Okay, the property is indicated for residential use under city plan.
Hardship demonstrated here where the lot is likely undevelopable without disturbing its
steep slope. Therefore, we recommend the request for granted to be granted.
To be granted? Yes. Thank you.
Alan, do you want to respond? I agree.
Okay. All right. Okay. What we're going to do, Alan, we're going to
hold this until next week. We're going to vote on this next Wednesday at 2 p.m.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you very much.
Number two.
MI 2023-001-286-152-58 West Logan Street.
Brandon Saverin is the attorney.
There were two meetings with the RCO.
We do not have a letter from the coordinating RCO.
We have a letter of opposition from Solo Germantown, but attached to it is enforceable provisives.
The applicant also had a petition support of 29 neighbors, along with 27 form letters of support.
Brandon Saverin has been promoted.
Good afternoon, Council.
Could you state your name, please, and spell for the court reporter?
Yes, my name is Brandon Saverin, and that's spelled B-R-A-N-D-O-N, and then S as in Sam, A, V as in Victor, R-A-N as in Nancy.
Do you swear or affirm to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
Yes, I do.
But do you identify your client in relationship to the property?
So my client is Three Square Developers, LLC.
They are authorized by the city of Philadelphia to pursue this variance.
The property is currently owned by the city.
Okay. Our, our vice chair has a few questions.
Our vice chair has a few questions.
Good afternoon, counsel. Do you agree to waive the reading of the refusal and stipulate to accuracy?
I agree to waive the reading, but I do not stipulate to its accuracy, Mr. Vice Chair.
You want to explain why?
I'm sorry. I didn't, I didn't hear you there. Could you repeat that?
Could you explain why?
Oh, we believe that one of the four refusals was issued in error, and I'll explain that in a moment.
Understood.
Have you emailed all the required documents and exhibits?
Yes, with the exception of a letter from the coordinating RCO, which, as the chairman mentioned, I don't believe anyone has seen.
Got it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
All right. Good afternoon, members of the board. So I am here to discuss a property, 152-58 West
Logan Street in the Germantown section of the city. This is one property, despite the dashed
address. It is owned by the city and it is managed by the land bank. The land bank, through
its process of selecting developers has allowed my client, Three Square Developers, to pursue
today zoning variances. And then if we're successful, next building permits in order
to develop this lot. And if we are successful in getting all of those permits and variances,
we will be able to purchase the property from the city. And what the project proposes is to
develop 12 single-family homes and 12 parking spaces, one serving each home. So I will start
by showing you a portion of Exhibit 12 of the 12 exhibits that I sent to the board last week.
Whoa, that is too far zoomed in, sorry. So this is an informal site plan, which ultimately led
to our official zoning submission, which I'll show you in a moment. The reason I'm showing you
this informal site plan is because this is what was proffered to the land bank as part of its
selection process. So this is what the land bank selected my client to attempt to develop. It's
what it wanted to see happen with the property. This is the same image that we showed the
affected RCOs at both RCO meetings. And it is what the current zoning plan is based on. So that's all
just to say that we've been very, very consistent with all involved parties about what we're trying
to develop throughout. I think that it's also a good opportunity just to illustrate what the
project is. So here on Keeser Street are 10 of the 12 row homes that we're proposing to develop.
And here along Logan Street are two others. And here is a shared parking lot with 12 spaces. So
So the concept here is that we're not going to legally subdivide the property, but would instead, if we're lucky enough to obtain the variances from you today, sell these homes as either condominium units or probably more likely planned community units, which is commonly known as an HOA.
So these are going to be homes for sale in an HOA, and the HOA will own and maintain the parking lot and the landscaping features around the edges of the site.
To show you a little bit more about the context, I will go to Exhibit 8.
So these are images from atlas.phil.gov.
This is a parcel map here, and then on the next page, these are aerial photos.
from Atlas, and they just show the extent of the property. It's at over 22,000 square feet.
It occupies, I would guess, about a third of its block. And the, you know, sort of
outer extents of the property are highlighted by the tips of these red arrows that I put on this
image. And then here at exhibit nine are zoning posters. These are actually the posters for the
first hearing that we continued in order to host a second RCO meeting and hear additional community
concerns. Later in the packet are the posters for this hearing, but I'll just kind of
Later in the packet are the posters for this hearing, but I'll just kind of leave you with this image because this image, I think does a good job illustrating sort of the large size of the site.
This is looking, I believe, eastward from Logan Street.
This is from Keeser Street, again, looking eastward.
And then finally, I'm going to pull up the refusal, and then I'll sort of end up passing the presentation to our architect and then take it back to discuss what I believe are our hardships.
This is Exhibit 2B. It's our notice of refusal. So to address the refusal that I believe was issued in error, we are not subject because we are on an RSA-5 property that is adjacent to other RSA-5 properties.
I don't believe we're subject to the code section cited in this refusal, 147051-D and 147051-E. So I think that that requirement or those two requirements are not applicable to this project, and therefore that particular refusal is erroneous.
The other refusals are, I think, technically accurate, but written up in what is perhaps an accidentally misleading way. So this is not what you would call multifamily housing, but the second and third refusal, what happened here is because we're not legally subdividing the property,
The examiner seems to have taken one of the banks of the 10-row homes and considered it a 10-unit apartment building and then taken the other bank of two-row homes and considered that to be a two-unit apartment building.
So critically, these are, again, single-family row homes.
They will be for sale, not for rental.
They are going not to be staffed.
They are not connected in their interiors.
They are traditional Philadelphia row homes.
And I think the refusals are accurate because we're not subdividing.
But to use the word multifamily, I think is a little confusing.
And then in the last refusal, and I'll get into this more in a moment, it is not the
case that any of the proposed homes have no rear yards.
Now, it is the case that one of them has an insufficiently deep rear yard, but even that particular home is a yard, and I'll show you that in a second.
So I'm going to stop there for the moment, and I would ask for Jimmy Hare to be allowed to testify as the project architect and walk through the plans quickly.
Hello. Hi, could you state your name, please, and spell for the court stenographer?
Yeah, my name is James Harre, J-A-M-E-S-H-A-R-R-E.
Do you swear for him to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth?
I do. Proceed, counsel.
Thank you. Jimmy, rather than question you, I'm just going to invite you to, you know, give a presentation of a minute or two to the board showing, I would say, the renderings and the floor plans,
and then maybe also the location of our driveway curb cut.
Sorry, Brandon, I lost you there for a minute as I was joining as a panelist.
Oh, I understand.
I just said if you could please share the floor plans, the renderings with the board,
and maybe also just discuss the location of our curb cut.
Yeah, we'd be happy to.
Thank you.
I just want to confirm everyone can see my screen now.
Great.
So what we're seeing here is just a rendering from the corner of Logan and Kaiser Street.
You can see the 10 homes along Kaiser Street to the right here.
And then you can see in the left-hand side, the two homes that front Logan Street.
Here's our site plan again that Brandon was showing you.
Our curb cut entry here.
It is approximately 40 feet away from the curb cut for the rear driveway of the homes along Knox Street.
Again, it's about 40 feet.
and as brian mentioned 12 individual parking spaces uh the floor plans for all the homes
are fairly similar um they really only change slightly in the sense of the end units having
these bays here that you can see as well with a mansard that wraps the whole way instead of just
the front but as we look through these you can see we have the entryway coming into living area
a dining room and then a kitchen in the rear with a rear yard access
that goes into the rear yard and the parking way as we go up we have two
That goes into the rear yard and the parking way.
As we go up, we have two bedrooms and two bathrooms on the second floor with our mechanicals.
And on the third floor, we have an owner's suite with a den slash working area.
Here are side views of the elevation.
So again, this one being the sides of the end units and then the front with the mansard and the bays kind of poking through.
um all of these again are are more or less the same and here is um front on elevations again
kaiser street here at the bottom you can see how the um home step with the sloping of the street
and then logan street uh here and then again our driveway access in the middle
um views uh from the parking lot looking out and then also um seeing how the homes interact with
the driveway against Knox Street and then those homes and then again here's just another rendered
view of this area as well again our driveway in the middle the Knox uh street homes driveways to
our left here and Kaiser Street to our right thank you Jimmy that that was the question is it it's so
Oh, it's 12 parking spots and then it's a van lot, a spot for a total of 13?
No, it's 12 spots in total, one of them being the ADA accessible spot.
Because we have 13 accessory surface parking spots.
Brandon can speak to this, but we did notice that after the refusal was issued and we do have revised plans.
Yeah, that's right.
Great. So, Jimmy, if you just leave your screen there for one moment, Mr. Chairman, I believe that what may have happened is the examiner confused the handicap accessible aisle that you see hatched there with a parking space.
So we do have proviso plans. And one of the changes on those plans is to specify that there are 12 spaces.
all right jimmy could you um actually stop sharing your screen and i'll sort of wrap it up from here
thank you so uh members of the board thank you for your patience just going to make a couple
comments to close so um on my screen now um is our um proviso zoning plan which is one page this is
exhibit three in my exhibit packet. And I just wanted to walk you through, if we're building
single family homes, you might be asking yourselves, why are we here? Why do we need a
variance? And I wanted to address that. So with a 22,000 square feet lot, we have enough surface
area to build 15 homes under the zoning code. We also have probably a little bit more of a
constraint would be the width of each home. But as you see on your screen, we have adequate width
to build 12 homes because these are 16-foot wide homes. So that meets the zoning code standard.
Essentially, the main reason we need a variance is because without a variance, we would have to
subdivide the property, and I'm going to use my cursor here. If we were to subdivide the property,
there can't be any sort of unowned space. So because of that, and to meet minimum lot area
requirements, these homes along Kaiser Street, the lots would be almost double as far back.
Each person would own up to about where my mouse is now, if you can see that. They'd be over 80
feet deep. And we would still be able to propose, theoretically, a drive aisle here. But that drive
aisle would cut through every single person's backyard on Keeser Street. So what you'd have is
a very odd situation where the driveway is owned in chunks. And maybe we could have something like
an easement agreement or something to that effect. But it would be owned by at least 10
different homeowners and there'd be no organized mechanism to maintain the dry vial, what we're
going to have here is a community association that owns the dry vial and the parking lot.
And let's just say that we have sort of a bad actor among this future group of 12 homeowners
that is blocking the dry vial. With an HOA, there's no need to take that person to court.
All you have to do is put a fine, an additional assessment into their HOA fees to basically convince that person, please play by the rules for the benefit of all.
to basically convince that person, please play by the rules for the benefit of all of your neighbors.
And absent the need to fine anybody, the HOA will have very, very low monthly fees
that will take care of cleaning the drive aisle and the parking lot,
and also pruning and caring for the landscaping at the perimeter of the site.
You know, if we were to subdivide in order to avoid the variances, that taking care of that landscaping would basically fall on whatever homeowner happened to own that space.
So this is just a much more organized setup that is going to result in a cleaner, easier, more peaceful environment for everybody involved.
involved. And the last thing I'll sort of say, this home right here, which is the furthest north
on the property, this is the one that the examiner marked as not having a rear yard. And you can see
here that it does in fact have a rear yard. It's just that the corner meets the lot line and that's
what triggered the refusal. But this is not someone's home directly beyond the lot line.
This is a paved driveway that serves as a rear alley to these homes on Knox Street that are dozens of feet away, the buildings are.
So just wanted to sort of call that out again.
Didn't want you to think no one was going to have a rear yard.
Everybody has a rear yard.
Is your client here?
Last thing I wanted to say, Mr. Chairman, there's additional support for the arguments I've made and others in our memo of law, which is Exhibit 1.
You did mention the letters and petitions of support from neighbors, which are in our packet. And with that, that concludes our presentation. And Anthony Drake is the client I expect to adopt our testimony.
Okay. Mr. Drake?
Hi, Mr. Drake. Could you state your name, please, and spell for the court stenographer?
Anthony Drake.
A-N-T-H-O-N-Y-D-R-A-K-E.
Do you swear or affirm to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth?
Yes, I do. Yes, sir.
Please proceed.
Thank you. Anthony, are you authorized to speak on behalf of Three Square Developers, LLC?
Yes, I am.
Did you hear my presentation in your zoning case this afternoon?
Yes, I did.
Was it true and accurate to the best of your knowledge, information, and belief?
Yes, it was. I think you did a very good job.
Thanks, Anthony. And finally, would you therefore adopt my testimony as if it were your own?
Yes, absolutely.
Thank you.
Questions from the board?
No, Mr. Chairman.
No, Chair.