I do not want to stick my nose in Council's agendas, but the screenshot pulled from Planning Commission's August 7 packet, with the parking garage, that @hood just reposted, is the approved site plan and what is being built. Someone over there uploaded old presentation materials to the packet and those should not be taken as current.
Just want to reiterate that police concerns are the reason there is a big front yard parking lot, no one else wanted to allow that, but they trumped.
Good to hear that it will be the version with the parking garage.
I get that the Feds have their design guidelines/requirements for these sorts of facilities but I'm fairly certain they could have been satisfied with barriers similar to the downtown MSP HQ, it sucks that forces within the police department got their way on this one. I'm sure it would have taken the mayor to battle the police on that front but it's certainly a hill I would have been willing to die on if I were in the position to.
@citykid Any chance there's public renderings floating around of the newer design? Or even floor count/square footage figures?
1. Setting public hearings for the PILOTS (payment in lieu of taxes) for Riverview 220 and Grand Vista Place. Still no attached renderings or site plans.
2. Introduction of ordinance and setting of public hearing for the lot dimension amendments that eliminate the general residential lot width minimum (except on corners), amendment to the lot depth min, and municipal depth x width ratio.
3. Introduction of a OPRA (Obsolete Property Rehabilitation Act) district and certificate proposals for the old gas station at the southwest corner of Elm and Washington. This one does not have anything describing what's planned, either. Edit: D&P Committee documents state Good Truckin' Diner is moving in.
Development & Planning Committte packet:
I agree with everything Mr. Ellis said in his email communication to the department on the FBC. lol I've said it before, but I much rather the departments stance be to overshoot and then pull back if criticism arises than undershoot. And, politically, the 5 votes you need on council seem to be easier to get than I'd thought. So shoot for the stars and make Lansing a leader, not just in the area, but the state. Lot sizes in the SFH districts should be smaller, parking mins - if they should be kept at all - should be much more based around the nearby availability of public transit, etc. In fact, I think the city should have the ability to eliminate them (or greatly reduce them) if the property is within so many feet/blocks of a CATA route.
My baseline for success of the FBC is that a property owner should at least be able to redevelop or develop land to the same densities as in the 1920's or 1930's. I'll accept or tolerate sensible regulations that acknowledge how much more popular automobiles are now than then, and that they are larger than in those eras. But the baseline should be able to develop in SFH neighborhoods to the degree you see on the Eastside of Lansing anywhere in the city. I don't think that's unreasonable. A 30-foot-wide lot is not a hardship on anyone. You want a tiny home on an acre of land so that you won't ever have to see your neighbors? Well, Dimondale and DeWitt and etc. has plenty of that.
A lot of people will choose not to develop that way in certain parts of town, and that's their choice. But everyone within the approximate 35-square miles of Lansing should be allowed to develop in that way without having to go through complicated platting process, variances, rezonings, etc. The built environment is not going to truly change until regulations put real pressure on it to change.
Okay, tangent over. My only other criticism is that the redesigned zoning map colors are still so very hard to read. The color choices between things like R-1 and R-2, R-3 and R-MX, and MX-1 and MX-2 are still so hard to ditinguish between one another.
I feel like I'm so behind on this zoning stuff. I had somehow forgotten or overlooked that the entirety of the Cedar/Larch corridor is already zoned DT, that is a comforting fact. I also agree on the lot sizes, being able to get two houses on the 60'-80' lots you see a lot of on the south side would make them more appealing for redevelopment, along with bolstering tax revenue. More units/taxable value per linear feet of roads/utilities the better.
One specific zoning wish/request that I have, and may have mentioned at some point, is regarding the collection of a dozen or so single family properties on the northside of Willow west of Seymour/N Grand River. I'd like to see them rezoned to MX; these properties are up to 500' deep, on the river and in Old Town. They'd seem to me a good case for a targeted effort to redevelop.
Well, some level of "downtown," anyway. DT-1 and DT-2 have what I'd consider pretty stringent height restrictions, 4 stories and 6 stories, respectively, which is honestly basically the same as the lesser commercial districts. The big difference is in lot coverage maximums. I guess I'm happy to see a slight expansion of the DT-3 east of the river in the new map.
BTW, kind of off-topic, but there was a schedule of an item inserted into the agenda that helps people understand the process of approvals of things like OPRAs and rezonings:
You can take off that last piece for rezonings, but you get the picture. Definitely seems that one of the steps at the beginning could be eliminated so this wouldn't take so long.
Okay, I was able to dig back through some packets so we can have these on the record.
Riverview 220
Grand Vista Place
I'd seen the Riverview 220 rendering. Had not seen Grand Vista Place. I don't want to belabor the point much more the rest of you have, but these are awful. They literally look like prison blocks. I can't believe that they got these wrong down to the very colors. The weird thing, too, is that the architect, Hooker DeJong, looks like it does all right designs for affordable housing. Like, not ground-breaking stuff, but decent. I fear we're now speeding far too fast through this after so much delay to effect any change in design, though.
Thanks for the renders. @citykid implied existing code shouldn't allow these designs so we'll see how it plays out I guess.
I'm hoping the city can convince the LHC to sell their remaining property in this neighborhood. They cannot build another building that concentrates even more low income housing all in this small area. I thought we learned from how projects ended up back in 60's and 70's. I wonder why they're not putting their offices on the ground floor of one of these buildings?
Those affordable apartments are so incredibly bad. They're soulless and ugly, and it looks like a communist block building, or a prison block. They're going to remake Cabrini-Green...
Comments
Just want to reiterate that police concerns are the reason there is a big front yard parking lot, no one else wanted to allow that, but they trumped.
I get that the Feds have their design guidelines/requirements for these sorts of facilities but I'm fairly certain they could have been satisfied with barriers similar to the downtown MSP HQ, it sucks that forces within the police department got their way on this one. I'm sure it would have taken the mayor to battle the police on that front but it's certainly a hill I would have been willing to die on if I were in the position to.
@citykid Any chance there's public renderings floating around of the newer design? Or even floor count/square footage figures?
1. Setting public hearings for the PILOTS (payment in lieu of taxes) for Riverview 220 and Grand Vista Place. Still no attached renderings or site plans.
2. Introduction of ordinance and setting of public hearing for the lot dimension amendments that eliminate the general residential lot width minimum (except on corners), amendment to the lot depth min, and municipal depth x width ratio.
3. Introduction of a OPRA (Obsolete Property Rehabilitation Act) district and certificate proposals for the old gas station at the southwest corner of Elm and Washington. This one does not have anything describing what's planned, either. Edit: D&P Committee documents state Good Truckin' Diner is moving in.
Development & Planning Committte packet:
I agree with everything Mr. Ellis said in his email communication to the department on the FBC. lol I've said it before, but I much rather the departments stance be to overshoot and then pull back if criticism arises than undershoot. And, politically, the 5 votes you need on council seem to be easier to get than I'd thought. So shoot for the stars and make Lansing a leader, not just in the area, but the state. Lot sizes in the SFH districts should be smaller, parking mins - if they should be kept at all - should be much more based around the nearby availability of public transit, etc. In fact, I think the city should have the ability to eliminate them (or greatly reduce them) if the property is within so many feet/blocks of a CATA route.
A lot of people will choose not to develop that way in certain parts of town, and that's their choice. But everyone within the approximate 35-square miles of Lansing should be allowed to develop in that way without having to go through complicated platting process, variances, rezonings, etc. The built environment is not going to truly change until regulations put real pressure on it to change.
Okay, tangent over. My only other criticism is that the redesigned zoning map colors are still so very hard to read. The color choices between things like R-1 and R-2, R-3 and R-MX, and MX-1 and MX-2 are still so hard to ditinguish between one another.
https://content.civicplus.com/api/assets/9937f214-2f87-46c9-9187-818062ce436d?cache=1800
I think you need to choose from the colors of the current zoning map for those sets of districts:
https://content.civicplus.com/api/assets/2b1512c3-d12e-4405-b752-37c9e5b2fdb0?cache=1800
One specific zoning wish/request that I have, and may have mentioned at some point, is regarding the collection of a dozen or so single family properties on the northside of Willow west of Seymour/N Grand River. I'd like to see them rezoned to MX; these properties are up to 500' deep, on the river and in Old Town. They'd seem to me a good case for a targeted effort to redevelop.
BTW, kind of off-topic, but there was a schedule of an item inserted into the agenda that helps people understand the process of approvals of things like OPRAs and rezonings:
You can take off that last piece for rezonings, but you get the picture. Definitely seems that one of the steps at the beginning could be eliminated so this wouldn't take so long.
Riverview 220
Grand Vista Place
I'd seen the Riverview 220 rendering. Had not seen Grand Vista Place. I don't want to belabor the point much more the rest of you have, but these are awful. They literally look like prison blocks. I can't believe that they got these wrong down to the very colors. The weird thing, too, is that the architect, Hooker DeJong, looks like it does all right designs for affordable housing. Like, not ground-breaking stuff, but decent. I fear we're now speeding far too fast through this after so much delay to effect any change in design, though.
I'm hoping the city can convince the LHC to sell their remaining property in this neighborhood. They cannot build another building that concentrates even more low income housing all in this small area. I thought we learned from how projects ended up back in 60's and 70's. I wonder why they're not putting their offices on the ground floor of one of these buildings?