And there was large support for the project.
I think the vote was 26 to 9. So by way of a little background, the property is again located on the 2200 block of Hope Street. It's located between West Susquehanna Avenue at the south. If I can move this or not. There we go. West Susquehanna at the south and West Dauphin at the north.
We have North Front Street just to the east of us at the end of the block, across the street, and the next block over.
You can see back in the early 1900s, the block was developed with dwellings.
And again, we are on the west side of the 2200 block.
I can't tell from this whether in 19, sometime between 1917 and 1947, the property went vacant
because it no longer, you see a line at the back where it would look like it's the back of the
building, but it doesn't indicate D for dwelling. But sometime between 1951 and 1982, you can see
that line is no longer there, just like the other properties surrounding us. So sometime between
at least either after the 40s or even sometime after 1917, our property and a lot of other
properties on our side of the 2200 block of Hope, or also known as North Hope Street,
went vacant, became vacant lots. You can see in the Sanborn maps that there's an alley that runs
behind our property to the west. It runs north and south parallel with Hope Street. As you'll
see in the zoning plans, our property is 42 feet deep, so it's relatively shallow. But the last
two feet of that goes into the middle of the alley. That's a four-foot wide alley. So we only
have 40 feet of usable space. It's a 16-foot wide lot. So it's a pretty small lot and only 672
square feet which is um as you know is well below the minimum lot size for rsa5 properties
but again as you go through the years you can see the vacancies um we did pull street view images
back in 2007 this is our property right here with the chain link fence
Back in 2007, this is our property right here with the chain link fence, 2226 Hope Street.
You can see the property to the south of us is vacant.
You have this masonry wall with some type of swinging garage door or door in it.
A gate property to the south, a gate to the north, a gate for the property to the north of that.
Here's from 2009.
You can see a lot of trash, blighted, a lot of blight, graffiti on the wall next to us to the north.
Here you can see in 2011, chain link fences with barbed wire, a lot of debris.
This is, again, 2014.
You can see all the trash that's strewn in the lot.
2016 little cleaned up a little bit better fence chain link fence next door still have that kind
of that masonry wall with two doors in it properties to the to the north here's been
dressed up a little bit in 2017 um you can see banners and streamers but um you know tarps and
other kind of rigged up structures around the property. You can see there's cars that are
parked in front of it up on the sidewalk. And then sometime after around 2021, there's a building
built to the south of us. You can see our property here to the north with the tarp and a bunch of
trash and dilapidated gates. We do have photographs of the property. These are photographs that I
took. This is the current condition of our property. You can see the chain link fence,
the property to the north of us, which is under common ownership with the property behind
on Howard Street. And you'll see in these photographs, a lot of the properties on our
side of the block are actually looked to be utilized by the properties behind them,
The houses behind them that are zoned RM1 on the 2200 block of North Howard Street.
But this property adjacent to it was 2228 is owned by the same people that own 2225 North Howard directly behind.
So and I'm sorry, I made a mistake. That's 2227 North Howard is directly behind it.
And they are under common ownership. 2225 North Howard is directly behind us.
And this is the property, the Hope Street property that's adjacent to us to North 2228, what's going on behind the masonry wall there.
At the bottom, you see a view, head looking up the block.
Again, there's a lot of lots that are vacant, open, they're not built upon, that are curb cuts being used as parking, whether with or without permits, largely without permits.
As far as we can tell from Atlas, here you go.
Here's some more vacant lots here.
I think the picture's of the same lot there at the bottom of page six of tab 5C.
Here you have a single-family dwelling that was approved with front-loaded parking, a garage, single-family garage, just like what we're proposing, and what we have a variance for.
that I can show you that went before the zoning board and was granted a variance.
It went in front of the community group, received unanimous support.
It was a different community group at the time.
It was North Square.
And they had a letter of non-opposition from Councilwoman Sanchez.
To the north of that, more vacant lots.
And then you have some garages.
And then you have a multifamily with a commercial establishment at the ground floor.
We have a library at the north end, and then single families across the street.
We have a multifamily down at the bottom of the block, down at West Susquehanna on the opposite side.
And then we have an auto repair.
It might have been a Pep Boys at one time.
I saw that in a file just to the south of us, at the southwest corner.
And you can see it here at the bottom of page 19.
with curb cuts and obviously a lot of vehicles.
They get lots further to the north,
just to the north of that, you can see right here,
probably serving as the rear yards
of the people on Howard Street.
This is the rear yard of the single family
to the south of us.
And I bring that to your attention
because I referenced the alley
that's supposed to exist behind our property.
You can see it goes through a little bit
to the south from our property,
but it's clear that it doesn't go all the way
through to West Susquehanna like it's supposed to. You can see the property not behind us,
2225 Howard, but 2223 Howard has built out completely to the rear property line.
This is 2225, Howard, the property behind us.
This is 2225 Howard, the property behind us. You can see right here.
You can see right here.
And then the property to the north of that, which I mentioned, was 2227, which uses 2228 Hope Street.
This is what you see here at the top photo is the alley extending to the north behind us,
completely blocked off with walls, masonry or wood doors.
So there's no way.
And the reason I bring that up is, and you'll see one of the refusals, is that we are two feet short of our required rear yard depth, but the reality is that two feet is our portion of the alley that doesn't go anywhere, which is completely blocked to the north and south of us.
And we'll get to that when we get to the notice of refusal.
The property is on RSA 5, as you can see.
We're back up to RM1.
You have CMX 2 at the top and bottom.
And then you have the front street properties on the other side at CMX 2.
aerial images. Here, again, here is our property. You can see the vacant lots or the lots that are
not being used at all or don't have a structure in them or being used for parking from this view.
We are obviously, as you know, over Front Street, you have the L just to the north at Dauphin and
Front, you have the York Dauphin Station, the elevated SEPTA station. And then some other aerial
images that you can see of the block and the property surrounding those are at tab 5B.
So we did do a check on the uses of the property surrounding us. 2225, which is a property right
behind us, again, it's zoned RM1, has rental licenses for two units. 2223 has a rental,
which I showed you, which was the property that had been built out all the way to the alley,
has a rental unit for one, a license for one rental unit. And then 2227, Howard, that goes,
is owned also by 2228. It looks to be owner-occupied from what we can see from the records.
In terms of the other uses on the block, as I mentioned, as you can see from the photographs,
you've got three other single families. One of them is new, was granted a variance. I think,
like I said, in 21 was granted a variance by the zoning board. They have off-street parking.
There are 21 properties. Out of those, 11 of those have curb cuts in front of them. So over
half the properties on the block have curb cuts. Mind you, there is no parking on either side of
the street. So the curb cuts are not taking any parking away from anybody else, any on-street
parking away from anybody else, which goes to the one of the criteria for the granting of the
variance for the off-street parking that we're proposing, in that driving around
slowly looking for on-street parking causes more traffic congestion than a car just pulling into
its garage. The zoning plans that we have that we submitted to L&I are at tab 3A. You can see
them right here, site plan section. The proposal is, in terms of the building itself, is dimensionally
compliant in terms of the height. Again, you'll see in the notice of refusal, we're a little short
and our rear yard depth. And that is mainly because we have that alley to the rear of us,
which we were not able to count in terms of rear yard depth. When the lot is less than 45 feet
under the zoning code, rather than the required nine feet that you see typically in RSA 5,
it's only seven feet. And again, this is way below 45 feet percentage wise. We're only at 40 feet
to the alley. So we got a refusal for having five feet to the alley, and then you have two feet to
our actual rear property line, but we don't get to count that two feet of the alley as our rear
yard depth. We get to count it as open area, so we don't have an open area refusal, but we do have a
rear yard depth refusal, as you'll see. This is a rendering of what we're proposing. We do have a
deck off the back of the second floor, which creates one of our refusals. Here's an elevation.
at tab 3C, sections at tab 3D, four-story, as you can see, single-family dwelling,
so we don't have a use variance for the number of units, which is nice.
The number, and here's the floor plans, three bedrooms, two baths, again, no cellar, it's slab-on-grade.
Primary living is at the ground floor, then you have a deck off the back, a roof deck above, and then roof deck is compliant.
We did do a shadow. We met with the coordinating RCO within a preliminary Zoom meeting, and they asked some questions regarding the shadowing from the deck. FUSA Design did these shadow studies, and I went ahead and circled, and you can see.
So what we compared it to is the top row is what we're proposing, and then the bottom is no deck, but with a dimensionally compliant building where the roof deck.
but with a dimensionally compliant building where the roof deck could actually be higher than what we're proposing and as could the pilot house.
So, and as you see, oops, sorry about that.
As you see, if you were to take a look at these closely, and these renderings are at 3F of our exhibit book, the shadows are identical.
There's no discernible difference between them.
So in terms of the criteria for the granting of variance, the impact on air and light of adjacent conforming properties, again, the property to the southeast of us, 2223, is not compliant because they built all the way out to the rear property line.
I don't believe that 2225 or 2227 North Howard are compliant, but even to the extent that they might be, we're not shadowing them any more than a by-right design would be.
And we're obviously to the north of the house beside us, and we're barely any deeper in terms of the structure than we would be as a matter of right.
So you can see all those here at 3F.
Uh, scrolling on down, uh, we do have the zoning archives for some of the other properties on the block again, uh, 2200 to 04 north front, which is down at the south down here at this corner is a, I think, a six unit, uh, multifamily with commercial.
we have the zoning archives for the what i mentioned was the southwest corner which is
the auto repair uh so you can see what um that there are those other uses non-single family uses
that are on the block and then we also included the zoning archives for 2250 north hope which i
mentioned is the single family that was granted a variance for the front-loaded parking and
And real quickly, you can see here they had the refusal for the parking, the notice of decision by the zoning board, the coordinating RCO, which again at that time was noticed North Square Community Alliance, a unanimous support, and the letter of non-opposition from Councilwoman Sanchez.
in terms of the applicable provisions of the zoning code and the notice of refusal
to go back up to the notice of refusal at tab two i did talk about the off-street parking we feel
that the use has obviously been granted a variance by the zoning board already obviously there is no
precedent in zoning but when you take a look at the blighted condition of this property and the
rest of the block for such a long period of time again decades half a century maybe longer
the number of other curb cuts where over half the properties have curb cuts the fact that they serve
essentially as the rear yards for the properties that are on north howard street um we feel that
the uh that the criteria for the grand variance for the off-street parking has been satisfied
In terms of the minimum rear yard depth, as I mentioned, and to go to the zoning plans,
and if I zoom in a little bit, the required, there you go.
So the required is seven.
So the required is seven.
And you see, we have seven feet to the rear property line, but again, and that's, again, that alley that's blocked right next to us to the north, completely blocked and blocked a few properties down to the south.
we don't intend to fence in that alley. We show a fence along the edge of the alley,
which is what you're supposed to do. But essentially, we do have that seven feet
clear to the rear property line, which is what would be required if that alley was not there.
In terms of the other refusal, excuse me, which is the rear deck at the second floor,
The decks aren't supposed to encroach into the rear yard.
And again, our rear yard, what's interesting here is that you have a rear yard depth that's
seven feet.
I don't know why it keeps doing that.
It doesn't like scrolling over.
But it is a small rear yard with the building to us to the south, with the other buildings
to the west of us on North Howard Street built so close to the rear property line.
It does create a little bit of a chasm or a pit there, bringing out – seeing that the main living space is off the second floor, having that deck come off the living space is a nice feature.
And again, at the request – and it was a good request or suggestion of the community group – we did the shadow study and showed that having that deck wasn't going to have any impact on the air and light of surrounding properties.
It isn't going to have any impact on the air and light of surrounding properties, and it's low enough that it's not going to be intruding necessarily on the privacy of the property surrounding us.
As a little bit of a housekeeping matter, we do have the ownership, the deed for the property at tab 8.
You can see their deed from September 6, 2017.
Tax compliance, you can see here, through March 16th.
and um our 14 303 notice the email from the planning commission designating north square
community action network and scan as the coordinating rco for the project and that is
who we met with the list of addresses from the um the planning commission's link
a copy of the 14 303 notice for our meeting in february again it was a it was
i thought that was me you can you hear him bill right no i can't hear him i think he went dead
Okay, yeah.
Hillary, do we have David's phone number?
Yes, I can call him.
Give me one second.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you.
um mr chair i i can't get him on the phone um
maybe just just wait a couple more minutes since he is the last case on the two o'clock list
can you hear me yeah can you hear me
okay yes i can hear you now yep i think this is the last case right yeah i know it is it is the
last case on the list so you just give him a couple more minutes if not we may have to do a resumption
i think he was just about done too
Thank you.
I'm surprised he hasn't called you, Hillary.
yeah when i tried to call him it went straight to voicemail
Yeah, when I tried to call him, it went straight to voicemail.
he likes to talk bill he might still be talking
i'm knowing him he's he's he's running around trying to find a way to get back on i can see