before our vice chair um starts uh hillary do you want to bring up the issue of a missing refusal
um well so on on the refusal i think there's a um because it's zoned rsa5 there may have been
a refusal missing for multiple principal uses on a lot but i just wanted to make sure the one
so the refusal the non-residential refusal says um warehouse equipment and material storage which
isn't a use in the zoning code i think it's supposed to be equipment and materials storage
yards and buildings is that correct that is correct yes okay okay that's what it looked
like in the pictures and that's what i i think they were trying to say so mr chair we may just
want to add a proviso clarifying the use because they can because the refusal kind of amalgamates
two different use categories into one um all right so our vice our vice chair has
several questions for you, Mr. Saverin. Good afternoon, counsel. Do you agree to
waive the reading of the refusal or stipulate to its accuracy? Good afternoon, Mr. Vice Chairman.
I agree to waive the reading of the refusal and I stipulate to its accuracy aside from the issues
that were just pointed out by the solicitor. Thank you, counsel. I've emailed in all the
required documents and exhibits that's needed to proceed with this case five days in advance of
this hearing. Yes, I did. Thank you, counsel. Please proceed and share your screen.
Okay, thank you very much. And let me just say congratulations to Ian, and I hope that the job isn't as hard as I imagine it to be.
So, oh, excuse me, let me try that one more time so I can zoom in a little bit more.
There we go. Okay, can everyone see the refusal?
We can.
Okay, thank you. So, good afternoon. My client is Alder Group LLC.
That's the property owner. And today, the LLC will be represented by Daniel Gorin.
Just for context, the LLC has two members, ex-husband and ex-wife, who purchased the
property in 2017. And I'll get into that history a little bit more in a moment. So
the application before you is to legalize the existing uses in an existing structure.
no changes to the structure are proposed as described in the refusal the property has a
commercial warehouse on the ground floor and three residential apartments above it my clients learned
years after buying the property that it did not have a certificate of occupancy and along the way
of getting one a zoning refusal resulted because the property is in the rsa5 district
So I'll begin going through the exhibits.
As you can begin to see in the city zoning map, the subject property is on a mixed block that has some wider mixed use properties like the subject property, as well as row homes.
The next image here shows that the property is three times as wide as this zoning district's
minimum lot width. It is 48 feet wide and has 2,400 square feet of lot area. Looking at the
distinct roofs on the property, and you can see here our property actually spans the width of
this section that the pin is on with the lighter roof as well as this section of the right with
the darker roof what you can see there is that it appears that decades ago the property consisted
of two distinct structures which were joined on the ground floor but remained separated by
a structural wall upstairs i'd like to take a minute to explain why this application is occurring
i'd like to take a minute to explain why this application is occurring just now if my clients
just now.
purchased the property seven years ago that's because after buying the property in 2017
my clients applied for a multi-family rental license and were granted one for five dwelling
units which is shown here you can see that the license states five units and you can see my
client's name towards the bottom. Before that, the prior owner also had a rental license for
five units. To go back to my client's license, because my clients were granted the same rental
license that their seller had, my clients simply had no reason to suspect that anything was out
of the order and out of the ordinary with this property's permitting until 2022, five years
after they purchased the property, when the city raised an issue for the first time.
That's when L&I did not allow them to renew their rental license.
L&I's eventual explanation was that the property did not have a certificate of occupancy,
but left it to my clients to discover that a new CO could not be obtained without a new zoning
permit. When applying for a new zoning permit, it was discovered that the prior zoning approval
did not include a third apartment.
So, what is unique about this case is that two of the apartments
and the downstairs warehouse space were previously granted zoning approval
by court order in 2015, shown here, overturning a denial by this board.
But strangely, we have evidence that there have been three apartments,
which are shown here on your screen, since at least 2007. So again, we have evidence that there
have been three apartments on the upper floor since at least 2007. This is a floor plan showing
the three apartments today. Even stranger, if you'll remember, is that L&I granted the prior
owner a rental license for five units. So the prior owner had a three-unit apartment building
with a zoning permit for only two units, but a rental license for five units. So suffice it to
say the permitting history for this property is a mess. My clients wish to keep the warehouse
plus all three apartments above it. And if this board grants our application today,
unlike the last owner, my clients will apply for and obtain a certificate of occupancy,
making all necessary improvements to the building's interior as may be required during that process.
I'd now like to walk you through some images of the block and property.
This is one more aerial image in which you can see that another triple-wide mixed-use property is located two doors down at 2327-31 Alder Street,
which is where my cursor is now, if you can see that, and the red pin is the subject property.
Similarly, it appears that this 2327-31 Alder property also is a combination of two structures.
You can also notice in this image that garage doors are very common on our side of the block, serving both commercial and residential uses.
To turn to some street-level images, you'll see that on-street parking is not permitted on the subject property side of the street.
That's the subject property and its garage door in the foreground on the right.
Here's the block facing the other direction with a neighbor's garage, the immediately adjacent neighbor in the foreground, and the subject property's garage door in the distance.
Note the walled stoop here, which is a part of the subject property, which is where the apartment's trash is kept per city collection.
So the residents are able to walk their trash out of their units to cans, which live on this stoop.
This is a 13-year-old photo from 2011.
You'll see that the property has three entrances in addition to the garage door, which remains the case to this day.
One of the entrances serves the ground floor warehouse, while the other two serve the upstairs apartments, with two of the three apartments sharing the entrance on the left that has the stoop.
You can see in this image that the property had four mailboxes back in 2011, the gold one for the downstairs business and one for each of the three apartments.
Four mailboxes are shown in this even older image from 2007 as well.
More recent images from the period of my client's ownership also show four mailboxes.
So again, four mailboxes is evidence since 2007 that there's been four units in total, three being residential, one being the warehouse.
four units in total, three being residential, one being the warehouse.
Google's images also do a good job highlighting the use of some adjacent properties. So this
image from last year clearly shows two mailboxes on our next door neighbor at 2333-35 Alder Street.
One property further down, so now this is two doors down from us, at 2327 Alder Street,
appears to show a business plus five residential apartments of a property of about the same size
as ours. The ground floor appears to be occupied by a roofing company, per my client's personal
observations. And you can see some of the roofing company's equipment photographed here leaning
against the building. You'll also see six distinct electrical meters mounted on the outside of this
building. Three are on the left side of their warehouse here, and three are on the right side
of the warehouse, shown here. This evidence is offered to establish for you that the property's
two closest neighbors to the north are also engaged in mixed multifamily and commercial uses.
I'll quickly walk through the interior of the building. The ground floor is an
interconnected, pardon me, series of rooms that span the entire property. So this entire floor
is what we call the warehouse. The ground floor is occupied by a tenant, a business that produces
signs for real estate agents. And I'll walk you through photos of these spaces now. So this is
the first room. It's essentially a loading room where they load the finished signs.
One more photo of that room, which was, I think, being cleaned while this was taken.
This is the next room is a room where the tenant business stores its signs and sign posts.
So you can kind of get the gist.
Some of these signs are suburban style that are put on a post that's hammered into the
ground and some are tacked onto buildings.
So the tenant has an elaborate rack system that stores these signs across a couple rooms.
Here's the same room, just a better image of that rack system.
And here's the next room that has yet more racks.
The fourth room is where the signs are assembled. The tenant does not actually make the signs from
raw materials here. What they do is they take blank signs produced elsewhere and they print
images onto them using this printer. And finally, there's a small bathroom in this tenant space.
Here again is the upstairs floor plan. So one apartment shown in orange is separated by a
structural wall from the remainder of the floor. All of the apartments are one bedrooms.
The orange apartment has its own entrance from the street. The other two apartments shown in
blue and green, share an entrance from Alder Street and have a common staircase and hallway,
which is seen here. So here's the entrance from Alder for the green and blue apartments on that
floor plan. You come upstairs off the street, and this is the common hallway.
Give me one moment. I'll load some interior pictures. So this is the unit that is called
37 front. And what you're looking at here is its kitchen. Then if you turn around in this same
space, you'd face the living area. This is its bathroom. This is its bedroom.
The next set of photos are of 37 rear. This is the other unit that shares the common hallway.
This unit was photographed between tenants, but it is currently occupied.
So this is the kitchen into which the front door to the unit leads.
This is the living room looking at it from the kitchen.
This is again the living room just turning the camera around so you can see the kitchen
and the front door there. To the left is a door that leads to the bathroom.
here is the bathroom and now we're back in the living room looking at the door to the bedroom
and then finally here's the orange unit the one that is structurally separated from the other two
which is called the 41 unit
this is more of an open concept layout so this is a door that leads to a private
an indoor staircase that goes down to Alder Street. You have a kitchen and sort of a dining
area here. Looking at the same area, just turning the camera around. This is a seating area
This is a seating area towards the front of the apartment.
towards the front of the apartment.
And then in a separate room, this is the bedroom.
Didn't want anyone to think there's no window.
The window is behind the camera in this photo.
And this is that unit's bathroom.
So as I mentioned, in a 2015 case about this property called McNally that went to the court
of common pleas the zoning board was ordered to grant variances for the downstairs warehouse plus
two apartments so you're looking at the refusal that wound its way to court in that case and on
this next page is the court's final order for reasons unknown the court simply didn't consider
a third unit despite as i showed you some evidence that there was a third unit present by this time
third apartment unit, that is. The court's opinion in the case is nonetheless very helpful.
It notes that Sanborn maps indicated that various commercial uses have been located in the ground
floor for over 100 years, and that the property was previously zoned in a different way that
allowed non-residential uses. Although not explicitly stated, the implication of the court's
decision is that prior zoning also allowed the apartments above, as the court included variances
for the two apartments in its decision. Given that a third apartment was not before the court
in 2015, it is not the case that the McNally decision is binding on the board today. If it
were, we wouldn't be here. But it's persuasive evidence that the property faced a hardship
preventing it from being used in conformity, sorry, preventing it from being used in conformity
with its RSA-5 zoning. The property continues to face this hardship to this day. And I promise
I'm almost wrapped up here. The McNally Court in 2015 relied on and cited a much older case
called O'Neill v. ZVA from 1956, which is a seminal PA Supreme Court case discussing hardship.
The present application has much in common with the facts of O'Neill. In the interest of time, I won't run through that comparison during this hearing. I'll simply note that I provided a memo at Exhibit 16 that discusses the similarities between our situation and O'Neill.
The famous line from the O'Neill case is that, quote, the board's discretion is not so circumscribed as to require a property owner to reconstruct a building to a conforming use, regardless of the financial burden that would be incident thereto, end quote.
So here, as in O'Neill, the minimum necessary relief is to legalize the property in its current
form. My clients are requesting that the board do so to obtain a zoning variance, because in order
to obtain a variance, it's sufficient for an applicant to show that a property can be conformed
for a permitted use only at a prohibitive expense. That is a line from Hertzberg,
which is another PA Supreme Court case. In my memo, I detail why combining even
two of the three apartments, would involve removing tenants and major expenses.
For context, my clients are an ex-husband and ex-wife who bought the property while married
and are not full-time real estate investors. They currently charge each apartment tenant
$1,200 per month. That's the market in this location. So the cost to gut and rebuild to
merge units would be very hard to sustain and very disruptive for the folks that live there.
putting aside the history of the property and its unique physical constraints which again are
further detailed in my memo the applicant submits that the board may grant variances on the basis
that the property is located in an area in which multi-family use with three apartments is
appropriate specifically this is a triple wide lot and two of our nearest neighbors are also
used as multi-family properties with an equal or greater unit density per lot area for context
Next, if the property were zoned RM1, the city's most common and lowest density multifamily designation, six units would be permitted by right given the property's lot area.
Of course, the property is not zoned RM1, but again, it is directly adjacent to other multifamily properties, so it's useful to determine that the city would not consider our second floor to be overly dense if we were in a multifamily zoning district.
Based on the significant evidence before the board, the applicant submits that it has met each element entitling it to use variances provided in the zoning code.
With three apartments in the warehouse present since at least 2007, the property has not caused congestion or endangered the public.
The RCO has not claimed any such ill effects and no complaints about the property.
The RCO has not claimed any such ill effects, and no complaints about the property were voiced at the RCO meeting, which my client and I attended.
Granting new variances to this property will allow my clients to apply for a certificate of occupancy, which will ensure the continued safety of the property's neighbors and its own tenants.
Thank you very much.
You want to bring your client on?
Yes. Thanks, Mr. Chairman.
Daniel Gorin, could you raise your virtual hand?
When did Mr. Gorin buy it?
Daniel Gorin has been allowed to speak.
Mr. Gorin, could you please state your name and spell for the Stockford?
Mr. Gorin?
daniel
he's unmuted chair might be having technical issues
so mr sabrin you're an officer of the court and we accept your testimony um just a quick question
so in 15 when it went to the zoning board yeah did they ask for two plus plus downstairs and
then they appealed it um so the case actually came before the zoning board in 2012 um given
that litigation moves like molasses it took until well okay yep but but but the zoning board what
what were they requesting there yeah so um there's the request to the zoning board was two apartments
um plus the warehouse the zoning board um denied i don't have a copy of the file that's okay sure
And then went to court.
In court, they appealed for two and one.
So, right.
The court reversed the zoning board.
That's correct.
All right.