05-10-10 Council Agenda & Packet

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Area Board of Zoning Appeals -April 7, 2010 structure. And so if 1 understand correctly it's duplex, two units, four bedrooms apiece. I take the word of the homeowners that there are more than 4 unrelated parties living there. I went by this morning to take some pictures and observed many more cars in the ]ot than 4 in the lot, sa I have a tendency to believe that. And so the concern with the new structure, isn't the structure itself but it's adding mare of what I think inevitably will be student renters tp an already overly subscribed site. I think a family that's paying attention would look out the back door of this house and see a large structure with rental units in it probably occupied by students and they'd say "I'd rather be somewhere else." Sa I think inevitably whatever his intentions might be, I think this new stricture is going to wind up in the hands of under graduate students. And we Iave our students but the problem their lifestyle is often incompatible with the lifestyle of the residents that live there. Finally I guess in full disclosure mode, when we became aware that these properties had been purchased we approached the owners of the properties to see if we could buy them and fold them into the Notre Dame Avenue housing program, we discovered they were asking twice the appraised value. And we had appraisals done, even Notre 1'7ame couldn't justify those kinds of numbers so. But l just want you to know that this is not a case of sour grapes. We would have loved to folded them into the program but we couldn't pay the price. Finally this wasn't our issue, but one of the pictures I took from the street and if the issue is visibility for emergency vehicles, I think a structure on this property is absolutely going abscuxe the new building. And from my perspective the issue wasn't emergency vehicles but it just further Iawers the desirability of living there and therefore the desirability of the people that will rent there. Thank you for your time. MR. URBANSKI: Greg can I ask you a question? 1VIR. HAKANEN: Sure. MR. URBANSKI: First of all, my comment, I have all respect for the University of Notre Dame and everything you do. The largest employer, without Notre Dame, who knows where South Bend would be. But also I hope you understand because I was a landlord at one time, close to the University and I had grad students. Four ar eve grad students who are very prominent in the community at this time, two of them are. You talk about the rental houses, but it's supply and demand and I'm not sure what the University can do to promote more housing, apartments. I don't know what it is. There's a gentleman sitting in the back, Sohn Phair, ten or fifteen years ago had a plan for that whale neighborhood and it kind of fell an his face for whatever. I think people buy property in that neighborhood because of supply and demand and unfortunately, and I understand your position on that and I think it is great what you have done on Notre Dame Avenue and St. Peter Street, but the supply and demand and the supply is conning from your organization and same kind of spark business, please understand, it's just the way it is. MR HAKANEN: I guess on the demand side what I would say is that Notre Dame does house 80% of it's students on campus and I don't know if you have perspective country wide, that's quite unusual. So in a sense we do to an amazing extent take care of and house our own. But you're right a simple head count tells you that 20% of those students are going to seek housing else where. And our hope, there actually has been a lot of new student oriented housing developed, not so much south of campus but east of campus. My personal hope is that that will absorb a lot of the demand for students that want to live off campus. And what 78