variance, we recognize that there are unique conditions of this block that limit the viability
of commercial use on the ground floor on both parcels, parcel A and parcel B, and so the
City Planning Commission recommends that the board grant the variance for 2013 Germantown
Avenue, Parcel A, and grant the variances for 2013 Germantown Avenue, Parcel B.
Thank you. MI 2022-003-506, 2013 Germantown Avenue, Parcel A, and MI 2022-003-511-2013
Germantown Avenue, Parcel B. I vote yes to both. Carol Tenere, my vote is yes to both.
Thomas Holloman, my vote is no to both.
James Snell, my vote is yes to both.
Yes, M. Shahid, my vote is yes to both.
Thank you.
Thank you, counsel. See you later this afternoon.
Is there anyone in the virtual audience whose case has not been called?
Chair, we have a Julie Bernstein with her hand up.
Ms. Bernstein, please unmute yourself and wait for the chair.
Mr. Chair, this may be number 14, which we are now hearing, 245 East Johnson Street.
Okay, you're right.
You're right.
All right.
Thank you.
We now have all the exhibits?
Yes, we do, Mr. Chair.
We have received all exhibits, including a letter of support from East Mount Airy Neighbors,
and Councilman Cindy Bass has taken a position of non-opposition.
Okay. Hi, could you state your name, please, and spell for the court reporter?
She's coming back in as a panelist now.
Good morning. Julie Bernstein.
Okay. Could you spell for the court reporter, please?
First name Julie, J-U-L-I-E, last name Bernstein, B-E-R-N-S-T-E-I-N.
Do you swear for them to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth?
Are you for 245 East Johnson Street?
Will you identify your client and the relationship to the property?
So my clients are Leah DiMatteo and Joel Thomas, and they are the owners of the property.
Okay. Our vice chair has a few questions.
Excuse me, Mr. Chair, this is Hillary. Can you just read the case into the record, please?
The MI number as well as the address.
It's MI-2022-003-484-245 East Johnson Street.
Good morning, Ms. Bernstein.
Do you agree to wait the reading of the refusal and stipulate to its accuracy?
Have you emailed the exhibit packet with proof of ownership tax compliance, a copy of the refusal or referral,
vote is under plans of the property five days in advance of this hearing, and have you met with the RCO, and do you have a letter?
Okay, great. You may proceed and share your screen.
Okay, can you see my screen?
We can.
Okay. So good morning, members of the board. My name is Julie Bernstein of Kaplan Stewart, and I'm the attorney representing the applicants, the owners of the property at 245 Johnson Street. This property is zoned as RSA 2. It's a large property improved with a historic single family residence that is vacant and in a state of disrepair.
The applicants are seeking to use the property as a birthing center for prenatal labor, delivery, and postnatal related care to be operated by an established midwifery, the Philadelphia Midwest.
to be operated by an established midwifery the mid the philadelphia midwife collective which is
defined as a group practitioner use and which is not permitted in this district the adaptive
reuse of this large property will provide a much needed service to the community and will benefit
the neighborhood as the property is in a state of disrepair which would need significant monetary
commitment that may be largely unattainable for a single family resident this is also evident by
the fact that the property has remained in this condition. This adaptive reuse will help revitalize
the neighborhood without impacting the character of the residential neighborhood, as will be
discussed further, because the goal of a midwifery is to provide health care services in a home-like
setting for prenatal, birth, and postpartum care. As a result, this use will preserve the residential
feel of the neighborhood, and the proposed use represents the lease modification to the possible
code to support this use of the property, which, again, is in significant disrepair
and requires extensive and expensive updates to remodel the building for any use.
To streamline the process, I'd like to incorporate our exhibits and exhibit list into the record.
I also have Stephanie Brown, who's the operator of the Midwife Collective, with me today to help
discuss the use and proposal. And then briefly, I'm going to go through the exhibits. So first,
we have the deed, which indicates that Leah DiMatteo and Joel Thomas are the owners of the
property and have standing to bring this appeal. We've also included the tax clearance. I also
have, although they happen to be on this call as well, the owner's letter of authorization for me
and Stephanie Brown to speak on the owner's behalf. Leah DiMatteo, kind of appropriately for
this application is pregnant and due to deliver at any moment, so they were unsure if they'd
be able to attend, but they are here in case there are any questions for them as well.
We've included the notice of refusal, which again demonstrates that a group practitioner
is not permitted in the RSA 2 district. We've included our appeal to the Zoning Hearing
board as well and a project information form and then the postings for the property.
And here we go.
And we have this illustrative aerial of the property. As you can see just from this aerial,
It's located with its frontage is towards East Johnson.
It's between Magnolia and Musgrave.
And the house is actually set quite far back off of the road.
This is also shown in the photographs of this historic home, which again is quite large and set back off the property.
There's plenty of parking in the back.
But as you can see, when you get more particularly into the inside, the property really requires a significant amount of work.
It's in really poor condition.
We've included street views that show that even though this is a technically residential neighborhood, there are some other types of buildings here that don't appear fully residential.
This is actually right next door to the property in question, and this is a view from across the street.
So here, there's a large parking lot.
This shows that, you know, the location of this house is set quite far back off.
So any kind of use is going to be quite far away from any of the neighboring properties
and is unlikely to kind of impact anyone that's quite nearby.
We've also included just the zoning overlay map showing where it's located.
And we have our RCO documents, so our near neighbor notification letter,
and then all of our certificates of mailing to everyone.
I actually was not in attendance, but the applicants and the midwifery practice did what I heard, a beautiful presentation of this to the East Mount Airy neighbors, and they obtained a letter in support.
The majority, the large majority of neighbors overwhelmingly supported this application, 36 and eight near neighbors. There were a few that didn't, but again, a ton were in support.
They also got a petition of 209 signatures of people in the neighborhood and kind of the adjacent neighborhoods that would be using this support that all are like very much so in support of this use.
Many of them specifically note that they live in the neighborhoods that the birthing center is going to support, such as Mount Airy, Germantown.
That the birthing center is going to support, such as Mount Airy, Germantown.
They indicate that the services needed for the community, like number 44, I believe a birthing center would be a welcome and much-needed addition to our area, 68.
Please let this amazing resource for birthing people to come to our neighborhood.
There also were a number of people who actually had gone to this midwife collective and successfully had their babies delivered by them and felt that they would be super helpful to everyone in this neighborhood.
So as you can see, there's just a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of support for this use.
Additionally, Cliveden, so this was historically part of the Cliveden property.
Cliveden is a community-oriented historic site that advocates for responsible stewardship
of historic buildings in their neighborhood.
And this letter discusses the history of the particular property and comments on how many
buildings in this area are vacant and neglected, such as this one.
The preservation writer, director writes, it is wonderful to see a community and preservation
minded project like the Midwifery Practice Birth Center that was historically part of
the Clifton Estate and that the Philadelphia Midwife Collective couldn't be a more worthy
enthusiastic steward, literally bringing life into the neighborhood by establishing an active
center for affordable and accessible reproductive health care to the community by activating a
large empty historic home. Lastly, I've included a couple of the slides that were presented to
the RCO, just to kind of give a little bit of an overview before I introduce Stephanie Brown to
discuss further the midwifery practice. But this shows that this is an accessible, safe,
and integrated birth center and highlighting the midwifery's goals to restore and renovate the
property while honoring its history to provide these services, which are intended to be provided
in a home-like setting. As mentioned, I have Stephanie Brown with me of the Philadelphia
Midwife Collective to adopt my testimony and provide some more information about the proposal
and to answer any questions you have. Ms. Brown, can you raise your hand so you can be unmuted?
Chair, we have someone with their hand up with the phone number ending at 1366.
that's fine that's fine yep
caller with the phone number ending at one three six six please unmute yourself and wait for the
chair good morning could you state your name hi this is stephanie hi could you state your name
and spell for the court reporter please sure stephanie spelled s-t-e-p-h-a-n-i-e last name
Brown, B-R-O-W-N. Do you swear or affirm to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth? I do. Proceed, counsel. Great. Thanks so much. Hold on. Did you just hear the presentation
I made to the board? I did, yeah. And do you agree with and incorporate what I just said as
your testimony? I do. And then before I turn this over to the board, can you now provide the board
with a brief overview of your proposed use.
So thanks so much for hearing our case today
for 245 East Johnson.
I'm just going to contextualize a little bit
about why we're proposing this variant
to permit a group health practice.
So to start, a little bit about
Philadelphia Midwife's Collective.
PNC is a small private midwifery practice.
We currently offer home and hospital births
to people wanting evidence-based,
trauma-informed, safe care, regardless of insurance status or ability to pay. So,
PMC has been operating out of Germantown and Mount Airy for over five years. I am
the chair of our board. I'm also a lactation consultant, so I work directly
with the collective. Our midwife is a certified nurse midwife. So, nurse
midwives are licensed and recognized within the state and federally, and they
have over ten years of experience. We also have a formal collaborative
relationship with the Jefferson Einstein Medical System. Both of us work within the hospital system
as well as doing the out-of-hospital work that we do. So we also offer auxiliary services. So I
offer infant feeding support. We run free groups that happen at our current office,
which is located on Germantown Avenue in Mount Airy. We have referrals if we need to refer care
out and other services that we provide you know within our office space we have
a chiropractor etc so a little bit about birth centers over center is a health
So a little bit about birth centers, so a birth center is a health care facility in
care facility in a home like setting equipped
a home-like setting equipped for prenatal birth and postpartum care.
We also offer other services like I just mentioned, like general well-person gynecological care,
things like that.
We also are offering HRT hormone therapy for queer and trans people.
So birth centers are statistically safe options for out-of-hospital birth for low-risk pregnant
people, which is a very important piece of this.
birth centers are only seeing people with low-risk profile, and they're safer statistically
for systemically marginalized people, such as BIPOC individuals or queer people, of which
our practice tends to center.
Philadelphia has an unnecessarily high Black maternal and infant mortality rate, and in
this country, 98% of births take place in a hospital setting.
So these numbers are coming largely from the mainstream medical system, and birth centers
serve to take low-risk people out of the system and give them care in settings that might be safer
for them. So currently Philadelphia only has five labor delivery units for the entire city.
Most major cities have multiple freestanding birth centers and Philadelphia currently has zero.
We have an example of a very successful birth center on the main line which is Lifecycle Women
Care. They opened in 1978 and they operated out of an old home for the first 20 years of their
existence um they're very high volume at this point um we plan to be much lower volume
um and to kind of put it in the context of the property itself 245 east johnson street
meets a lot of our very unique needs so i mentioned before um first center basically
we are trying to make them a non-critical setting and offer clinical care um so the house has been
empty for many years um and it's salvageable but it needs a significant build out um like julie
mentioned, it's set very far back from the street. I actually live a few blocks away and I never
really even knew the property was there. I've walked by it a million times and provides ample
parking on site for our needs. So I mentioned being low volume, we just aren't going to have
that many people on site all the time. We can fit at least seven to eight cars on site, which is
going to be more than enough for us. Most of the changes needed will be inside the state and any
the external changes that we plan to make um are only going to make the building more accessible
and safe so we plan to put like a small ramp in the back to make it um handicapped accessible and
for disabled folks um and we plan to put a fire escape on the side of the building um in order
for uh folks to um safely get out if they need to and that's part of our licensure which i'll
discuss in a second um so the property sits on over a half an acre of land which is a large and
very rare lot size in this neighborhood. So in our community in the northwest, in Germantown on
Mount Airy, we're seeing historic properties torn down and replaced, kind of at lightning speed right
now. And so PMC kind of sees this as an opportunity for intersectional preservation, right? So this
old building, we've dated it, I think somewhere between 1860 and 1880, based on some maps that
have um and of birth right which before 100 years ago took place in homes just like this one i'm
sure this house has actually seen babies born inside of it um so it's really an adaptive reuse
project right um so the building was also clearly institutionally used previously um it's been
vacant for at least three or four years um but based on what we found inside um it was being
institutionally either as like a halfway house or a shelter um so our collaborative hospital
einstein philadelphia which i mentioned before it's a five minute drive from the property
in case we need to transfer in so a little bit about transfers birth centers have a less than