There are no hands.
Planning Commission.
Hello, Keith Davis, City Planning
commission um the comprehensive plan recommended that the site remain uh ca2 zoned uh nevertheless
it was rezoned to ca1 in 2019 uh neither the existing nor the proposed zoning support the
proposed personal auto care use however given the site's long-standing use as a shopping center
and the orientation of the proposed use on the north side of the building facing abutting
industrial lots no negative impacts are anticipated as proposed the planning commission recommends
uh the planning commission recommends that the board grant the requested variance thank you
that the board grant the requested variance.
Thank you.
mi 2024 000 314 9745 r east roosevelt boulevard i vote yes
MI 2024.
chel gaston my vote is yes mike johns my vote is yes
Suneeta Graham, my vote is yes
Taya Nguyen, my vote is yes
James Snell, my vote is yes
Ishmael Shahi, my vote is yes
Thank you, counsel
Thank you
Number three, MI 2024
000767
1425 Marlboro Street
Brandon Savage is the attorney
also Verne Anastasio
represents Protestants
could both come on
Brandon has been promoted
Brandon
could you
state your name and spell for the court stenographer
good afternoon
members of the board
could you state your name and spell for the court stenographer
please
Sure. I'm Brandon Saverin. 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, representing the applicants.
You swear or affirm to tell the truth, the whole truth, it doesn't even put the truth.
Yes, I do.
And Mr. Anastasio.
Mr. Anastasio has also been promoted.
Good morning, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon.
Counsel, you've already been sworn.
Could you just state your name for the record?
Vern Anastasio on behalf of Mr. Anthony Lolio, among others, neighbors of the subject property.
Thank you.
And Mr. Saverin, could you identify your client and their relationship to the property?
My clients are purchasers under contract for the property, their husband and wife, named Stephanie Widener and Armin Gabriel-Ans.
Okay. Mr. Saverin, our vice chair has a few questions for you.
Good afternoon, counsel. Do you agree to wait to read another refusal or stipulate to its accuracy?
Yes, I do.
Have you emailed in all the required documents and exhibits that is needed to proceed with this case five days in advance of this hearing?
Thank you, counsel.
Were we swearing the other counsel in or no?
I did. I swore him in already. You're good. You're good with him.
Mr. Sabrin, just for a point of information, we have a letter of no position from Fishtown Neighbors, 25 in support, 25 opposed.
That's correct.
Please start your case.
Okay. Thank you. And thanks, Mr. Vice-Chair. Just give me one moment to share my screen.
Let's see.
There we go. Okay. Okay. Hopefully you can see this rendering of the proposed project. Let me know if not.
um so good afternoon again members of the board as stated i represent stephanie widener and her
husband armin who are purchasers under contract for the subject property this is despite the
beautiful image on your screen currently a paved parking lot and per our understanding from the
seller it has been a paved parking lot for 50 years so it's a vacant lot they would like to
build a home for themselves on this vacant lot. For over a decade, they have lived on the adjacent
1300 block of Marlborough Street. So they are locals in the deepest sense of the word. This
property is on the 1400 block. The goal of this project is to stay in their neighborhood while
Stephanie, who has a spinal disability, can gain the ability to park at home. Their current home
has no parking. So on that note, after I complete my presentation, Stephanie will adopt my testimony
and will also make a short statement about her disability. And I would also like to reserve time
to rebut any testimony that's offered in opposition. And because of all that, in the interest of time,
I will not include our architect, Gabriel Deck, in our presentation, but he is on the line and
available to address any design related questions that the members of the board
may have. So what you're currently seeing on your screen is a rendering of
So what you're currently seeing on your screen is a rendering of the proposed project.
the proposed project.
This is a part of the 15 exhibits that I submitted to the board in advance of the hearing, all of which I respectfully request to be moved into the record.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
And I will now walk you through some, but not all of those exhibits.
So let me start doing that.
Exhibit two is our refusal.
try and zoom in a little bit more and we go um so what you can infer from this refusal is that
we are proposing to build a single family home on a vacant lot um as you saw in that rendering the
the scale and mass of the home really is designed to perfectly line up with other homes on the block
um the the dimensions of the structure and all of its qualities fully conform to the zoning code
except for one item, which is the refusal given here. That item is that accessory parking,
while a permitted use in the RSA 5 district, has to be accessed through a specific manner
that we are not offering. So in the RSA 5 district, one must access accessory parking
from a rear street, shared driveway, or alley, as many of you board members probably know.
What I wanted to perhaps introduce that is new here is that at least two commonwealth court cases have suggested that even when L&I calls a refusal a use refusal, the more stringent hardship standard that is typically applied to use refusals should not apply when the refusal does not deal with a blanket prohibition on a certain land use.
And that's the situation here. L&I has called this a use refusal, and I'm not disputing their terminology, but it's really a manner of access issue. And accordingly, we believe that it is what these cases that I've mentioned have called a hybrid refusal rather than a use refusal, which is really a court-made hardship standard that is easier than the typical use refusal hardship standard.
The hybrid standard allows economic issues to be taken into account.
And this is important because one of the bases of our hardship that I'd like to assert, in addition to those stated in our application, is that if we are denied relief to build a home with parking here, it is virtually impossible at this time to purchase an existing home in Fishtown that includes code compliant parking.
short of going to the owners of those few properties, even if they're not for sale and
offering the owner an amount, you know, over market value to pry the property out of their
hands. So that's a hardship. I'll continue to our next exhibit. This is exhibit eight. It's
the zoning map of the property. So you can see here we are just east of the intersection of
Marlboro Street and Frankfort Avenue. The property is zoned RSA 5. As you can see here, and I really
do apologize, this came out quite a bit blurrier than I had hoped, but if you look at our block
and then some of the adjacent RSA 5 blocks, very few of the properties in Fishtown touch a rear
street, a side street, or an alley, which is, again, the required manner of accessing your
parking. It's a tiny minority. So, you know, instead in Fishtown, what you typically have
is two properties that touch each other on the rear and each of them only touch a front street.
So in other neighborhoods that you're probably familiar with, like much of Northeast Philadelphia
or Winfield or Overbrook Park in West Philadelphia, there are shared private alleys
that weave between the rears of homes. In some parts of South Philadelphia, there are rear
streets behind homes. I was here on one such case last week or two weeks ago. But here in
Fishtown, for a majority of the properties, it's impossible to have on-site parking while conforming
to the zoning code. This is despite the fact that parking, accessory parking, is not a prohibited
use. So this is also a factor behind our assertion of hardship and, you know, leads us to sort of
this pickle where we have to create a home with parking from scratch if one is not available.
And as I mentioned, my application for appeal, which I won't go through live during the hearing,
includes other arguments, you know, towards our assertion of hardship.
And real quickly, and I did not include these in my exhibits and we'll submit them afterwards in
accordance with the board's regulations. This is a photo of the atlas map of a neighborhood
in Overbrook Park showing those kind of alleys that I mentioned.
thanks for your patience there so this is exhibit six which is our zoning site plan
Thanks for your patience there. So this is exhibit.
zoom out a little bit this is what our architects submitted to L&I
um what you'll see here is that um we have this sort of dog leg that is ours in the back of this
property um and between that and a very nice sort of entry garden which I'll show you a rendering of
in a moment, most of the, well, not most, about half, I think if you go to the table, it's 49%
of the property is proposed to be left as open space. So this is not an overbuild of the property.
I also wanted to highlight that the existing curb cut, which I'll show you moments of in a second,
serving the vacant lot, is 21 feet long. One moment, I'm sorry. Trying just to, there it is.
Right here, you can see that the architect notes that the property width is 21 feet, and you'll see that the curb cut occupies the entire property width, whereas we are going to narrow the existing curb cut to 10 feet.
So over half of the existing curb cut is going to be eliminated and effectively given back as parallel parking space to the community.
So the community is going to regain a parking space through this project.
We also had to submit an elevation to L&I, and this I'm just going to briefly touch upon to show you that within the garage, the parking space is fully code compliant and comfortably fits a full-sized passenger car.
I'll also show you that the Streets Department has reviewed these plans as part of its typical
zoning stage review and has approved these these plans which means that they do not run
afoul of any Streets Department regulations. Exhibit 7 is a architectural presentation that
was shown to the RCO. So here's the first photo I'll show you taken by the architect of the
existing property and curb cut. This presentation is 11 pages long, so I'm not going to show all
that to you during this hearing, but the entire thing is in your possession as Exhibit 7.
A particular note here is that these photographs show this yellow translucent square, which
approximates the massing of our new home in the context of its neighbors, which again is to really
say it fits. It's approximately the same height, et cetera. Also, as part of this exhibit six
presentation package are floor plans, single family homes. So I think the plans are great
and include this recreational space in the rear yard. I'll sort of leave it to the architect to
walk through them if you want him to do that. I think, Brandon, we want to concentrate on the
parking issue. Yeah, understood. That's the only issue you have. So let's concentrate on the park.
Okay. Thanks, Mr. Chairman. That's helpful. So I'll skip ahead a couple more pages in this
presentation set. Actually, I'll tell you what, I will skip ahead to the next exhibit,
which is Exhibit 9. So these are aerial photographs from Atlas, and I'll just flip
through a few of these very quickly. The point of providing these is sort of twofold. One,
today, so I will also submit this after the hearing, I received a letter from the seller
and the seller's agent that states that the lot has been used for parking, first by her grandmother
for over 50 years and that she still uses it for parking, the current owner, the granddaughter.
But I didn't want to leave it to this letter as the only proof that the property has been
used for parking for that long.
So I went as far back as I could get a clear image in Atlas.
This one's from 2004.
You'll see the lot paved with a car on it.
And I won't even zoom in that far at the others, but 2008 paved with a car on it.
2015 paved with a car on it. 2020 paved with a car on it. I think you get the idea there.
Exhibit 10 is street level images. Again, sort of went as far back as I could get clear images.
I used a mix of Atlas and Google Maps. So this one's from Google Maps. It's from 2007.
What you're going to see here is that clearly a section of the sidewalk here is a curb cut.
and it looks like it's been a curb cut for a while because I don't know if you've ever walked
on a sidewalk that's starting to like erode in in sort of small sections but you can see the
stone sort of coming up through it from erosion and there was a patch that's been put on here
from erosion. And there was a patch that's been put on here to try and repair a little of that
to try and repair.
and tie it into the rest of the sidewalk. So I would say that's evidence that even by 2007,
this has been used for parking for quite some time. Our understanding is that around 2013,
the city did major utility work on this block, repaved the street, and reconstructed that
sidewalk. What you'll see here is as part of that, the city reconstructed the curb cut.
The seller, the current owner, did not perform this work. It was the city of Philadelphia.
You can tell that that's true by the way the curb cut matches the concrete of the surrounding
properties that the city also installed. So, you know, that's to say we don't have a permit for
prior parking on file for this lot, probably due to age, but the city's reconstruction of this curb
cut and, as the seller has stated, its continued ticketing of cars that block the curb cut, I would
say are evidence of its legality, at least in some manners of regulation. I'll just keep going
through a few more photos. This is the most recent photo from Atlas. It's how the curb cut looks
today. Not my clients, of course, but the current owner seems to put yellow paint on the bottom of
it, occasionally uses cones to mark it, installed a taller fence gate with a towing warning there.
This is from the other side of the block. So our property would be, if you can see my hand,
towards the end of the right-hand side. We're not on the corner. We're a couple properties
in from the corner on the right. But one benefit to the location is that cars, by the time they
reach our property coming from the east, are slowing down for this stop sign, which promotes
safety. The seller also indicates in their letter that they are unaware at any time over those 50
years of an accident involving a car entering or exiting the lot. And then in the foreground here
is an apartment building down a few properties and across the street with a curb cut.
This is my client's current block on the 1300 block of Marlboro, simply providing this to show
that while there's not a ton of properties in Fishtown with accessory parking, certainly not
a ton of properties that have that parking fully documented due to age, having parking is not
unheard of. Here are several properties on the same block that have it. You get the idea there,
I think, too. So I will just go to the zoning posters. We hung posters twice here. This is
exhibit 11 because Mr. Anastasio requested a continuance for the original hearing. I'm actually
showing you just to highlight that the selling agent, the McCann agency has this sign. It remains
there to this day with this hang tag underneath that advertises the lot as parking. So you can