17-75 Special Exception 806 Howard Street

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Area Board of Zoning Appeals—December 6,2017 consists of a basement plus two stories of retail,approximately 9,000 square feet total. Our proposal has the following elements. We propose to renovate the two floors of retail to offices. We want to renovate the basement for staff lounge and storage purposes. We want to add a third floor dwelling unit above the offices. We want to redesign the building exterior to remove the precast concrete and tinted glass and instead replace it with face brick limestone accents and slate color roof and I did bring copies of that. COPIES OF THE RENDERINGS WERE PASSED OUTATTHIS TIME MR. MURPHY: And finally we want to add an unenclosed porch on the north fagade. The reason that we're here today is the upper floor dwelling unit requires a Special Exception under the "O" Office zoning. The variances basically affirm the existing conditions. Our understanding is the variances would not be required if not for the Special Exception request. I'd like to walk through each of these items. The dwelling unit would be used by Ceres staff friends and associates to facilitate business travel to the South Bend office. We are willing to commit in writing that it will not be used to rent to undergraduate students. Although the overlay district is not applicable in this case it is interesting to note that upper floor dwelling units are actually encouraged in that Overlay District. The building setback variances permit the rebuilding of the exterior walls in current location. We will reuse the existing building foundations and build the new walls and design it. There are two exceptions to that. The first is the porch deck element that I had mentioned previously. And the second is that we would square off the northwest corner of the ground floor, bring it out to the wall line of the second floor above and element the recessed entrance. But other than that it's rebuild new walls on the existing foundations. The parking variance is also affirmed existing conditions. The Board of Zoning Appeals granted a variance in 1992 to reduce the required parking from 32 spaces to 4 spaces.That approved reduction runs with the property. So in a sense it permanently runs with the property. So in essence that reduction 32 to 4 is already in the bank. For the purposes of this discussion we're asking an additional 3. Two of these would be attributable to the dwelling unit and there would be another one that would be attributable to space that's recaptured within the building footprint. That includes the squared off corner that I referenced earlier. We will retain the existing four spaces on that on site to the east. We will also retain the existing driveway and shared access condition with the neighboring properties. Now I've had conversations with the City and the City has indicated a willingness to add parking stripping on both sides of Howard from Frances to Foster. If we look at the site plan,you'd see that there are five spaces would be accommodated in the half block immediately adjacent to the site. Then when we include the other,the eastern half of the block,that would add an additional five and if we add the opposite side of Howard Street the total would be twenty spaces of stripped parking on the street between Notre Dame Avenue and St. Peter Street. That compares to an estimated peak office load of twenty to twenty four. We would have twenty that are in that block plus the four on site equals twenty four. We should also note that the lot immediately to the east and the lot across Howard Street to the north are likely to remain vacant for various reasons,we can go into them if you'd like, but those are vacant now and will very likely to remain vacant. However, if we continue to run the math further, between Frances and Foster Streets about seven blocks, if there's 20 spaces stripped... MR.CRUMLISH: Sorry we have to limit you to five minutes. Thank you Marty. Board or staff any questions to begin with? MRS.SMITH: I'll start with a little history on this to help frame from where the Staff recommendation comes from. In 1991 the property was actually rezoned to"C-1"Commercial District under the old zoning ordinance. In 2004 when the map was, back up, in 1992 the Board of Zoning Appeals, as he mentioned,granted the parking reduction from 32 to 4. In 2004 when the new zoning map was adopted this property was identified as"0" Office so essentially the Council reconfirmed the"0"Office designation in 2004. So from the Staff's perspective the office portion of this building is already been determined as an appropriate land use by the Common Council. The only item in front of you in terms of the land use would be a recommendation on the upper story dwelling whether or not that would be an appropriate at this location. That's what the Staff looks at in our recommendation. The plan for this area calls for or encourages for an upper level dwelling and it encourages mixed use buildings throughout the area where appropriate and so we felt like the 12