I guess that's my default answer.
However, I understand you'd like to get some rough idea of what the square footage is of each floor.
Would my client be available to maybe answer that?
Sure, I'm here.
So the actual square footage of the building is approximately 6,000.
and there's an additional room that was added on to the square footage which is what is listed as
the fourth bedroom so that room would just be sitting out there so that was labeled um the
fourth room but the second and the third floor the layouts are pretty much the same it was very
easy transition there's not much movement there you just have to you know parse out the rooms
and I did
thank you the answer to the question
is the building itself is
6,000 square feet
so if we reasonably divided that
by three
and does it have a basement
yes it does
what's in the basement
it's just storage
so you don't have any
no living space
you don't have any depiction of what's in the basement
and you're not going to have any living space
in the basement no there's 36 000 is actually above yeah it's above living space in first second
and third floor okay all right other questions thank you and you have me here michael you have
a question okay the question the question i had was a commercial trash pickup it wasn't planned
you know typically we for the three family we don't necessarily have to do that or or want to
do it uh we just play this pay the city fee for the for the uh city hall so these are going to be
individual trash cans out back or is it a dump on the side yeah that they would be taken out to the
curb so they'll be individual trash cans that the tenants will be required to take that's correct
right here questions or comments from our attorney oh that's one we do have this thing seem to be
decently sized units except for the ground floor unit that has four bedrooms the living space and
kitchen areas a woefully inadequate four bed four bedroom unit but other than that the other ones
don't seem too bad okay those are all my comments all right thank you michael questions from our
attorney um no questions just to note that because the refusal does indicate four units if the board
is inclined to grant, they should add a proviso for a maximum of three dwelling units.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Questions or comments from the virtual audience?
Yes, Chair.
I have a handout from someone with a triple A's in their name.
I have allowed them to speak.
To speak, welcome to the panelist.
Multiple panelists.
Could you please state your name and spell for the stenographer?
Please accept the invitation to become panelist.
Wait to be sworn in.
Are they in yet?
They've been allowed to speak.
Could you please state your name and spell for the stenographer?
Are they there?
Yeah, there's still one.
Double A, please unmute.
Sorry, Mr. Chair.
Okay, do we have anyone else in the virtual audience?
no mr chair no one else with the hand raised for this matter planning commission
good morning chairman david fecto with the city planning commission that's f-e-c-t-e-a-u
do you swear or affirm to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth
yes sir i do please proceed thank you sir uh board members the comprehensive plan recommends
a change in zoning at this location from rsa3 single family to rta2 residential two-family
the appellant has a use permit for 12 rooming units granted by the board in 2011 the previous
use was a legal three-family dwelling the proposed three dwelling units matches the previously
approved use and matches the character of this block face which is primarily multi-family the
The City Planning Commission recommends the board grant or post-use variance for three dwelling units.
Thank you.
MI 2024-001-773-824-North 63rd Street, I vote yes, Proviso. Maximum three units.
McJohnson, my vote is yes, with Proviso.
Cheryl Gaston, my vote is yes, with Proviso.
Tanetta Graham, my vote is yes, with Proviso.
Iowa, my vote is yes, with Proviso.
Thank you, Council.
Thank you.
Number seven, MI 2024-005-778-523 Tasker Street.
Jennifer Bazzillo is the attorney.
There's recommendation of support from the Dickinson Square West Civic Association,
eight to one vote, and a letter of non-opposition from Council Member Squilla.
The applicant also provide 20 letters of support, two from the block.
Coming back in as a panelist now, Mr. Chair.
Good morning.
Good morning, counsel.
Could you please state your name and spell for the stenographer?
Jennifer Bizzidlow, last name is B as in boy, A, Z as in zebra, Y, D as in David, L as in Larry, O as in Oscar.
Do you swear or affirm to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
Tanetta Graham has a few questions for you, our board member.
Great.
Thank you.
Good morning.
Do you agree to weigh the reading of the refusal, and do you stipulate to its accuracy?
Yes, to both.
All right.
Thank you.
You may proceed.
Did you want to ask me about exhibits or no?
We have all your exhibits.
I know.
i usually just get a question so i wanted to make sure we're trying to move a little quicker today
okay i'll try to i'll try to i don't think i think we're in good shape with this one so i'll try to
keep it you are you are short okay so um i'm here today on behalf of reward jacob who is the owner
of the property um we also have the design and build team on the line if we need them g space
architects with angela and michael um bucci um so i'm just going to briefly go through my exhibit
packet and then we'll hit some highlights for you. So we have here the refusal. Our only refusal is
for the use of this property as a three-family dwelling. We're going to come back to this because
we already had a permit and we kind of need to renew it. Here's showing the ownership of Aurora.
She took sole ownership of this property in 2010 but it has been in her family since the 1970s and
And I do believe she even grew up in this home.
So there's the deed.
We have the only taxes dealer for this year.
Here is our letter of support.
We had a well-attended meeting and some good discussions with the community group who are in support.
Here's all of our letters.
All of the letters are from the notification radius for the community meeting.
And these letters are also not from people who were at the community meeting.
And these letters are also not from people who were at the community meeting.
So we have 20 letters in addition to those eight who are in support.
Zoning map just showing kind of where we are in relationship to other zoning.
I'm going to come back to this.
But most importantly, while this block is primarily zoned, RSA 5, we have about 50% usage of multifamily and mixed commercial use and multifamily.
These are the previous permits we'll be coming back to, including both use permits, zoning permits, and building permits.
There's the top of our property.
There's our zoning photo and photo of the property.
And we do have, I'll go through these photos, but there's our plans as well.
So let me start with the photo here.
um so like i said uh this is a property that aurora took sole ownership of in 2010
but it is a family property that has been in her family since the 1970s
um it is the parcel itself is a little over 1300 square feet there's this existing three-story
structure um that totals about 2700 square feet there's no proposed changes to the outside of the
structure at this point, and the property is already divided into three units. So I'm just
going to go through the photos right now, what the current conditions are here. You can see this is
unit one, here is our second unit, and our third unit. And so usually when I'm in this situation,
and this is what it looked like before any work was done to the property. So you can see in 2010,
And the property was in pretty rough shape before any work was done.
So usually when we're in this circumstance, I'm telling you about, oh, we didn't know we need permits or anything like that.
Aurora knew she needed permits.
And she went about this correctly.
So in 2010, she hired G-Space, drew up plans, and obtained a zoning variance at that time for three residential units.
um the work and here's that notice of decision from that prior um decision um work began she
hired a contractor in 2011 after the granting of this proposal um who did who pulled the permits
to do the work um we can see here that there's a list of permits that were pulled
um and additionally you can see the act these actual permits if you looked on atlas but i
didn't want to bombard you with all of the detailed permits um so the permits were pulled work began
um here's the older permits from 2012 and that contractor took a significant amount of money
from my client but did not finish the work um she is not a developer she is just as you know like
you said this was a family property that she inherited um and it took her some time to build
up funds to continue the work. So in 2015 and 16, the permits had been, the zoning permit was
extended an additional year. She hired another contractor who again pulled permits and almost
finished the work, but did not finish all of the work. And again, taking more money than the work
that had been done. So this is, this is quite a tragic story, honestly, for Ms. Jacob. But so this
where we are right now with this project it is all the work that was already done had been done
with permits and with permission of the city um but where we are at is that we need to do
a little bit of finish up like finish work um and the fire suppression system needs to be connected
to the street obviously after that a co would need to be issued but at this point the project
is over 90 percent done as you can see from these photos and was done with permits um
it is just now between having to save up more money for the additional finish work and also
delays due to covid um this is why we're just now trying to finish this project
um so you can see here i just want to go over the plans now um the plans are not changing from what
has already done. So what you're seeing in those layouts are what we're proposing. Each of these
units, there's no living in the basement, only mechanicals. And each unit is a two-bedroom,
one and a half bath unit. The front is the living area. You can see all of them are basically the
same layout, where we have a living room in the front, we have a kitchen towards the middle,
and then the rear section of the building are the two bedrooms and an additional and a full bath.
All of them have plenty of windows as you can see even the ones that the smaller bedroom also
even the ones that the smaller bedroom also still has two windows and that's because the design of
still has two windows and that's because of the design.
the building has a little indent so we can provide some extra lighting there. You know again this is
a larger building itself of 2700 square feet so each one of these units is only a little under
a thousand square feet so we have some nice sized units for a two bedroom in this neighborhood.
um this is not out of character with the neighborhood or with the block so if you
look at the zoning map here you can see our property in blue and you can see that this block
with the exception of these two corners here is zoned single family um notably the property
adjacent to us is cmx1 though um so when we look at how these properties are actually used though
we see that we have on this block 36 properties with uh on this that face this block
some of the i included the ones that have um frontage on this block but are on sixth and
fifth as well there's 36 properties 18 of those not including our property um are the last approved
use was for something other than a single family home um 16 are 16 of those properties that are
non-single families are zoned for single family use. So you can see the number range from three
units to some six units, and the corners are commercial with one, three, and four units.
So we have a block that has a pretty mixed use. We have a property that was previously permitted
for three units and basically completed for those three units and due to some mishaps with
contractors and personal financial issues as a result. We have an owner who's not a big corporation
who now is stuck with a property that had expired permits and a lot of money sunk into it. And it
would be a great hardship for her to not be able to finish this project as it was originally designed
and approved. Prior to going to the community group, to the RCO, the owner, Aurora, and the
architect team went out and reached out to the community and that's where those 20 letters of
support have come from is from them taking the notification list and doing some initial like work
to notify the neighbors. We did then go to the RCO where we had a really good meeting and talk
to people and wound up with eight in support and only one opposed. A lot of the conversation around
this with the neighbors was why they might be opposed to a brand new project of this sort.
They understand a lot of them remembered the zoning from 2011 and understood what was
happening here. And they knew Aurora, they knew the project, and were in support of finishing
this and getting this building back to being used for active housing. I did want to note that this
property hasn't been occupied during that time. So everything has been done by the books. We
haven't, you know, built without permits. We haven't occupied without a CO or anything like
that, which I think is different than a lot of the times when we're here trying to renew permits or
tell you we already have a finished product or something like that. So in summary, we have just