If we have a forum, I'd like to officially call this special session as a final quarter here on December
15th at 4.03 p.m. Will the court please call the roll? Council Member Rosari? Hello. Daly? Just want
you to be like she has saying, John. By clarity? Here. Dean Oaksman? Here. Rallo? Good day. Roe St.
Margaret's absent.
Here. Dr. Here. And Zulik. Present. Thank you. So for the meeting today, this is a special session called
by the mayor about the Hopewell plans for Hopewell South. So we're going to start with framing remarks
from Mayor Thompson. We'll have a presentation from the consultant and planning director, Hiddle, and
then have a number of question and answer followed by Derma. So Mayor Thompson. Thank you.
President Stossford. I am really excited that we were able to pull this together. So thank you for the
special scheduling. We did invite the RDC to come as well. So just want to acknowledge that they're
present. Some of them, not all of them, because of course the RDC has been working with this property.
It's RDC owned property. And I want to just start with,
Letting you know sort of some history of Hopewell very quickly. Ali, our consultant is going to log
on and she's going to really take the bulk of the time here to present what we have. But after I sort
of tee things up, Director Hiddle is going to frame some of the planning implications here so that you
know what those are and what considerations have been given.
This is really, you know, we have submitted a PUD. What that means is that we have a really good directional
idea of where we want to go with Hopewell South. We have been through four years of master planning
as a city. We set up a task force at the beginning of the Thompson administration.
to relook at Hopewell given the change in cost in housing production and really see how we could get
Hopewell to a place where it's more attainable than what we thought it was going to be otherwise. We
have had a public session in October with sort of how we were thinking about Hopewell and where we were
going. There's room at the table.
And in addition, we have had a couple of council deliberation sessions about housing that have all impacted
this Hopewell PUD. So with that said, we have submitted the PUD. That doesn't mean that things are not
changeable. This is an opportunity today.
to ask questions, give input on blind spots that we may have, things that we haven't considered. Maybe
we totally missed the boat somewhere. That's what we want to hear from you all because we're still at
a point in the process that we can make some changes. With that said, it will seriously delay things
if we have to make such significant changes that we're going back to the drawing board
And we are really trying to mobilize Hopewell to get some housing available, even perhaps as soon as
the end of 2022. So we are, we engaged, the RDC engaged Flintlock Labs to put together this PUD. We
think that this really makes the most of the Hopewell South property. It includes,
The preservation of the old lesson center seven fourteen South Rogers while we're doing a study to see
if the police department will fit well into that facility.
And our goal really has been to seek to be an asset for attainable housing for young professionals,
first and foremost, something that's attractive to them as we are seeking to grow our wages and our
economy here in Bloomington. And that also means that it happens to be attractive to a lot of other
folks in town, people who want to be able to have an affordable place that they can walk to work, to
various other resources. And we have been hearing increasingly from seniors who want to downsize and
can't find a place that's affordable for them to purchase in the downtown setting. Again, the PUD
is in a place where we still can make some tweaks to it. I think we have really gotten to a place that
is amazing. I am thrilled with where this PUD is right now. We have gotten to a point where
A good number of these houses, and you'll see in the presentation, a good number of them are actually
affordable to the 80% and below of the area median income. And that is sort of miraculous, especially
without a bunch of government red tape that goes along with it. So they should be relatively easy to
produce. We do intend to have not only a developer workshop on how to build these, but also
some workshops for our local lenders to see what they have appetite for and how to get these loans to
be as workable as possible. So we're thrilled. I think what this does also is set a living example of
what some changes in the UDO would look like.
for Bloomington so that our community can walk through a neighborhood and see what does it look like
to have some compact lot sizes? What does it look like to have really realistic sized houses that are
not more than what somebody needs? And what that does of course is naturally keep them affordable so
that we can
offer homeownership opportunities to more and more people. So I am going to just hand it over to Director
Hiddle to talk about some of the zoning implications. Again, I think this is an incredibly exciting
point in the project and really a lot of gratitude to council both
in the past and currently and to the RDC especially who's been working really hard on getting help well
to a point where we are right now. Thank you, Mayor. I'm David Ittle, the Director of Planning
and Transportation for the City. Mr. Maybe a quick refresher on what exactly a PUD is. They don't come
down the pike very often. The last one was the Summit Planning and Development which
was approved just as I started about a year and a half ago. So, PUD, plan unit development, it's not
unique to Bloomington. Pretty much every city, every zoning district, every zoning jurisdiction has
an opportunity for a PUD. Sometimes they go by different names, but as often as not, it's just that.
And it is what you zone to, and none of the other zoning districts that exist allow for what it is you
want to do.
So we have a lot of zoning differences. We have dozens of them, R4 and MC and MNs and lots of different
combinations of letters. But none of them allow for what it is that's being proposed here, which is
a very diverse mixed set of uses, residential uses with different development standards and other different
regulations that our ordinance would ordinarily allow. So when that happens, you rezone the PUD
And you don't adhere to a given ordinance, a given set of regulations as to how you can use the property
and how you can build on it, but you write your own. And so what you write is what carries you through
the process. In this instance, as soon as I hand it off to Ali, she's going to talk about what she's
written along with the redevelopment commission, which is serving as their
petitioner here to describe development, proposed development on the property, as well as the potential
uses of the property. Hopewell, as a redevelopment site, is really the 24 acres of the former hospital
campus. It's been subject to a number of plans and studies. We are talking right now about what we're
calling Hopewell South, which is the area south of 1st Street on the Wiley
It encompasses three blocks. Could you take me to slide 32, please? Sorry to string that on you.
subject site is three blocks, one of which to eastern most of which you will call a little police station
block because it may very well be in line to become the police station. It's the brutalist structure,
architectural structure at 714 South Rogers and then west of there we have two more blocks that would
be developed residentially. Current zoning is R4 for the western two-thirds and RM for the
lot on which the police, the future potential police station stands. And then the TRL, the Transform
Redevelopment Overlay District, which was written in 2022, it was basically written for Hopewell, overlays
all of it except for the westernmost portions here. And the reasons it didn't expand to those westernmost
portions, you hear different stories from different people. One of them is potentially that there was
a desire to keep a predictable zoning
district here so that it properly and appropriately transitions to the residential neighborhood to the
south, which is in the middle of gardens. We think that what is being proposed here will do that, certainly.
So a number of plans have been put together, a number of studies in regards to Hill South over the years.
In 2018, the Urban Land Institute did one, and then in 2018, later, the comprehensive plan specifically
addressed Oakwell, but it didn't have a lot to say about it. It really said, we're calling this a focus
area, and we recommend that there be additional study done to give us a detailed idea of how this area
should develop and evolve over the years. That came together in 2021.
which is known as the Bloomington Hospital Site Redevelopment Master Plan Report. Never adopted as a
component of the comprehensive plan, but there is direct narrative link between the 2018 plan and it,
what I think makes it destructive at the very least. Just real quick, some of the themes from that plan,
which really echoed the themes that came forth from the Urban Plan Institute Plan 2018. There's a desire
for diversity of housing types, neighborhood scale,
which I think directly eschews the idea of monolithic mega projects being in this area. There's a stress
unlockability, connectivity, with an emphasis with engagement with the beeline and the public realm
generally. There's a desire to re-stitch, I think is the language used in one of the plans, which is
very appropriate, re-stitch the urban and street grid. There's a desire for aligning these abuses and
future flexibility and adaptability.
So those are sort of the themes that have been established by virtue of these studies and plans that
I think should instruct how we allow for this property to be developed going forward. I think that's
all. The line that this will travel, it's gone to the Development Review Committee.
Its next stop will be the plan commission. They think it's scheduled first with potentially two years
in front of the planning commission on January 12th. And then from there, it would go to the city council.
After that, if it's approved, the planning would take place. So the planning development ordinance would
be written and it would actually would instruct how the planning is to take place in terms of lot dimensions
and things like that. So the valley's in the house.
She has permissions. Hi guys, I'm going to steal the screen share really quickly just so I can forward
slides as we talk through. I really appreciate you guys having me in today. I'm a
I'm dual licensed, I'm an architect and a landscape architect based in Fayetteville, Arkansas. We've
been really excited to be able to work with the city on this so far and are excited to talk through
where we are and hear feedback and really hone in on exactly what we're trying to do. We're calling
this a home catalog, so housing options made easy. We are a small multidisciplinary firm, as I mentioned
here in Arkansas, and Fayetteville is a real sister city to Bloomington here.
a very similar population. We are also a major state campus. We have similar student populations, similar
student housing challenges, and we're also a karst landscape with similar topography. We really enjoyed
working through and seeing how similar a lot of the challenges with housing that we have faced are.
I'm a former planning commissioner and so get nerdy about policy after many years of having to sit through
meetings and write zoning codes. I've been really enjoying working through the PUD process as an opportunity
both to hone in on exactly what we can do for Hopewell, but also always trying to make all of this work
more expandable to the rest of the city and as an opportunity to test some theories on some of the potential
housing affordability changes that might be brought forward later into the full UDO.
this is a really easy way to test them on a smaller scale to confirm that they're working exactly the
way that we think that they will before more broadly suggesting them.
We're also working with the national nonprofit, the Incremental Development Alliance, which has trained
around 10,000 people in 33 states in the last 10 years to develop in their own neighborhoods. It's a
nonprofit that's about training locals to develop for locals, working deeply within communities, not
as an extractive developer from out of town, but as somebody small being able to build an ADU in their
own backyard, being able to take an empty lot that's near them and put something in, being able to add
what is missing to their community. And so as part of this program, we're both fully designing and entitling
all of this housing. And then we're also training locals to develop it as both a capacity building and
as a calibration to ensure that this is really aligned to what locals are wanting to see.
We're also partnered with some of our good friends who are fellow INGTIF faculty, the Cronberg Urbanist
and Architects, which are based in Atlanta, who have incredible thought leadership on housing and housing
policy and the best ways to achieve really good built outcomes. Like me, Eric, their principal is a
small developer and an architect and so really only designs things that we know will work. We feel tested
and we've signed those personal guarantees to make stuff happen. We're both really focused on building
neighborhoods, focusing on real estate development as a way to build the background for people's lives.
That we need housing and we need really vibrant places that we can live and raise families and live
good lives and that that takes working within really complicated systems that are often trying to do
multiple things at once.
That's one of the things that we really try to bring to these programs is a very systems-wide set of
experience and thinking, trying to really get to a great built outcome that is what the city really
wants to see, but working within a lot of systems and codes that conflict sometimes and really what
we're seeing nationally really limit our ability to build the thing that we all say that we want. We're
trying to build lovable, sustainable, and attainable housing at a wide variety of price points,
which also means a wide variety of sizes. We've tackled this for a number of years through the lens
of pre-approved plans programs, and we've structured this in a way that it could be rolled out into
a city-wide pre-approved program. Those may be familiar to you guys. We helped with one in South Bend,
Indiana. We've worked on the one in Kalamazoo right across the border. We're also working on one in
Fort Wayne right now.
They can be a great way to calibrate to the consistent platted lot sizes within town to build the way
a lot of our historic neighborhoods were built, which is not a custom home on every lot, but is really
consistent and repeatable house designs that are calibrated to different family sizes, different times
in life, different needs.
They become really popular nationally because they can expedite development processes. They can cut
out a lot of the cost of housing that is coming from process, but it's not really leading to better
built outcomes. They can also reduce development costs. They can create local wealth because they're
more attainable to be built by small amateurs. They also develop better built outcomes often because
the architecture is being selected at the city level as being really desirable and compatible with the
character of neighborhoods. They can have simpler zoning often
because the architecture itself is already part of the program. It also often leads to a much greater
variety of housing options. We're going to talk a lot about the importance of that as we talk about
demographics. There is often this perception that the nuclear family that we're building housing for
often we think of as being 2.5 kids and that dog. That is not a common household type anymore. That
really was what the housing market was built for.
Through the boomer generation, we saw really strong household types being the leading buyer of housing.
We saw that driving a lot of our housing policy types and the way that we financed it and the way that
we built it was a three-bedroom house with a big yard. That is no longer our market. In a lot of places,
we're still limited to that type of housing product is the only thing that our zoning type allows us.
But in a huge proportion of our communities, that nuclear families are a very small percentage of our
household types. The single most common household type here is two people living with no kids. Generally,
that's a married couple, although sometimes that's roommates. But two adults, no children is about half
of our households. Another third of our households is one person living alone.
a full three-quarters of our households are sleeping in one bed at night and don't need a three-bedroom
house. Often both people are working. They do not want to be out doing yard work in the weekends. One
of the things that we're really seeing is a big mismatch that is leading to a lot of struggles with
cost. A bigger house on a bigger yard is more expensive than a smaller house with a smaller yard. But
we also have a huge amount of our housing stock, which is three or more bedroom houses. If you want
a large house with a large yard, we've got great news. There already are a lot of
those. The thing that we're not seeing within the market, which is really high desirability and is a
really good demographic fit to a lot of household types is smaller homes on smaller lots, often in a
more creative format with more of a focus on community space, social space, and connectivity and less
of a focus on car storage. This also really helps city budgets. One of the things that we're really
struggling with across the nation is that a lot of our cities are really tapped out in terms of general
funds, being able to fund
all of the infrastructure that we layer over relatively few large homes on large lots. It's not really
possible to get enough property tax, payroll tax, all of our different taxes into the city to be able
to pay for all of this infrastructure supported by just those two homes often lived in by one or two
people. This entire little section of land, this 0.7 acres that we're seeing in this diagram might only
have three total residents. One of those houses might be one
statistically one of them is probably going to be two.
Instead, one of the things that we're trying to legalize and test here is an alternative where in a
small part of the city, right here, two city blocks, a little less, that we can get a wider variety
of housing. We can still maintain the traditional sidewalks and tree plots and what we think of as feeling
like a really traditional neighborhood, but we can get a much wider variety of housing types and price
points so that you can find the kind of house that you want at a price point you can afford in a location
that you like with a lot more neighbors.
That also really helps our city budget standpoint as we begin to have many more people paying taxes
towards the same amount of infrastructure. We're seeing cities be able to balance budgets with this
style of development and it is more affordable to the people that live there. It often builds better
community. It's much more walkable and can support much better locally owned walkable businesses. It
also houses a significantly broader contingent of residents.
And at different price points and different phases of their life. We don't need the same unit when we're
23 that we need when we're 43 that we need when we're 73. And so part of this is about diversity of
unit type, but it's also about being able to provide options to people within a neighborhood that they
like and know.
As we look at the specific kinds of housing that we're focused on in Bloomington, we see those same
national stats really played out here that we've got about a third of households are single-family detached
homes. We have a lot of multifamily, really large multifamily projects that is something we struggled
to understand sometimes too in our community. But we have very little single-family attached and we
have very little what we would call missing middle type housing. A lot of the code changes that we're
proposing within this PUD,
are geared around legalizing a type of housing that as we dug into, kind of stress testing, okay, why
aren't we getting these kinds of projects? We found that even in some of our newer, more permissive
zoning areas, we still had some things that we needed to calibrate to be able to see these kinds of
household types legalized.
As you can see, we're down here in blocks nine and 10 in the southwest corner of the Hopewell project.
And even within these initial drawings, we can see that there's some non-typical layouts that were promoted
in the original master plan that would not be legal under the current R4 zoning. And so even within
the early master plans, I think there was an anticipation that there would be some customization within
these blocks that would require a little bit of calibration. So what we're trying to achieve here,
We'd like, as we've talked about pretty extensively, a mix of housing types with a really good mix of
price points. We'd like to get to a pre-approved home design for each one of the lots to streamline
permitting and reduce costs. We're working to be able to deliver a fully buildable set of construction
documents for each lot that our small builders and small developers can show up to the permit office,
pay their further permit, and be ready to build.
This is really about building opportunities for local builders with training and with a lot of this
pre-work. Then providing frameworks to support permanently affordable and market rate houses both blended
into the neighborhood. We'll be doing ongoing community outreach and developer trainings to support
the built outcomes being piloted and the outcomes being what we intend them to be. We're about a third
of the way through the process here towards public launch. We're working through the PUD and plotting process.
We'll be finalizing land planning, the plans catalogs, and starting to do deeper developer and lender
roundtables to confirm a lot of the early assumptions that came from interviews with locals. A little
bit deeper run-through of some of the changes here, and some examples of the kinds of places that we're
trying to get to. A lot of our historic villages have a higher density than what we allow in a lot of
our new neighborhoods, and that often requires that we do some smaller streets. Smaller streets tend
to be much
safer for pedestrian. They can be more of a shared street environment. We do still need to balance fire
code. I'll preface a smaller street need with everything that we're showing you as fully compliant with
all of our fire codes.
We're also experimenting on some non-typical frontage. We've seen quite a few situations where houses
having front doors and front porches that open out into green spaces and common spaces are really high
desirability, especially for our couple of likely young families with young kids. Having a front porch
that doesn't open out into a car space significantly improves our community engagement and our sociability
space rather than having your front door open out into traffic.
It also helps again with that budget that we've got units that have much lower infrastructure costs
for the city to maintain relative to the tax dollars that they are providing into the city.
We're also trying to reintroduce some housing types and density that we're not seeing in some places
in the city. Hopefully you're familiar with diagrams of missing middle housing. We've seen a lot of
these types of housing were very common and very popular prior to modern zoning being passed in the
1970s. In a lot of places, a lot of these kinds of programs are really trying to reintroduce these kinds
of housing that we used as a country very successfully for a number of decades prior to zoning codes
making those illegal.
We'll give you a quick case study too of the kinds of things that we think might be attainable as changes
later on, although this is not directly proposed within our project, but just to give an example of
the kinds of studies that we've been doing about how this might impact citywide. If we look at a block
over next to Rossell Cemetery, this is between Elm and Waldron,
One of the things that Bloomington has is a really strong benefit is the large number of platted, unbuilt
alleys in the city. A lot of cities that have very deep lots, the way that you do really struggle to
get any sort of effective infill accomplished when there aren't any alleys in the back. Even when those
are unbuilt, the fact that they are platted is really useful because it means that residents could choose
to use them, could choose to build them out.
The lot depths in Bloomington are very unusual. You have very deep lots relative to most cities of your
size, which does then present this opportunity as we start to look at accessory dwelling units are very
popular nationally. One of the challenges with this accessory dwelling units is that you're then selling
packages of two houses. The overall attainability of those homes is very low. It's very hard to buy
two houses for the price of one, you're instead buying
two houses for the price of two. That really increases the price to play. It can really impact our housing
affordability only being able to have accessory dwelling units that are on those specific lots. Being
able to plat rear lots using alleys as frontages can create an opportunity for citizens to decide to
build units in the back of their lots in yard that they may not be using.
In this case, you actually can yield what most cities would say is an average lot size in the front
without losing any existing units, without losing the existing character of our historic streets, we
can get an opportunity for infill in the back. This is one of the things that we're testing through
some of the policy changes that we're showing is being able to use some alleys as frontages. As we look
at site plan and PUD, what we're proposing here,
Again, we've got three blocks, although blocks eight and nine are legally currently one block. We are
constrained with Jackson as a right-of-way in the middle of block eight and nine, has an already built
apron that needs to be aligned. You'll see that alignment is relatively fixed. Jackson does not go through
to the south, and so it does currently have a jog in it that allows a little bit more space for housing.
Wiley Street along our south edge is an existing 36-foot right-of-way. Rogers is a 41 and some change
right-of-way.
First Street is our widest right-of-way, so that one's 66 feet. Fairview is a relatively narrow 16-foot
right-of-way here. The pink hatch that you're seeing is the proposed right-of-way dedications. We're
proposing that Wiley Street and First would stay as is in terms of width, and that Fairview would widen
to a more typical right-of-way, and Jackson would widen to a little narrower than a typical street.
We're showing Rogers would dedicate up to functionally the existing building edge,
but that we are trying to preserve that building. I'll also preface that a PUD is really land use-based,
so it's functionally custom zoning for the lot. The site design is going to be coordinated, especially
on Block 8 as studies for the reuse that building are followed. We are showing those diagrammatically,
but there are some caveats on exact specifics, especially on Block 8.
One of the things that we really ran through at the beginning is what we could do under current R4 zoning
by right. Because we've got such deep lots along our Block 10 over here on the west, we end up with
relatively few blocks that are all larger than our minimum lot size. We're stuck with that minimum lot
width and the minimum lot size because we can't do anything without a rear frontage by right. We end
up with only a handful of lots over on Block 10.
On Block 9 then, with our R4 by right zoning, we end up with a little bit of a no man's land in the
back, which we were proposing to be a detention pond, but by right currently, we've got 28 lots can
be created under the existing R4 zoning. We've also provided a finished lot value. This is both taxable
to the city as an important value of the use of your land. We often describe cities like farms.
You have a limited number of fields and we have to be able to both responsibly work within them. We
have to be able to farm those in a way that we can afford to keep the farm. We also have to really be
respective of soil health. We can't be extractive on this. We want to have a long-term view as good
farmers. But we want to think about ways that we're using land in a way that both provides housing for
residents and supports an economically sustainable city. As you'd notice that finished lot value, that's
important to note from a taxation benefit as well as
value of the land itself. You see our average home price is pushed up above kind of $400,000. And so
this is in line with what we're seeing in terms of the average sale prices in Bloomington. And that
makes sense, right? We've got an overall land value and infrastructure costs that can only be divided
into so many pieces. And so those pieces are more expensive than what we'll see as we move forward.
So in our initial proposal,
We also assumed then we analyzed what happens if we take a full 60-foot right-of-way on all of our frontages,
if that extra right-of-way is taken out of farmable land, so to speak, and it's moved from an asset
into a liability for the city as land to maintain, that is infrastructure that the city maintains at
cost. We've got 84 homes. A really great impact to the city if we can get
all of these code changes passed in this version, but still about a doubling in value over what we can
do in a standard R4. But then in our final version, we've got almost 100 units. We've done some smaller
writes of way, we just picked our units back up.
We also have fronted houses into green spaces. We've got a trail frontage in an old alley that provides
us a second door frontage. Then we've got what really is functioning a green street. Pedestrian only
with community space in the middle, we've got bike storage, we've got a community pavilion. What we
might see typically in a neighborhood as a street is instead both green infrastructure space and social space.
We have picked up a few small multifamily buildings, which again, in terms of reintroducing typologies,
these are not big, you know, five-story, 200 apartments. These are relatively small buildings that are
Here in our mid-block, and then we've got another little one that is facing the police department that's
providing a little bit of screening to those parking lot lights, and then one that is helping mitigate
some large grade on the existing site. We've got four small buildings that are really still half-scaled,
and then we've got everything from really small micro units that are affordable below 50 percent AMI
for a homebuyer, which the mortgage payment on is significantly less than even a subsidized apartment is.
got some one bedroom, one level and two bedroom, one level fully accessible units. And then we've got
everything up to some of our bigger corner lots are maintained for more of a family three bedroom, relatively
nice house. So we have not very many of those, but they help hold the corners and mitigate from some
of the scale of existing neighborhoods into some of the smaller units that we keep more interior to the site.
From an accessibility standpoint, topography of the site is one of our biggest challenges here because
we need a really level site in order to be able to get parking space and kind of accessible route to
the front door and a zero step entry into a house. And so the limitation, you can see some clustering
here. We're up on a little bit of a ridge line where we've got some units that we can get fully wheelchair
accessible is shown in the blue, which is a higher standard than is required within that universal design.
So universal design is going to be zero step.
wider doorways. It is going to be adaptable to be wheelchair accessible. Full ADA is going to have full
commercial turnarounds, the full letter of the law on wheelchair accessibility built in from the beginning.
So our light blue, our full ADA units, the dark blue, our bedroom downstairs, zero step entry, a little
bit more accessible.
We've also overlaid both a pedestrian network here in the green, which again is our continuous front
door facing to the interior of our site. We've got traditional pedestrian infrastructure, sidewalks
along the streets, and then the blue is our vehicular traffic. We've got some low volume speed traffic
through our lanes.
which have parking off of them for driveways. We also then have more traditional kind of higher volume
streets surrounding these blocks.
In terms of creating lots, we currently have six lots on site. And so as we begin kind of a first phase
of one of the proposals is that we'll create four lots in the northwest corner here where we already
have infrastructure. Those can be done via lot line adjustments. Those will be built to our four standards
so that we can go ahead and get a first phase running. Lot five then will be the rest of this. Lot six
is these two large blocks.
And then we'll plot the following lot lines to create all of the smaller lots within the neighborhood.
So that will allow us to start with five initial houses while the plot process is still working.
Conceptually, the site is really roughly running kind of from the south
west to the northeast. We'll be handling water quality through green infrastructure within the neighborhood
through the hatched areas. We'll have a common storm park with the Block 10 user, which is likely the
police department, and there will likely be some underground storage underneath the surface parking
lot. That's an existing surface parking lot that is remaining more or less in the same location, but
we'll have green infrastructure and screening added around it.
Trash is remaining within Jackson Street and Fairview Street. While fire access does work through the
lanes, the fire trucks have a little smaller turning radius than the trash trucks do. We've worked with
both of those departments to ensure that trash pickup and fire access, police response, and all of those
features work fine with the proposed circulation.
For custom street sections, we're proposing that First Street would remain as is. It has currently been
improved. We are discussing an option dependent
potentially add some parking in some of those blocks on street. Generally, first street is proposed
to remain as is. Roger Street is proposed to be a slightly modified section to be able to work around
the narrow existing right-of-way and the narrow right-of-way around the existing building. We do an
eight-foot multi-use path so that we have pedestrian and bike on both sides of the street with on-street
parking both sides and typical drive lanes.
Jackson Street is proposed to have on-street parking and sidewalks and street trees. Fairview Street
is a very similar right-of-way. Those are slightly narrower than our typical at a 48-foot right-of-way
with one lane of on-street parking. Then Wiley Street is proposed to remain as is. It's a historic street
section that fits the character
and quality of the neighborhood itself. We're proposing leaving that as is. That also lets us improve
our tree preservation. There's some really nice trees at the back of the sidewalk along our southern
block. We've proposed holding houses back from those so we can maintain that tree line along Wiley and
reduce the change for residents south of Wiley of what they see as they look out their front porches.
And then our lanes really are functionally rear alleys. We've introduced a new street type so that we
can call those street frontage, but that's really intended to be a relatively typical alley section.
This is your back door, your garbage is back there, and the condensers are back there. You're pulling
into your driveway, but your front door is facing onto a green street.
The unit types and unit mixes, we can kind of run through the catalog if that's helpful later, but we're
showing some kind of examples of our smallest unit type, which is called the Aster, up to some of our
largest unit types at the corners. And there is a wide variety of kind of size and shape will feel really
familiar architectural language with these. And again, these will be provided to the builders with full
construction.
documents for these units and almost all of these units are things that we have built before and we
know work and are really marketable and desirable. So we're here for questions. I know we'll have some
and then I've also got contact information for all of us if you've got questions that come up after
today's conversation.
Great. Thank you so much for the record. That was Allison Quinlan from Flintlock Labs. So now we're
down to the council member question and answer period. Is it also permissible council president for
RDC members to ask questions? Let's start with council members. RDC has been meeting 17 minutes. So
some of the other proposals, not the one you're bringing through, but some of the A and B,
you had price points indicated, but you don't have any for that, the math for the proposed PUD. So what
are you envisioning the price points of the housing to be? Let me pull that exhibit up and we will share
that. And I apologize, we'd had an option three that we're on option five now, the option three I think
included our price points. In general too, let me fix our screen view.
We, in general, at R4, our average home price is around $400,000. With being able to make all the code
changes, but having a 60-foot right of way on all of our streets, we were about $350,000. Our current
price point here is $270,000. So we've been able to bring our overall price point down through these
code changes by about 40%. Alec, can you get the range, too?
Yes, so they range from our smallest unit, our Aster, which is our little studio, is $83,000. So that
is affordable without subsidy at market rate to 35% AMI. And then our most expensive house, so we've
got two of them on the corners, our big family houses are $650,000. So those are affordable to right
under 200% AMI. And so you'll see our Aster
we're able to stay low because we have a lot of the smaller, more affordable units and only a handful
of the more expensive units. Is that for purchase, those prices? These are purchase prices and I'll
clarify too, we're not saying this house will go for sale. This is early analysis to say,
using comps of current homes that are being sold in Bloomington and getting an average price for square
foot and then applying those to the homes of this size. This is what these would sell for at market
rates with no subsidy, you know, with none of the there will be affordability protections. We're proposing a
Forgivable down payment assistance for qualified homebuyers. There will be additional affordability
layered onto this, but this is just an early analysis of what housing currently sells for in Bloomington
in the current market. This is what these houses would sell for today. That's what the city giving developers
land or not? Well, it's not a good question.
The land is not intended to be provided for free. There's discussions about four qualified home buyers
for the affordable units. That the value of the land may end up being two buyers, the down payment assistance
that is forgivable over a number of years. But the land is not intended to be provided. Within these
numbers, this is just an, if everything was market rate with no subsidy, this is what the price points
would be naturally. Thank you. Thank you. Other questions from council members?
I see Council Member Rallo's hand up. Go ahead, please. Yes, thank you. Can you hear me? Yes. I had
also a question about home price and for your Plan A and B. Could you send us some material about the
average home price in Bloomington? Because I'm coming up with the number of around low to mid 300, and
you were mentioning something higher. But in any case,
Yeah, I was concerned about the range, but you're saying that there are only a couple of homes that
are 676,000 or whatever approximate. Could you provide a list of the number of homes that would be available
that would be say under 200,000 or say 200,000 or
close to that. In other words, I'd like the number, how many homes would we expect that would be truly
affordable? Yes. We'll send this detailed spreadsheet out, but we can give more detail about which home
plan has which number of units. One of the things that we typically do when we're doing an overall assessment
is eliminate a lot of the kinds of homes from our
comparables research that we couldn't produce now. For instance, if we've got a house that's very affordable
because it's in very bad shape, we're going to want to pull that out of this
kind of comparables group because that's not something that is really going to be used as a comparable
when we're selling it. And so we did end up with a lot of the new construction and kind of what is legal
now with seeing an overall higher comparable because our overall average is getting brought down by
people who are buying homes that are then tearing them down and they're functionally paying lot value.
But yes, I can send some more data on that. So you can send that data, you can send the whatever, the
home design, square footage,
the likely price, et cetera, and to know exactly what would be proposed here. Yes. Okay. Actually, that
was part of my planning commission lunch packet actually, so I am sending that right now via email to
everybody. You just give me a second to attach it. Then we've got that spreadsheet pulled up to share
So that you guys can see this and we can zoom in because I know that these on screen and in person these
numbers may be very small. Yeah, I didn't know that.
One of the things to discuss too, just as a caveat, when we start talking about affordability in housing,
I always want to give a couple of level setting for everybody. That everything is going to be tied to
AMI, so area median income. Area median income for a one person household is different than area median
income for a two person household. We've got a chart that is a typical census data that is
provided and available of what the area median income is for a one-person household, for a two-person,
for a three-person household. Each one of these is tied. We've got an AMI level over on the second to
last column, which is the household is
Affordable, which means that federal standards define that affordable housing is no more than 30 percent
of your total gross income going to housing. That is not just your mortgage payment, that is your utilities,
that is your home insurance, that is all of your houses related to your housing or your costs related
to your housing. We have in a really the dumb simple math version of this is our area median income
divided by 12,
And then 30% of that, we need to make sure all of these housing related costs aren't more than that
number. And so if it's affordable to 100% AMI, that means that a person making the area median income
of your town is not spending more than 30% of their gross income on housing.
In order to be affordable, that is the standard by which they're measuring it. But there is a little
bit of striation here because we've got one-bedroom units and studio units, we've got two-bedroom units,
we've got three-bedroom units. We're assuming that a two-bedroom unit is a two-person household. We're
assuming that a three-person household. We're assuming that one-bedroom and studio unit is a one-person
household. There's a little bit of variety built into the spreadsheet.
those are all tied to the current incomes of residents in the last measured year. And so we've got in
terms of units that are affordable at under 100% AMI, that is 70 of our units out of 98. So that means
71% of units that are proposed within Hopewell South are gonna be affordable under federal definitions.
Thank you. Are there other
Thank you. What does the city envision doing with the land? I guess, is it all going to be like individual
lots sold to individuals at market rates? Is that what's envisioned? Or we don't know. We haven't gotten
there yet. Okay. I noticed, so yeah, look at the details maybe that we don't have yet. I'm looking at
the chart on the screen and it says
looks like there's a six-unit and 12-unit building, but otherwise all one-unit buildings. Looking at
some of the comparisons, for instance, using R4 zoning, it said 28 ohms, but of course, R4 zoning allows
multi-family, allows five-plexes, tri-plexes, so four-plexes, for instance, would be 112 ohms,
which would, of course, have different value, but also have different price points for units.
Can you tell me a little bit more about the range of scenarios that we're exploring, I guess, with the
existing zoning codes, including what it's zoned for right now, as well as any of the other zoning zones
that we have available to us in the recently updated UDF? Yes, and let me come back to those site plans
so that we can look at that together. So one of the things that we're finding and are finding typically
is being challenging with, you know,
Three to three and four units buildings, especially this is true. Duplexes tend to be pretty easy to
build because they can still be built under international residential code. We don't need fire sprinklers.
We can typically then park them in the back if it's a duplex. One of the challenges with a 35-foot wide
lot to be built with a fourplex is that it's not really possible to park it.
you've only got 35 feet of width in the back that you can pull into and so that's typically only like
three parking spaces and so unless we have really good on-street parking that we can count towards our
parking minimums, which is not currently something that we can do by right, we can build legally a fourplex
but we can't make it pencil because
we've got to get fire sprinklers and it's a one lot with a four plex in there, but then we also can't
get the parking to work. Duplexes then become really appealing typically. Duplexes are ADUs, but we
again get into that same affordability problem. If we've got 28 different lots that each have a duplex
on them, the only way to sell those at an affordable rate
is to be able to sell them individually, right? If we're selling two houses, two houses are more expensive
than one house, and so that's essentially what a duplex is doing. And so even if we can get a duplex
that we can park on the lot, because we probably could get three spaces to work for that duplex parked
off the rear alley, we then struggle with
We have a condo association in order to be able to sell those individually, which means we then have
28 different condo associations that are all unrelated on the site, which becomes very complicated to do.
Practically, very few places are seeing that happen and I think that's one of the things that we often
find when we are hired in a new town is there's this desire to build a type of housing that is legalized,
but the market is not producing it. Often that means that there's an analogy that is really commonly
being used right now, which I think is great. It's not mine, but I'll borrow it.
which is that housing is like a door with a bunch of deadbolts on it. Imagine your old school apartment
door that you've got seven deadbolts on it and you've got keys, maybe you don't lock them all all the
time, but housing is like that. Zoning is one of the deadbolts and we've got to get zoning open to get
the door open. But often even once we've fixed zoning and you can build a fourplex in our four zoning,
we're still not seeing people do it. Part of the reason is building code. It's those fire sprinklers.
Part of the reason is parking, that's another deadbolt.
And then part of the reason is ownership structure and finance. So one of the other downsides of needing
to condo a building in order to sell units individually, if it's a really small building, is that you
need a condo association. Condo financing is harder than single family home financing. It's harder to
go get a loan for
You know, go get a mortgage for your condo, and you've got owner occupancy requirements and so only
a certain number of condos can get financing, you know, if they're not already sold an owner occupied
and so often then you end up with those condo buildings.
The units haven't all sold yet. The first home buyer can't get a mortgage and has to be a cash buyer
because they can't get a mortgage for it because the other units aren't currently occupied because they
haven't been purchased yet. You end up in this really complicated death spiral of housing, which a lot
of people are finding themselves in, where even when something is on paper legal, there's still a bunch
of other deadbolts that still exist. While yes, 28 homes times four would be about the number of houses
that we're proposing, it's
It's really challenging to be able to build those and then be able to execute them at an affordable
price point to a home buyer who can get a mortgage. So one of the biggest things that we're really,
one of the things that most of these PUD changes are based around, right? And one of the most important
things to kind of keep in our heads as necessary to get to attainable housing is to be able to access
federally backed, you know, subsidized mortgages that everybody uses for their big single family home
on their lot.
to be able to get to a unit on a piece of land that is owned fee simple. And so we need property corners,
we need a property description, and we need people to own the outsides of their building. And so one
of the best ways that we can do that is being able to plot very narrow, very small lots. So we've personally
built in our town on lots as small as 800 square feet.
R4 has a 4,000 square foot lot area minimum. One of the things that we're asking for is no lot area
minimum, which then allows us to do things like on our final lot plan, we've got a couple of little
Aster duplexes that each one of these Asters is a duplex, but they're each platted on their own lot
so they can each be sold fee simple, they're not a condo, they can be sold and you can use a traditional
mortgage to buy those.
Yes, it is more complicated. Absolutely. I did breeze by kind of some of the things that are allowable,
but hopefully that's helpful context to kind of understand how many different deadbolts we have to work
with and to get stuff done. Thank you. Great. Other customer questions? Just want to thank you to the
RDC members who have joined us and enjoy the rest of their meeting.
Council Member Rallo, raise your hands up from the floor. Do you have a second question? I have a second
question. Okay. Is there anybody else who needs first round question before we go to Council Member
Rallo for a second? Okay. Go ahead, Council Member Rallo. Well, I was just wondering a little bit about
background. So the way I understand it is that Flintlock is going to be recruiting and training builders and
I wonder if this has been, have you achieved that previously? Is that correct? Am I understanding that
correctly?
Yeah. That's something we're working with the Incremental Development Alliance to do, which is one of
their core mission and the thing they've been doing for the last 10 years. They've all the way served
as master developer on projects like this in places like Memphis previously, but this model of recruiting,
training, supporting local developers all the way through the process while having no actual developer
role themselves is really typical to their work. Okay. Could you
Could you include or could you tell us what the developer profit margin is in this? Is a percentage
of the list price of the home in this process? We're currently calculating and a lot of our work we
try to have be very pro forma driven because we know that there is an opportunity for a city to layer
lots of different affordability subsidies in specifically for qualified home buyers. We typically only
try to show things that are
marketable, financeable, and buildable at market rate assumptions. And so we typically are assuming
that we need a minimum of an
I'd like to really preface this, we're guaranteeing no one a return. We're guaranteeing no one any amount
of profit. Our assumptions for design is that we want to build things in that we know work at market
rate with about a 20 percent return on total purchase price because that is what a bank typically expects
to see before they'll give a construction loan. There's a lot of the details about the exact way that
the land sale is going to be financed and how is homebuyer assistance going to be
provided that will be worked out through the development process and in a separate framework. But in
our initial assumptions, we want to assume that the project works at the minimum financially viable
level, which is typically for most regional banks about a 20 percent profit margin prior to anything
going wrong, which is an important element to remember for this process. One other quick question. Have
you in any of these
past projects. We've been considering SROs, single room occupancy dwellings as a means of transitional
housing. Since we control this property, the likelihood is that it's occurring is pretty slim, but it
might be far likelier at Hopewell. Has this been considered and discussed at all?
We've specifically discussed or recommended any SROs. I'm an enormous SRO advocate. We currently have
an SRO project that we're pitching here in Fayetteville that would be our first self-developed SRO.
We tend to try to test things before we develop them ourselves as R&D to make sure they work before
we recommend other people do them. We've got a 68 unit SRO that we're currently recommending on city
land that's in our town. If that is of interest, that is certainly something that, for instance,
the Faulkner's, which is our largest set of buildings here, one or both of those could easily be swapped
out for more of an SRO format, if that is of interest. That's not been directly discussed previously,
but really small units with good public space are a great way to build in attainable housing at deep
price points that are hard to match otherwise. Excellent responses. Thank you for answering my questions.
Thank you. Are there any questions from council members? Right, I heard council members. Thanks. Thank
you so much for the presentation. One of the questions, and this may be building off of council member
Flaherty's earlier question, could you talk a little bit more about the demand signals that are market
infertility that we have about each of the types of housing? I sort of get that the,
you know, the story here is very much tied to this sort of mixed housing approach. So, like, how do
we know that this is the right mix? Like, why not more, what do you call it, the single efficiency units
or whatever we call those? Yeah, like, why not more of those? So, how do we arrive at this mix as the
right mix? Let me come back over to our
I'm gonna, I know spreadsheets are not very exciting as. I love spreadsheets, macros and stuff. I love it.
The first thing that we're often analyzing trying to get to unit mix, and the thing that a lot of developers
are going to look at first is what's our proportion of one-bedroom to two-bedroom to three-bedroom.
We have stacked our one, two, and three-bedroom proportions to match population on household size more
or less exactly for Bloomington. We're maybe a little heavy on our one-bedrooms, we're at 48 instead
of 45 percent, trying to get our affordability numbers
down a little bit and you know this is a tetris game too right there is some of this that's like okay
well we have this one lot left what will fit on that lot but we we're typically trying to match our
household types within within the community as our first stack of one you know one to three bedrooms
i'll admit to one thing that we really have discussed pretty heavily within the planning department
is that the accessibility standards within the city of bloomington are really unusual for us this is
the first community we worked in that has such a high percentage of an accessibility unit
which is it's challenging from a topographic standpoint. The reality is there's so many of those that
we can get a parking space to a front door. We are stacked with a little bit more slightly larger units
that are slightly more expensive because it's a one-story. You like us have tough soils and so foundations
are a little higher. A larger one-story unit to be accessible is slightly more expensive than a smaller
footprint, same square footage, but two-story.
So we do have a higher stack of our accessible units than we might in some other unit mixes that we
would propose.
Then we try to do an intermixed unit type, unit size within the neighborhood as well as that we don't
have one big cluster of all of our studio units are in one place. They're really evenly scattered throughout
the neighborhood is relatively important. Then from a large bedroom unit, those are really slated to
some of the financial analysis of looking at what is the thing with the fewest days on market that is
showing as really high desirable,
desirability and those are in some instances, those bigger, more expensive houses. The chinkapin is
our largest three-bedroom that I think is our most expensive house. We have three of those, that's three
of our corners on our main block nine. Then we also have the Elm is one of the other
Larger ones and so we have five of those and those have been one of our most popular three bedroom place
a very tight three bedroom that still you know kind of has all checks all the family boxes. So it's
an 1800 square foot floor plan that's been very popular in a lot of communities and so it's it's about
520 again at you know.
average price per square foot equivalencies, and so we have slightly more of those than the slightly
nicer ones. But we've got about eight, so eight or nine percent of units are kind of those larger, more
expensive family homes, while then we've got eight are the little micro units that are affordable at
35 percent AMI.
There is not a science to it. I don't want to lie and say, okay, well, we needed exactly 7.5
of this one. But some of this is a Tetris game, some of this is matching existing demographics, and
then some of this is analysis of what's selling quickly and what is popular. What sits on the market
for six months? What has 30 days on the market, which means somebody made an offer first day and it
closed. Awesome. Then just to follow up with in terms of mechanics and maybe this is more a question
for planning.
But in your experience doing PUDs like this, have people ever, have developers ever deviated from the
plans? I mean, as I understand it, the incentive is that you have these pre-approved plans, but that
doesn't keep a developer from buying a plot and then doing something else with it, right? Using the
normal allowed standards.
So the goals with these, you know, this is yet to be kind of fully fleshed out. So I'll describe the
goal rather than the full kind of policy. But the goal of these is that these would be sold. And one
of the conditions of sale of the land is that you are buying the land to build only the provided set
of floor plans.
And so we do have a mechanism by which the RDC could allow people to, there's a built in set of modifications
that are allowable in any of our pre-approved plans programs.
You can remove this one bathroom window if you decide that you want to. The portrayaling can be this
or it can be this. There's some amount of variety that is not impacting overall quality or neighborhood
that is within the purview of a developer. The intention though is that these are being sold with a
contractual agreement to build a house with
with the plans that you are seeing, and that there is an opportunity to swap houses. There are some
of these houses that have the same footprint, and so there's an allowable way that the RDC could okay
a developer if it's three years from now.
there's one of the unit types that has been less popular than what was expected and there's one that's
planned but they have another unit that's the same size. The RDC could choose to swap for another plan
in the catalog as the intent although the lots are very calibrated as you see to the exact width of
those houses and so there's a limited amount of switching that you could do but the intent is there's
a little flexibility but it's really driven by the RDC being able to make
call the ball, if it's three to five years from now, the market has shifted, they have something really
specific that they want to do, but they are structured where the PUD allowances are only houses that
are within this catalog or a pre-approved catalog approved by the city council, so that there's some
ability to be flexible later that they could come and ask to add another unit type to the catalog, but
that you buy the lot to build the house that we're providing you. Thank you.
Yeah. Council member Clarity, do you still have another question? Yeah. I guess one question is whether
a, so the transform overlay was mentioned by director a little earlier. We've used overlays to change
things about the base zoning district that don't quite fit the context of something unique like downtown
or in this case, you know,
a redevelopment area that has a massive parking garage outside, you know, for instance, I think parking
minimums were eliminated. I think I also heard that this section or portions of it may not fall within
the overlay district. I'm curious if the overlay district could be expanded to include this section
and if an overlay might've been a reasonable way to approach this as opposed to a PUD. I'm thinking,
I had more questions about PUDs and their administration over time and
some challenges we've experienced as a city there historically, but more specifically initially, would
an overlay be able to accomplish what's being accomplished here?
We did analyze during a PUD, it's a heavy lift. Prior to proposing the PUD, we worked through with the
city on could expanding the TRO accomplish this? The short answer was no. The frontage on lanes and
the ability to do custom street sections was one of the biggest elements of the PUD that allows this
to happen.
Minimum lot size in the TRO was still bigger than some of these that we're proposing for some of our
really deeply affordable units. It would have gotten us a lot closer, but it still wasn't all the way
there. I also tend to be a sometimes PUD suspicious person as a planning commissioner who has had to
administer really old PUDs. I don't want to say it's no administrative additional burden. This one seemed
worth proposing because of the opportunity to test
some of these really specific code changes that we think could really help with housing affordability,
attainability within the city generally, but which we would not feel comfortable proposing citywide
without more of a pilot test. This is an opportunity to test some of those elements on a small controlled
scale, which then can be assessed whether or not those are desirable for broader output. Thank you.
What a clarification. I didn't mean that overlay as it exists now. I meant the overlay as it could be amended.
So you mentioned lot size minimums that could be changed. You know, for instance, are other things that
overly district? The street, the street widths, custom street sections is a really big one because otherwise
the transportation plan would have to be amended in order to provide that. And so custom street sections,
lot frontage to allow for that green street.
and then a lot size and a lot width minimums were some of the high-level things. I don't want to say
that's a fully comprehensive list, but off the top of my head, those were some of the elements that
pushed us to a PUD rather than an overlay. Are there other questions? I have a couple more practical
questions, I guess, and some of us might be like,
Because I am the council representative on the planning commission. And so as long as it might be like,
hey, we put the planning commission, can you talk about this a little bit? But like, I'm looking at
the plan for trash collection. And like, so is, is there first an expectation that city sanitation is
going to be picking up? Yes. Okay. So with that and kind of being like, okay, so there's trash on these
very specific corners and then there's going to be one trash container per unit.
there are going to be a lot of trash containers on these corners on pickup days. And I just really anticipate
that being highly problematic in terms of just the sheer number of containers then that are on these
very limited corners. So is that something that you all have thought about?
That is something that we've we've gone all the way to laying out the size of rolling bins in plan and
we will likely be proposing some permeable pavers in some of those corners so that we've got a hard
surface that those cans are going on. That's really clear and we will likely have one or two parallel spaces.
along Fairview that will be blocked that like when you've got street cleaning and you can't park on
this side of the street for two hours this morning of the week that on trash morning that parking space
is not available and it's being used for cans. But yes, that's being fully laid out. And you know, it
is because a lot of these units can actually pull up to the street.
And we're using basically each one of the lane corners, right? So for instance, this corner of Jackson
Street, if you guys can see that little hand down here next to these parking spaces, it's actually just
these three little units.
this ADU in this house and then these two units. In some of these, it's a one-bedroom house, it doesn't
need to have the largest size can. We're guessing on using the medium-sized can for all of them, but
then we're assuming that there will also be some smaller ones that are being used. But yes, those are
being dimensionally laid out and it's being considered having a hard surface material for those to rest
on. I would appreciate seeing those details at the fine pressure model.
I think that, I guess the other thing that I wanted to know about were the parking, the perpendicular
parking spaces for Jackson and Wiley. And what are those, like are those visitor parking spaces, are
those parking spaces for those units? Like what is the vision there and why are they perpendicular spaces
as opposed to empty spaces which tends to be more unusual at this point.
Jackson Street went back and forth through each one of these iterations with the city as the preference
from police and from our side was that it's more of an alley. It doesn't go all the way through, it
is very low traffic. We really only have one street frontage because we've got the back of a building
and a parking lot along the other side.
So we started out with a very, it was an alley. We then kind of graduated up to, okay, it should actually
have sidewalks. So if we're going to do sidewalks, it should have street trees. It got itself all the
way back to a street.
challenges with this existing building and with us pushing our right of way as far to that building
as we could get it, was that the police department is frankly pretty crunched for parking. And so as
we looked through different ways that we could make up that balance to them, head-in parking in this
area, we both had really good topography to be able to achieve that. We had a really good door that
it could come into. They had a specific division that needed some extra parking that didn't need to
be within secured
secured parking and so the intention of these is that they are police, you know, specific spaces.
We can, when we load spaces onto an alley or onto a street, it's significantly more pavement efficient
because we're not making another drive aisle just to load the parking spaces onto.
We did make Jackson, part of Jackson's custom street section nature is that it can have head-in parking.
Part of the benefit of it being head-in instead of angle because Jackson is not a through street and
Wiley is relatively low traffic is that if they are head-in, then people can access and come in both
coming and going back up to first instead of pushing more traffic onto Wiley. Some of that is just being
reflective of it's a very low traffic
street, we are not expecting, um, back in to be problematic whatsoever. And in a lot of ways, we actually
want the extra traffic calming of the little bit of extra friction, but we'd like those to be accessible
from both directions to really push as much police traffic up, much less residential, much wider right
of way, larger setbacks, um, versus pushing any additional traffic down onto Wiley. Okay. And then to
follow up on that, I feel like that whole explanation was finished on the back of, of this,
current building on South Rockers becoming a police station, which he also said, you know, that that
was still in process of being studied. That is also something that would need to come through council
as a bond and a completely separate thing. So how much of this whole concept is kind of hinging around
this assumption that that is going to end up being a future police headquarters? So we have built in
in the PUD quite a bit of flexibility
for the recognition that everything that's being shown on Block 8, which is this police block, is very
conceptual. Everything that's being shown on Block 9 and 10, the housing, is not very conceptual. Those
are fully designed houses and I can tell you where their parking space and their trash goes. Everything
that is on Block 8 here, their design consultants came on weeks ago. They are still in very early analysis.
We have built-in flexibility that everything on this block is
conceptual and will be adjusted. There are some things that when we show them in the PUD, the number
of accesses onto streets and roughly where those go are less flexible and would require more modification
if those came back and changed. Things like that.
are somewhat set. We wanted to show some of the head-end parking on Jackson because we wrote Jackson
that head-end parking was allowed, and so we wanted to show that that was possible. The east side of
the center line of the street, we want to recognize might be slightly different as long as it's like
the transportation plan within the standard street sections, that there's a little bit of variety that
is allowed.
But if the building was removed and this block was entirely redeveloped, it would more or less default
back to the existing TRO overlay standards because the PUD only modifies the underlying standards in
the specific ways that are listed and we've only listed a handful of modifications to code. The PUD
for that block is relatively light. In terms of changes that you all would see from normal zoning,
if for some reason the building came down and had a totally different user. Thank you. Other council
member questions? All right. Oh, yeah, this was clarity. Thank you. Thank you for the explanation earlier
about some of the challenges with missing middle housing types from a financing and administrative perspective.
What I'm hearing from you is that basically, despite zoning allowing duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes,
they're too difficult to build. So what we really need is smaller single-family homes on smaller lots
in order to have market rate affordability for homeownership. Is that right? For homeownership specifically,
that has been the single thing that we have been able to find that is fitting through the most of these
deadbolts.
And townhouses can count, you know, attached single family houses can still work for that, but really
small format.
Homes on their own lots has been the only thing that we are finding that works for homeownership
specifically. If we were only trying to gear this towards affordability and we were really gearing towards
a larger percentage of rentals, we might see more multifamily in what we would propose, but with the
really explicit goal here of promoting homeownership, small homes on small lots or where it's at. No
zoning district at the City of New England's UDO
makes it legal to build that type of market rate affordability, is that right? None that we were able
to find had both a lot width minimum and a lot size minimum and setbacks that worked for what we are
currently showing you. Okay, that's disappointing. We should perhaps propose a lot of change that. Why
not develop a new zoning district though or change an existing one? If this is like a good idea, it's
been proven out elsewhere.
I'm struggling with the TUV aspect of it, I'm sure you can tell, because we've had a lot of
mixed experiences, they become stale over time, difficult to administer, costly, et cetera, et cetera.
And in some instances, like within the parking, for instance, actually don't meet our standards, which
is a concern. So I guess, yeah, why not make a zoning district that allows this, even if it's only here
to start, and then allow that zoning district to apply in a targeted way elsewhere over time, for instance,
Corner lots in gridded neighborhoods where lots of it is easy places where we improve the alley to allow
that type of subdivision you were demonstrating on the lot between third and fourth Street, for instance,
and nonprofit bill. So, yeah, tell me tell me what you do not. Custom Street sections is the short answer.
I do think that new zoning districts and that exactly the mechanism that you are describing is something
we've used a number of times where we test a new zoning district just on one lot or we've even had some
communities where we pass a new district, but it's functionally opt-in. People can come and ask to rezone
to it, but it's not put on the map anywhere, although it's adopted first, which is a great way once
some of these other things are worked through.
The custom street sections is the reason that the PUD really took the lead on the approach that we could
use because I do think that a modification to the transportation plan to allow for some more narrow
street sections long-term is a really great recommendation and that's a pretty big lift in terms of
administrative process before anything can happen. The PUD allows us to get rolling and to see how it
works while some of these other processes that are much longer process can
take place. Well, I think it's a small follow up. That's OK. Which is, let's assume the world in the
next five years where we do some of these things, maybe develop or amend existing zoning districts to
have the lot dimensional requirements that would fit with this as a zoning district and update
the transportation plan, the comprehensive plan to allow more
I don't know what it is exactly. I have to learn more about it. Flexibility of respect to non-car streets
as frontage, for instance. Would the idea be to like, I'm wondering about like this, as it's like over
time, decades in the future, right? It'd be really nice if when we do sweep anxiety changes 10, 20 years
from now, that this is part of it and we don't leave this behind as a P and D. That was a great idea in 2025.
But come 20, 40, we're much more enlightened on something else. And this is left behind, you know, like
so many PDs have been in that, that our recent UDO re-mapping process that went a really long way to
overcome this patchwork we had on over blue maintaining over 87 PDs or whatever it was. So.
Thought on that, the ability to adapt this, um, in the future, I guess, to, to do the normal process
instead of its own special thing.
think that the more that that can be done, the more positive impact you're going to see about housing
everywhere. I think modifying your existing zoning districts that are already on the map is going to
be the most impactful way to do that. I know that there's political challenge and that's not as easy
as just saying it. I can fully appreciate that too. Maybe a good question for David too. I can fully
hear you on the challenges of PUDs over time.
I absolutely agree. I'm also not sure whether this could be designed to sunset that the intention is
to build exactly what you're seeing. And a lot of the PUD is written around that, right? That there
aren't intended to be really significant architectural standards for the existing buildings because
we're showing you what every single building looks like and it can't be modified. But then modifications
to buildings default back to the prevailing architectural standards at the time. And so we've intended
it to be able to be default
back to zoning, but I'm not sure if you could build in a sunset to a PUD that allows it to be built
and then it automatically sunsets unless extended. I can add a little bit to that. The UDO stopped short
of forcing PUDs to be absorbed into an existing zone district, but it does strongly encourage that they
be absorbed into an existing zone district. I would certainly hope
that in 5, 10 years time we do have the district that accommodates the things that are being shown here.
And so when that happens, as I think over the past several years, we've taken down dozens of pea weed
and assigned them standard conventional bone districts. Close to 100? Close to 100. I would imagine
that's exactly what would be done here.
Thank you. Any other last questions from council members? Okay, that was technically the last thing
on our agenda. Mayor Thompson, is there any other types of information or general feedback that you
appreciate right now as part of this session or Allie or Director Kiddle? I think it's just, I want
to express that this meeting is an effort to keep you all in the loop before it's a thumbs up or thumbs
down decision.
And so this is a good time to provide feedback and concerns while we're still working with the PUD.
And my hope is that this is an active conversation and it's not a, you know, we don't hear anything
and then we get to council meeting and there's a whole bunch of changes asked for, or we just don't
like the PUD in the end.
This is an effort at co-creating and keeping you plugged in throughout the process. So that sounds to
me like maybe feedback from council members would be appreciated if anybody has a comment perhaps around
what they've heard or any specific concerns that they would like to see addressed before it goes to
council in a more official way. Council member, I'll see if that's what happened. Well, I just wonder
if I like,
the plan in general. I like the PUD in general. And I do note that if council member Rosenbarger's resolution
last spring is on board, then a lot of these missing middle things would have been allowed to be built
sooner throughout the community. So I did want to point that out. But in general, the sticking point
for triplexes and fourplexes seems to be the financing. And I wonder if
there have been any conversations with CDFI, Renly Bloomington, or any other funders to make financing
more available for those kind of types? We have had, I don't know if you're asking me, but I'll tell
you what I know, we have had conversations with lenders, CDFI, et cetera. It's just right now, it's
hard to get done unless you have
a good model for doing it. And the reason that we are getting some flexes built elsewhere is because
they're all rentals and then they're rentals primarily for students. We're still not housing our young
professions. We're not. And once they're big enough that they need a sprinkler system, it's not just
that a mortgage would be
more affordable, the rent also goes up. The developer has more money in that unit. And so if we can
look at developing things that fit the code that don't require that, that's where we get some affordability.
Yeah, I want to reinforce that. It's not a small change for cost. So International Residential Code,
the IRC, is one or two units or townhouses.
Anything under the international residential code can be built by a residential contractor. We don't
need fire sprinklers. You don't have weird fire separations where you've got, you know, fire cocking
or lightweight chipcrete that's on top of a floor plate, which is a really it's a custom detail that
like commercial contractors can do what we're finding. And we've done a number.
of just volunteer basis, state level code changes, both the incremental development alliance and our
office. We just introduced a bill in Oklahoma to move more units under the international residential
code. We successfully, one of our alumni and faculty got one passed in Tennessee. We've passed one in
North Carolina. We've passed one in New Hampshire that's existing buildings only.
they don't have a lot of new construction, so that was effective. Dallas is recently, because in Texas,
states have their own power to pass their own building code, so Dallas has now legalized up to eight
units under the International Residential Code.
But the thing that we are finding, having done the state code change in Tennessee was in 2019, I think.
And so since then, Cronberg is one of our partners on this project and a good friend has built several
multiplexes under IRC and under IBC. So the International Building Code, three units or more, it's the
same code we used to do like airports and factories.
They've built them both in Chattanooga and then with the same builder, same floor plans, just the different
codes, and then cross pricing of the two of them to be able to field test what kind of a cost change
that makes. The same building built under IBC is approximately 40% more expensive, which means your
rent needs to be
40% or more more expensive. So it's not just the financing. There is a huge threshold by which we have
very few communities in America that we've ever worked that you can build one fourplex and make any
money. It doesn't pencil. You can't make it work. And so a lot of that is building code driven. And
so we are working on that at the state level. And we've had some conversations about a potential Indiana
bill. Because there are so many communities in Indiana, they're struggling with exactly the same question.
is a delinearal state, which means communities cannot pass their own building code that conflicts with
the state fire code. So it would need to be done at the state level. But three and fourplex buildings
nowhere in America for building code reasons really make any sense. You can get a traditional 30-year
residential mortgage, an FHA loan, a secondary market mortgage for up to 40 residential units on a lot.
So you can get a mortgage for a fourplex.
You don't have any comps for fourplexes, even if it would work, which means we can't get an appraisal
that works yet. And if we have to build it under IBC, no one can build it and make any money. And even
if a foundation came in and did it, which is what's happening in Chattanooga, the rents in them have
to be so high to cover the construction costs that they don't make sense yet.
That is something that zoning is fixed, but we still got a bunch of other dead bolts that we've got
to work through. There are ways that some of those corner three-bedroom houses could be converted into
a four-plex later if building code changes were made, but it doesn't make any sense for us to show and
legalize building something that then is not going to be able to be financeable and nobody is going
to be able to make work. Thank you.
Other comments from council members? Thank you. I'll share some thoughts with you, Bec. I'm very excited
about the value of the lands that may be possible to use as downhandle systems. I think that's a really
cool aspect of the project in addition to the smaller streets. And I'm really interested in the developer
and lender workshops. And if it would be possible to attend, I would love to just to be able to communicate
that with the rest of the community.
Is there anything else that I wanted to say? Thank you for this. Any other passing member points of
feedback or comments? Just a question for us too. The presentation is very helpful, by way of information,
but I think it puts in the fine commission packet is probably much more detailed.
A lot of it was duplicative. Well, this is just a presentation. I mean, there's no, like, it's code,
essentially, right? I mean, it's like a substitute for code, like an actual VEV of what all the exact
standards are. Like, that's not what you get.
Honestly, I mean, what we got was kind of like a preview for our session as opposed to an accidental
petition. No, we have not gotten the petition yet at all. I'm not sure if the petition is going to be
a little bit more detailed. There is a little bit more detail about the unit types of those plans, but
I think not as much detail. OK, thinking of the mayor's request for feedback, it's definitely happy
to try to do that. It is also a little hard until you actually see the proposed
zoning district standards or PUD district standards to fully comprehend it slash give detailed feedback.
My only feedback I guess is that I appreciate this session. It might have been nice a little earlier
to talk about whether or not we wanted to go PUD versus zoning district approach. I expressed some hesitancy
about using a PUD as a tool for our
our best thinking on affordability. If this is really what we think is that it's gonna move the needle,
like we should be talking about it in the context of our zoning code and what needs to change in our
zoning code. So not that's precluded necessarily by this, but it does add layers that might be unnecessary
in my view and are like kind of suboptimal. So that's my general concern, but I need to sort of find a review.
Thank you. Other council member comments about it. I guess my primary comment also revolved around that
idea is that it really need to be a community and the primary reason that seems to be the street escapes
and that seems to open up kind of a bigger concern for me about exactly how inflexible the transportation
plan might be in terms of trying to
trying to make our goals kind of work together in line in ways that there may be less aligned right
now. I'm also generally skeptical, I guess, and I mean, to get a PV right now, you have to have a minimum
acreage. And that is probably at least partly why that last quorum of the proposed police station is
in there. And I guess I just have in general a lot more questions about that
building and that whole project, which was, you know, originally kind of spent the demo and a replacement
entirely. So, I have more questions about that kind of place, but I don't think it's necessarily appropriate
here, but I also wonder whether DOD is really the right tool for this job, but maybe it's the only tool
for this job, but yeah.
I think that is an accurate assessment of, we did go back and forth a number of times
Pretty in-depth with RBC and with planning to assess that we did all get to the point we thought was
that this was the best tool to get it accomplished. That doesn't mean it was a perfect tool, but it
was the tool that we could use to get to a lot of these things relatively quickly without coming to
you guys with a really comprehensive and intense zoning set of revisions that was going to feel pretty
aggressive.
There are no other last comments. Anybody? Thank you to the mayor for calling us in. Yeah. And thank
you to Allison, and there's a lot of people. There are fewer people in our now than there were when
we started, but there is interest from us. So thank you everybody for coming. Thank you, Allie. Thanks,
guys. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. With that, I will adjourn.