that was the case until Mr. Green obtained the property this year.
He acquired the property was still being used as a rooming house.
In fact, there are tenants still in there to that effect.
And so usually I think when we come across these rooming houses in the city, they're typically a use that was either never approved
or they were approved and they were abandoned, you know, years ago, and then someone kind of
stumbles upon it. But that isn't the case here. Now, that said, Mr. Green, I think in assessing
the property and assessing what's in the area, came to the conclusion that he doesn't think that
was the best use for the property. And our engagement with the community and the individual
neighbors that are adjacent, that are on the block, and in the immediate blocks that intersect
with 16th Street seem to agree by the support that they provided in the petition, which I'll
get to in a second. So what we're proposing to do is to change this use from the rooming house
that it currently is to a traditional residential multifamily building. We originally were proposing
going from a five unit room house to a five unit, a traditional five unit building. But after
conversations with the affected neighbors, after meetings with the meeting with the coordinating
RCO and with some affected RCOs, we decided to reduce the density that we're proposing from five
residential units to four residential units in the building. The refusals that we have or refusal,
We only have one refusal, which is just for the multifamily use, because as I stated, the property itself is zoned as RSA-5, but you'll see in a second that there's essentially no RSA-5 use on that property.
I mean, excuse me, on that block. It's all multifamily or commercial across the street or in the bottom of the properties on the corner.
And you'll see why in a second. I'll get into the area context.
So as you can see, this is the refusal proposed multifamily is prohibited in the zoning districts that is in existence.
So as for what's actually there, it's actually the buildings on this block are actually fairly beautiful on the on the exterior to have these sort of historic design.
every other sort of a pertinence on the top of the property. Ours is one of them. This is our
property here that has that. We're maintaining the exterior. We're not changing it. In fact,
we're just going to do the facelift in terms of brick pointing and things like that to make sure
it's all safe and nice looking. But what you'll see is that these properties that face on Erie
Avenue are extremely deep. I believe the locks are about 97 feet, almost 100 feet deep.
And because of that, most of them have multiple multifamily uses, and some, especially the ones
on the corner, have what looks to be, at some point, some commercial spaces at the bottom
level so you can see here just so you get a context of how deep these parcels are and why
multi-families actually um why it's so prevalent here um despite the zoning of this property um
you can i mean just by the sheer number of windows here i'm not even sure exactly how many units are
in this building but i know it's more than three um without including whatever these commercial
spaces were in the bottom um this is just another look at the corner this is the adjacent building
to us. This is across the street. Again, this is just to get a context of how deep these parcels
are, how many units is in most of them. And then so you can get a reference to the traditional
sort of two-story homes that are not fronting on Erie Avenue. You can see them here in comparison
to what's on Erie Avenue. They're just substantially bigger. And that sort of falls in line with why
you'll see that basically almost every house on Erie Avenue in this area is multi-family.
They're massive. Here's just a close-up. Looks like this one has six different units.
I think they're all residential. I don't believe there's a commercial one in that property.
I think they're all residential. I don't believe there's a commercial one in that property.
And again, just so you can get some of the frontages, I just took some photos of the
part. These are all on this block. This one has five units. This one has two separate door
entrances. I believe it's three units. And just again, supporting why multifamily is on this block
and why the properties facing Erie Avenue generally have multifamily. This is the corner.
So there's transit on the corner, so literally a 30-second walk from the doors.
It looks like there's two separate buses across the street.
There's commercial, and there's much more commercial up and down.
But I just wanted to give you kind of a snapshot to sort of explain why basically the entire block is multifamily.
Now, in addition to the context and why we think multifamily, a traditional multifamily makes more sense in the rooming house and why there's variances, excuse me, there's variances to minimums because of that, we did speak to the immediate adjacent neighbors.
We spoke to neighbors. We met with them on Erie Avenue. We met with neighbors on the adjacent
blocks on 16th. I'm happy to report that it seems that most people we spoke to agree
that they would prefer to see a traditional multifamily structure use here than the rooming
house. So before I get into the level of engagement that we got into, I just want to
briefly, excuse me. I just want to get into our plans so you can get a sense of the floor plan
and what we're proposing to do here. And again, if there's like specific questions,
I do have our architect on the line. But you know, if that's not needed, then I won't call him,
but I just want to let the board know that he is here. So as you can see from this overview,
Excuse me. We are proposing four units, basically one unit per floor. And so this first one is a
basement unit that will have a separate entrance, as you can see here with the front yard, just
only two walk-ups, one that walks up to the basement unit and one that walks up to the
ground floor unit and above. The basement unit is two bedrooms, one bath. The second
ground floor unit is two bedrooms, one bath. The third unit, unit three in green here,
is two bedrooms, two baths. And then the smallest unit you'll find is on the highest floor,
which is one bedroom, one bath. Just for context, we originally were seeking five units,
as I stated earlier. This was what the original floor plan that we were proposing when we met with
the RCOs and the community groups. But after hearing some concerns about density and
And reducing it, we decided to reconfigure it to reduce it to three, excuse me, to four units.
And I'll have our architect explain why we couldn't really go to three units because of the sort of existing setup with the rooming house.
It made it a substantially higher sort of conversion than just going to the four.
But I'll let the architect touch on that.
In addition to reducing it to the four units, we did agree to a proviso to do private hauling and also Mr. Green agreed to construct a trash storage container in the front.
That's kind of what you see here. I don't know if you can see that. I can zoom in some more. That's kind of what you see here.
What you'll see if you look up and down the block is that most of the homes or the residential properties, they kind of just have trash lined up in front of the porch.
And so and because it's an elevated entrance on this along Erie Avenue, it's susceptible to like wind, knocking over the trash, knocking over the lids, you know, carrying the smell, et cetera, et cetera.
And so this was something that we, I mean, we wanted to do this anyway, to sort of mitigate that kind of issue.
Normally, what I would suggest to applicants is to find a way to do rear trash storage, but you'll see from the area of the property that there isn't like a rear alley, there's no real rear access or rear space because the properties are so deep, the structural properties.
So this was a sort of workaround to solve that issue.
This was a sort of workaround to solve that issue. Now, in terms of community engagement, I'm happy to say that there's been a substantial amount.
We did meet with the coordinating RCO in July, I believe it was July 15th. That RCO was the 13th Democratic Award.
um in addition to that we we've met with uh the some affected rcos um and in addition to that
most importantly i think we've met with the immediate neighbors on that are um would be
immediately impacted by this proposed project um we met with our adjacent neighbors uh we reached
out to everyone on the block individually um and all the adjacent blocks i'm happy to say
that, excuse me, we obtain support once we obtain support from neighbors on Area Avenue. You can
see we have our immediate neighbors, 1608, 1605, 1612, 1616, 1626, 1620. And so we have support
from the people that live there
that would be directly impacted.
We also have some support
from neighbors on 17th Street
on 16th Street as well.
Oh, and 1729, just a block up.
In addition to that,
we received a letter of support
from one of the affected RCOs,
Upper North Neighbors Association.
As you can see here,
again, actually, I do think
y'all did receive this one because this is the one i think you referenced earlier um there is
a letter of opposition from the 13th democratic ward um we met with them they had uh the uh
representative mr karn stated that uh there there were concerns regarding the density when we met
with them it was still five units um they had concerns regarding the trash as well um it was
still five units at that time and we informed them um actually during the meeting we informed
them we were willing to reduce it to four and we would see if it was possible for us to do three
considering the strange configuration of the rooming house and what that would take um and
and once we followed up um and and informed them that we were reducing it um they wanted to have
um another meeting um i informed them that it was important for us to go forward and we tried to get
the schedule beforehand. That wasn't possible. We do, just for full disclosure, we do have a
meeting on a record with them to let them know, well, they already know, but to present
officially, I guess, the reduced units. And that's in October. But it was important for Mr. Green to
be able to go forward and at least have the board see the work that was done, our proposed project,
and see the level of engagement that sort of was already done and so the board can understand what
the support is on the ground and so with that unless the boards have any specific question
for me I would like to have our architect be caught up his name is Devon Lonnie L-O-N-E-Y
i'm not sure if he comes up uh with his first name or his last name but just to speak to why
um we had to settle in the four units as opposed to the three
mr lonnie you can unmute yourself and wait for the chair
and i'll go to the plan so you can direct