in relationship to this property? My client is Andrew Langsom. He is the equitable owner
pursuant to an agreement of sale. Okay. Our vice chair has just a few questions for you, sir.
Good afternoon, counsel. Do you agree to waive the reading of the refusal and stipulate to
accuracy. I will waive the reading of the refusal but will not stipulate as to its accuracy.
Have you emailed in all the required documents and exhibits that are needed and required to
proceed with this case five days in advance of this hearing? Yes. Okay thank you please proceed
and show your screen. Counsel just out of curiosity what is it you don't say is accurate? There was a
typo um an inconsistency in our plans which listed two different building heights one of
which would generate a refusal the one which didn't we've submitted proviso plans which clarify
that um so we believe there should only be a refusal as to use here okay please proceed terrific
um so while i give my introduction right here is just in the background that you can look at here
is the subject property, Eleven Shures, which is this parking lot here, and then the little
building up top. So we're here today seeking a use variance for an ICMX property to build 45
residential units. This is located on the side of a hill in Maniunk, about a half black up from
Main Street. As you can see from this photo here, it's right next to the elevated septa tracks,
And it's also surrounded by the tall walls here of the I-2 zone, Littlewood Dye Works, which is now an abandoned factory.
As the pictures show here, there is a hardship with this unique property in finding a conforming use.
So first off, as I'll go through in more detail, as you can see, Schur's Lane here, it's two lanes.
there's only parking on the other side. And because it's so narrow, there just isn't truck
access. And we'll get into that in more detail. I'm here today with, I will be presenting the
testimony of the real estate agent who listed this property, who's Chris Pennington from BizWent.
real estate agent who listed this property, who's Chris Pennington from Bizwanger. He will explain
his exhaustive attempts between March of 2021 and November of 2021 to try and find a conforming
use, to try and find someone to purchase this, and that he's confident based upon the market
conditions now that it's impossible to find a conforming use here. He tried and tried and
couldn't do it. I'm also going to be here with the testimony of our engineer at Ruggiero Plant,
Dennis Couric, who's going to explain, he'll walk people through the plans, but he's going to
explain that due to the constraints of the site location, it's just impossible to get loading and
also to get truck access, and even if we were to remove the historic facade. I will also have
testimony from my client, Andrew Langsom. He'll testify about the flooding that most recently in
2021 came right up about to the driveway. And he'll also walk the board through all of the
commercial vacancies just down the hill here on Main Street. Finally, as I got into before,
there is a refusal on height, but the height is conforming. It's at 38 feet. We have clarified
the typo on the plans to make it clear that this is conforming. We did get a letter from the RCO
on Monday, which was copied upon the board. And they, in essence, took the position that
I didn't present evidence showing them the exhaustive efforts to market the property.
Since that RCO meeting, I did get in touch with a listing agent, and he's going to testify about
all that today, addressing their concerns. And another concern was that if we remove the facade,
we're going to keep the historic facade, that there wouldn't be an issue here.
So this property here, just to orient everyone, it's 79 feet of frontage, and it's 231 feet deep.
That brings it to about 1,800 square feet, which is 0.41 acres.
Historically, if you can see these little walls here, there used to be railroad tracks.
You can see the one in the bottom right here.
This was a coal yard.
Coal was dumped here.
That's how the property was used.
It's now being used as a parking lot.
And based upon my research, that use is illegal.
There needs to be a special exception.
There isn't one.
So let me tell you a little bit about this property.
So it's going to be a 38-foot-tall building with a ground-level lobby facing Schur's Lane.
I'll walk you through the plans.
So there's going to be 45 units on floors two to four.
As far as parking, the code requires 23 spaces, but we have 37.
And here the garage footprint is 1,800 square feet. We're going to have an eight-foot setback around the upper floors of the property.
So let me just walk you through these photos real quick.
So here's the refusal, which lists two different bases. I'll take you through some of the photos here.
Okay. Here's just a rendering showing you what this building is going to look like.
Here's another rendering. This one is not to scale. The other one is. But just to show you where the balconies are.
And this here stone wall is an existing facade. We're going to build around it. We're going to save it.
we're going to destroy the building, but we want to keep that historical piece here. Again, here's
Google Map. You have Manion Brewing Companies down here, Schur's Lane. This property here in the
bottom is the Littlewood Dye Works, which is I2. Here's another image here. Just more images showing
the tall walls. Another image. So here you are looking at this brick wall is where Littlewood
is down down the hill and this here is our property with the about 25 foot wide opening
here's an image looking down the drive aisle another one here is kind of from main street
looking uphill just so you can see the imposing elevated septic tracks above the property
again another one looking uphill here's one looking downhill um this shows you the the
parking our building is right here on the left this shows the parking on the one lane across
the street and lets you see how narrow and steep this hill is which is a real challenge again our
driveway and here's some photos from inside so inside looking to the right this is the existing
wall of Littlewood it gets really tall a couple stories tall in the back again if you look at
Again, if you look at these towers on the left, this here is looking up back to the left, just showing you how tall the septa tracks just tower over this property, the rear wall.
these towers on the left this here is
Again, this is a it's a bit of a prison in there with all the walls.
Here's a photo just showing when Ida hit, when folks were doing backflips into 676, the water came right up to the edge of this property.
Again, here's a zoning plan, which shows our property right here.
And then this is the I2 of Littlewood.
And I'm going to have my client walk you through this map, which shows our properties right here.
It shows all of the commercial vacancies, which which are important here.
Let me take you through the just I'll just show you these renderings.
You know what? I'll have Dennis in a minute walk you through these through the plans.
So let me switch back. Here's just a sample floor plan here of what what the upper floors will look like.
I submitted the Proviso Plans form. There's also the application for appeal, agreement of sale, project information form, tax clearance, photographs of posting.
If I could have Dennis Kirk, if you can raise your hand, please.
dennis correct you're free to speak hi sir thank you very much could you state your name please
spell for the court stenographer yes it's uh dennis kurek d-e-n-n-i-s-k-u-r-e-k i'm with
regiro plant land design do you swear or affirm to tell the truth the whole truth nothing but the
truth yes we do proceed counsel and dennis can you just briefly kind of walk the board through
um the the site plan here and and show them where everything is sure so the the green that you see
there is the proposed uh building footprint that's going to be located on the ground floor
a vast majority of the site is going to be surface parking um as ryan mentioned before we
we're proposing 37 parking spaces on the on the ground floor um with just that small area of green
That's the proposed ground floor lobby and residential amenity space on the ground floor.
There's also bike parking provided on the ground floor as well.
Terrific.
And then we also have the trash here on the ground floor in an elevator.
Dennis, can you just briefly tell me about the challenges the site provides as far as trying to find a commercial or industrial use?
So just Dennis the engineer. Correct. Yeah. But but I mean, aren't you going to bring somebody in later to talk about the commercial sites?
I just wanted to tell me that a truck can't turn in here. That's really what I want.
Go ahead. Go ahead. I'm simply just going to say, you know, we looked at various options for truck turning templates.
And with the narrowness of Schur's Lane, with the on-street parking, it really would propose a very difficult situation to have any trucks of any size accessing the interior of the site for loading or deliveries.
And that would make it really, really difficult at its location.
And what if we remove the existing stone facade? Would that remove those impediments?
no it's the issues are based upon the street width and the on-site and the on-street parking
adjacent from the property terrific um that that's all i have for dennis if um chris pennington can
raise his hand please mr pennington please unmute yourself and wait for the chair could you state
your name, please, and spell for the court's demographer.
Chris?
Mr. Pennington,
please unmute yourself.
Mr. Pennington?
He's unmuted here.
He's just, we're not able to hear him.
Um, can you guys hear me? Yeah, we can hear you now. Please state your name and spell for the course. The.
Sure, it's Chris Pennington.
P. E. N. N. I. N. G. T. O. N.
Do you swear a firm to tell the truth the whole truth? Nothing but the truth.
I do. Proceed, counsel. First off, Chris, did you hear my argument and testimony today about
I do proceed counsel 1st off Chris. Did you hear my argument?
the marketing efforts on the property and the inability to find a conforming use
despite your reasonable efforts? I did. And was it true, correct, and accurate?
Yes. You adopted as your own? Yes. And Chris, what's your title? What do you do?
I'm a partner and senior vice president at Binswanger. We're a commercial real estate
brokerage firm. And what area do you focus on? I run the mid-Atlantic region for Binswanger
with a focus on Philadelphia. And how long have you been doing this? 20 years. And have you ever
testified as an expert before this board before? Yes, I have. Do you know how many times? A handful.
Okay, terrific. And when were you retained by the owner of 11 Shares Lane? March of 21.
Okay. And I'll represent to you that part of the packet I just showed the board was a copy of the agreement of sale, which was signed on November 22nd, 2021.
So based upon what you just told me, would you have marketed the property from March till November of that year?
And that's about nine months?
And can you tell me, what were your marketing efforts from March until the time that Mr. Langston signed the agreement of sale?
Sure. So like all the properties that we market in the city of Philadelphia, we put together a very extensive marketing package that outlines the highlights of the property, the zoning.
And we put that together to go after predominantly those that conform with the zoning for the property.
So we went out and talked to industrial groups, commercial groups, as well as investor and developers for this type of site.
we put it on our website we put it on costar we put it on loop net and we send it out to
our proprietary database of users that we have for the city of philadelphia and chris did you
want to find a conforming use or was your goal always to put a residential um developer here
so the path of the least resistance to get to a closing for the seller is to
get into a transaction where no zoning variance is required. So it was our hope that we would
be able to find a user for this property, whether it be industrial or commercial,
fitting within the ICMX zoning classification.
But in fact, you had no success finding a conforming use?
No, not during the process.
And you made good faith efforts to try and find a conforming use during those nine months?
Absolutely.
Can you tell me a little bit about what unique attributes of this property presented impediments to finding a conforming use?
Right. So there are a number of different things.
Dennis mentioned a moment ago about the inability to get a truck into this location.
It has a very limited access point offshore's lane. It's on a hill, so that presents a number
of different issues, specifically from a logistics standpoint where getting either a 53-foot tractor
trailer or a shore truck make it very difficult to do. You have, from a commercial standpoint,
vacancies right across the street from an office standpoint at 10 Shures Lane. There's
space in that office building that's been available for a long time. So the commercial side of it from
an office standpoint is something that we had difficulty with. Remember also we were in COVID
and we have as a city, really as a city, haven't have yet to recover from an office or a return
to office. And then from a retail standpoint, I think Andy is going to walk the board through
the number of different vacancies for retail that are on Main Street, which provide retailers
with much better visibility than you would have up a hill from those locations.
Terrific.
So just to go through some of the impediments, you agree there's no delivery access at this
location?
I don't believe so.
Okay. Did you try marketing this to self-storage?
Yeah, we have done a number of different self-storage transactions all over the city of Philadelphia.
We did make an attempt to go to those groups for this location, and they were unwilling to take a stab at it.
So we did not have success in obtaining a self-storage buyer.
What about for business offices or professional offices? Any luck with that?
What about for business offices or professional offices? Any luck with that?
Like I said, we did a very exhaustive search to find somebody that would conform to the use of this property.
So it was our hope to do that. And we unfortunately were not able to find that buyer.
OK, so to confirm you couldn't you couldn't find anyone interested as a restaurant, gas station, warehouse, wholesale distribution, artist studio, anything like that?
we were not um can you just 20 seconds explain to the board what in today's market would make it um
so that a tenant wouldn't want to go to this location versus uh another location uh possibly
on main street that's already vacant i think mr bolin i think he's already done that okay he talks
about it being on a hill and things of that nature now on main street i think we understand that
Understood. And Chris, just to understand, even if you hadn't done all of this marketing,
do you believe you would ever be able to put a conforming tenant in this property?
If I were evaluating it for the owner, just to evaluate for him, I think it would be very
difficult with the Littlewood warehouse next door. You've got the big septa wall and you've
got limited access to this so i think that the the chances of and the viability of getting somebody
to conform here are very very very small terrific that's all i have for chris i don't know if the
board has any questions if not i'll move on to my client that's it we're fine what who's your
who do you bring in next andrew langson okay
and if you can raise your hand please andrew langson you're free to speak
Hi, could you state your name, please, and spell for the court stenographer?
Sure. Andrew Langsom.
Can you spell it, please, Andy?
A-N-D-R-E-W-L-A-N-G-S-A-M.
Right. Do you swear or affirm to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth?
Proceed, counsel.
And, Andy, you're the equitable owner of this property pursuant to the agreement of sale, correct?
That's correct.