 Welcome to the Amherst Planning Board meeting of February 21st, 2023. My name is Doug Marshall and as the chair of the Amherst Planning Board I'm calling this meeting to order at approximately 705 p.m. This meeting is being recorded and is available live stream via Amherst media minutes are being taken. This planning board meeting is being held in person in the town room at town hall. However, we are conducting this as a hybrid meeting and members of the planning board and members of the public are also able to attend via zoom. Pursuant to chapter 20 of the acts of 2021 and extended by chapter 22 of the acts of 2022, and extended again by the state legislature on July 16 2022. The planning board has been given authority to hold meetings via zoom. The zoom meeting link is available on the meeting agenda posted on the town websites calendar listing for this meeting, or go to the planning board web page and click on the most recent agenda, which lists the zoom link at the top of the page. In person attendance of the public is permitted at tonight's meeting. However, there is limited capacity in the town room, due to the COVID pandemic, the capacity of the town room is limited to 40 people including the planning board members and staff. Every effort will be made to ensure that the public can adequately access the meeting in real time via technological means in the event we are unable to do so for reasons of economic hardship or despite best efforts. We will post an audio or video recording transcript or other comprehensive record of proceedings as soon as possible after the meeting on the town of Amherst website. Board members I will take a roll call when I call your name unmute yourself answer affirmatively and if you are participating remotely returned to mute. Bruce Coldham. Here. Tom Long. Present. Andrew McDougal. Present. I Doug Marshall and present Janet McGowan. Here. Johanna Newman is absent. That was what we were told in advance and Karen went here. Great thank you board members and welcome to the town room I for some of you this is your first planning board meeting ever in person. And for somebody like me it's the first one in probably three years or two years must be two years. We had one. Yeah. So it's nice to see you all in person as well as the staff who are here with us we have Chris Brestrup. We have Nate Maloy, Pam field Sadler and Sean, whose last name I forget. Sean Karen. Thank you. Okay, board members if technical issues arise we may need to pause to fix the problem and then continue the meeting if the discussion needs to pause it will be noted in the minutes. For those participating remotely, please use the raise hand function to ask a question or make a comment. I will, I may see your request I can't assure you of that because I'm looking at paper rather than a screen tonight. And we're not really planning to have very much public comment. After speaking, assuming I do see your request and call on you to speak. After speaking remember to remute yourself planning board members who are present in the town room should also raise their hands when they wish to speak. The general public comment item is reserved for public comment regarding items not on tonight's agenda. Please be aware the board will not respond to comments during general public comment period. Public comment may also be heard at other times during the meeting when determined appropriate by the chair. Please indicate you wish to make a comment by clicking the raise hand button when public comment is solicited or raise your hand if you are present in the town room. To resume meeting using a telephone, please indicate you wish to make a comment by pressing star nine on your phone when called on please identify yourself by stating your full name and address and put yourself back into mute. When finished speaking residents can express their views for up to three minutes, or at the discretion of the planning board chair. If a speaker does not comply with these guidelines or exceeds their lot of time, their participation may be disconnected from the meeting. So the time least on my watch is 709, and we'll have public comment period at this point. I don't have a screen. We have three attendees that I don't see any hands raised on the screen. All right, I see one public person in the room with their hand raised Janet could you hand them the second microphone oh Sean has it. Thank you. Thank you and Pam Rooney 42 cottage street. Thank you for letting me be here in in person. Thank you for your questions as you cogitate over your task tonight and one of my questions is, if we're thinking about the densification in the residential village centers or business village centers. Do we have an account of which parcels are actually containing historic structures. We're thinking around town and thinking about townhouses. What are appropriate areas for locations of townhouses or townhouse clusters. And thirdly, where would, where would duplexes most likely be built, we haven't seen a huge number of them. Would they be, would they be perhaps add ons to existing buildings, or would they be teardowns and new construction. So as you're dealing through that might be handy to talk about those. Thank you. Okay, thank you Pam Rooney 42 cottage street. I don't see any other hands so we'll go on at 711 to planning for housing growth. Alright the main topic for this evening was item two here planning for housing growth. This in person meeting was a chance for us on the board to huddle around maps of town and talk about where the town might be able to allow additional housing beyond what's here now. Thank you. We're trying to all talk into a microphone this evening so that people at home and on the recording can hear us. So, if you want to speak I guess raise your hand physically and will pass you one of the two microphones, Sean is it true that when my microphone is on the other one will not operate. They should both operate at once. Okay. Great. I thought mine wasn't working when Pam was speaking earlier. Okay. So, I guess I'm more or less responsible for this for having this meeting tonight since I'm the one that at one of my chair reports said, Hey, you know I had some thoughts about where we could increase allow our allow additional dimensional at least housing, and would anybody be interested in that so the first, the second time I said that was the night that we first heard Mandy Joe and, and Pat De Angelis is zoning amendment and I thought my suggestion would die and we could really only handle one thing at a time, much to my surprise you guys seemed more enthused and than I was expecting so here we are. And I know that Chris kind of used this as the beginning of what might be a multi part conversation it's not like we're going to be deciding anything tonight. So, I guess, I could just start by laying out a couple of things that I have had been musing about. And there were basically three areas that I was interested in. One was north of the university, not immediately north, but up in the RN. West of North Pleasant Street so kind of in the area. Let's see this is a hard map to. Okay. Okay, yeah and that's North Village so I was thinking of this area up here where where Puffton Village and Brandywine are now. It's kind of on this, this whole corner. And the reason I wondered about it is it's fairly low density housing now and it's all from like the 70s. And so it's one in two stories. It has a mix of undergraduate housing of residents it has graduate student residences residents with families. It has some low income family, you know, occupants, but it seemed like right now it's housing rental housing that has some students and not, and who would object, I suppose, you know, part of this was, what could we do that we wouldn't arouse both opposition to because we're, we seem to have a lot of that. So, that was one area. And do all of you are all you familiar with that, that kind of area. So, do you mean we're north, north village north of north village north of. Yeah, and I mean presidential is right here where where the. Yeah, I mean this is the this is the university's north village area that they just are rebuilding. So just south of that is a private parcel that's that's called presidential one and two I think. And then north of it is Puffton Village over to this area is Brandywine towards route to 16. And then there's another private housing right along Meadows Street. Yeah, I forget what that one's called townhouse. Is that what it's called. Okay, so, so those are all kind of, you know, they're already housing, they could be denser. It's kind of what I wondered. And then on the opposite side of the street there is, what's the name, somebody's Lane Hobart Hobart Lane. You know, and, you know, would we want to extend, you know, would we want to limit it to those areas that are currently multifamily housing, or would we want to nibble nibble at the edges a little bit and maybe go a little farther. And something that that kind of struck me when we were talking about Mandy Joe's project proposal. There is no multifamily apartment housing zone in Amherst, and isn't that kind of weird. And one of the things when I first met and mentioned this to this area to Chris a few months ago, at least, she said, Well, you know the building inspector views it as non conforming, and therefore it could continue and maybe continue to be equally non conforming and that you could actually build more there, according to the building inspector then is there now without any change of zoning, but that's not clear to people who are actually looking at the town zoning. And it's not clear, maybe even to the landlords who own those parcels. Chris has her hand raised. Hello. So it's already been done in two places one is presidential. We looked at that and that is non conforming it's an I think the RN zoning district, and they applied for a special permit under section 9.22 of the zoning bylaw to expand on non conforming use. So that was a number of years ago. The other one is down in South Amherst. I think it's the boulders or self point I can never remember which is which. One of them is going to have a new building built there, and under the same section of the bylaw the 9.22 you got a special permit to add a building with 47 units. So the zoning board of appeals and the building commissioner are both open to that idea. And I think others other landowners in town have made inquiries about doing that kind of thing. Now it just came on. Thank you, Chris. Janet. So, most of Amherst can have multifamily housing. So, like all RN can have duplexes or triplexes or quadplexes depending on the lot size. And so, you know, so that's already there but I think I have a question is like so you're, I think what you're suggesting and just is taking existing apartment complexes. And rezoning them for more density in and that's what this one would be. And so, you know, and I support that, especially since I think the 9.22 is kind of this constant twisting of it and why not just say this is where we want apartment houses we want them to three stories, you know closer together as long as there's amenities and so people. So it just, it's like where we want to put, right. So, so it would be, is that what you know this section 9.22 or whatever exists already, creating a zone that says, here's where we want multifamily apartment. It's happen would communicate more effectively to the development community that we're open to some some things that maybe it's not so obvious right now. Yeah. Chris I see your hand again. So one of the problems seems to be in Nate and I discussed this a lot, which is that property owners who are already making money on their property are reluctant to forgo that money for a period of years which it would take to build something in order to then be able to make higher benefits. And there were, there were, there was talk about this in the housing market study and I think the conclusion of the consultants there was that you'd have to build between three and five times the number of units that are existing on the property in order to make it worthwhile to, to the landowner for them to go forward with such a process. I wanted to mention that. Yep, if you have a property that's fully paid off your monthly income is, is heavily profit, and how would you even equal or gain that if you took out a new mortgage to build something new. So maybe, you know, maybe that doesn't have legs I'm not a developer, but that was one area that I thought of the second one was down along university drive south of Amity Street. And then some housing built along there that want the one university drive was built. And then what 70 university I think was the other one that was recently done just south of that new restaurant savannahs right. That was an area where there weren't a lot of residential butters who might be objecting to allowing housing. Now it's basically commercial, you know at the big why is there you've got all the medical stuff in the corner with at route nine. Then there's what the post office then all the pot shops along there. But, you know, I know you if you. If we wanted to we could do say an overlay district along there that would allow add housing as an opportunity along there. If it were relatively urban in its configuration close to the street and you know, four or five stories, you, you could have kind of a new downtown down there. And it's a pretty straight shot up university drive to the university. I know there's that one. What is it the Alpine Heights or whatever on route nine that you know that that's a lot of students. And somehow they get on with a shuttle bus I think a lot of them come up to UMass and back so there's also pretty good bus service there and if you had an apartment there you could walk to big why and back and you wouldn't need a car. And that's basically what university drive to the university so that seemed like an area with reasonable amenities in terms of having the supermarket and some medical stuff that you could probably operate without a car if you lived in that area. So that was the second one and. And the third one is I'm sure the most controversial and it's. So I'll mention it but I don't expect us. I expect a couple of you to object to it right off the bat. And that is the west side of Kendrick Park. That that stretch of housing between say McClellan and Triangle Street. I realize that there's resistance to that in the adjacent neighborhood, but you know those from that sort of developer point of view that is an area where particularly with Kendrick Park becoming a park. And that's like the potential to be our Boston garden, you know our Boston common so it's it's a place where if you had pretty nice apartments along this that's a stretch, I think they'd be really desirable, and could be a nice place for retirees or you know, well off families. So those are the three that occurred to me and I know there's been other conversation maybe with Andrew and Tom about route nine headed east toward Belcher town. And whether that area should be zoned. The route nine stretch between say the Amherst college campus and East Pleasant Street where that sort of commercial district with the kind of single story. It has the. It's a long. It's meant East Street between East Street and the railroad on route nine college street. Okay, college street. Where that the flooring store is that diner is the Dunkin Donuts is. You know it's, it's like the commercial district along there. I suppose if we allowed a bunch of housing along there it might push the commercial out so I'm not sure people would want to do that so that was kind of my intro Andrew. I'm going to add just the area that Tom and I had talked about and actually several of us when we were doing a site visit was belch down road going out out of town east towards belch town is that there's lots of low density around here and with East Amherst village center really starting to develop that might be an opportunity to. I'm using the cursor on the map yes sorry for that. But so you know we had we had recently looked at this, the hot pot. And when we were on that site visit, recognize that there is a large really stretch of route nine, all the way down to the forget the name of the old maple farm. And that that area seemed like that would also be a great spot for up zoning I think this is also one of the areas that was being, you know, has been targeted for some residential growth. And I think the property, remember which belch down road number was but that that had been purchased so just some more clarification on that. And that's your map is showing the Alpine Commons apartments to which are relatively new. You know, two story maybe. Yeah. And Tom. Thanks Doug I think one of the things we also talked about in reference to that particular place was kind of expanding the village center further down that road to allow for maybe some non residential markets or other types of grocery like stores that might populate the road as well because there is quite a big food desert there for people and it's quite a distance for them to bring their groceries on the bus, all the way over there. There's lots of students, there's lower income housing there and there's a lot of density so I think bringing that urban, the village center further down route nine might allow for some development of markets or fresh produce or something that could alleviate this food desert that's in that zone. Plotted out where the bus routes go and there's actually not a single bus route that goes from route nine all the way across Amherst, if you want to go to stop and shop from the belcher town roadside you got to go, at least up to main street I don't know maybe all the way to UMass and then pick up a different bus and and many people here, I don't know if this is a rule that the drivers limit the number of grocery bags you can bring on the bus. And so people that are shopping for a family can actually get all their groceries on a bus and get them back to this neighborhood either way so then trying to find a way to get zone it in such a way that those types of things are more available would be wise and whether or not we encourage them to be built is another story but at least creating the opportunity for that to happen. Okay, Janet. So, one of the problems we have is we haven't delineated any village centers and, and I think, I mean I'm most familiar with the East Amherst Village Center or whatever we call it. And it's like the weirdo zoning, like there's just there's some parcels that have, you know, are split in two and remember we did that one of the permits and, you know, the backyard and the parking spaces and it, you know, I'd love to see some sort of make it easier and more flexible like Village Center zoning that allows, you know, more dense housing that allows different kind of stores. You know, I would do that with design like a process to figure out where the Village Center is, you know, develop design standards that people can agree on and so we won't be like arguing building by building but I look at colonial village and people, you know, there's, there's a lot of people living there but it's very low density, and you know people have, they use the grass and they, you know, barbecue but again it looks like the same kind of area very low density could get taller could get more filled in it might be. So I see that for that area to. Okay, Janet, Bruce. Yep. Yes, as you were saying Andrew that I guess it's the Village Center of Business is it? Yes, down, down well I guess it would be that side, which would be the north, that's northeast side of route nine there. It's currently RN. If we were to rezoning or whether the mechanism is rezoning or overlay. When we were at that site visit. So I'm speculated on the maple farm site, without knowing anything much perhaps about the proposed or the the new food cop go up it's gaining ground in town. It seemed to everybody that that would be a wonderful site for that type of use, and, but we also recognize that it may not at this cage be able to consider that site. So, along the lines of what you're suggesting Andrew making it considering what would it take to make that beyond the willingness of course of the seller. To make that a possible site for food cop might be something that would eventually be something cooperative that we can do. And I also should say that on the, the, the West side of Kendrick Park just so folks know the local historic district a local historic district commission is in the process of thinking about the, thinking sunset historic district expansion into that. So I don't know how that affects whether that, whether that would be a, whether there would be some collaborative synergy there, or whether there would be some conflict I don't know but it's relevant to the conversation if we want to continue it that that initiative is being contemplated by, by the another commission in town. Chris. I was just reminded by Pam Rooney that there is an affordable housing development that's going in along Belcher town road it's town sponsored and it's actually two locations so you might want to look at that location and see how that fits in with the thought about expanding the village center down Belcher town road and maybe Nate or yes. Yes, Andrew is pointing that out. And so there's that site and there's also the site that's on East Street, which is. Where's that need for the north. Near the East Street near the school right East Street school so those two locations are going to have up to 70 altogether 70 affordable units. Okay, no, Janet Janet has got her hand up. So just talking with that some more. There's also a new community garden that's gone in and I, it's, I'm not sure I can pinpoint it but it's on the east side of Belcher town road near Fort river. And there's a new community garden going in there. And so there's going to be a lot of low income housing a community garden the new school there's a lot of synergy there. I also got like some really good dirt. And so I could see, you know, it's a floodplain right good dirt and it's a lot of it is very wet I'm not sure about colonial village but I can attest to a lot of witness there but I do think it's a great area it could be kind of a kind of a test case for like how to put in amenities, you know to put in a grocery store or there are some places selling food there's Indian food being sold and then mom's market and things like that but I do think this is like an area that be great. It's kind of really good redevelopment and thinking about like who's there and Go ahead, Bruce. Oh just to add to what you were saying Janet, we probably should be talking about this remember that we hope we're going to have a double size school, right above that red part there. Right. So that means that it'll be twice as many people coming pick up us here and stuff like that so that's a, that's another augmentation like this. Right. Thanks Doug I was only, I was just going to point out that there's the new development happening in the southwest corner as well which I think is ground for retail. These comments yeah okay. So yeah residential coming in here, you know, the hot pot, the low and moderate income housing in these two areas it does. And then the village centers bisected by the commercial zone here. It does seem like with all of that anchored by potentially a new school that we could bring some cohesion to like unify this area. You know, another area to which I was also thinking of as well was just down in South Amherst. Which is Pomeroy, our other village center which we haven't really talked about in great detail either there's, there's some undeveloped land. Really sort of surrounding this that there might be an opportunity and I know at one point, and I'm not sure what the status of was what the status of this was but there was no this the intersection was going to be redeveloped. And then potentially turned into a rotary around about that. I think that that also makes for really compelling kind of place making opportunity where this right now just feels like it's a stop along the road but with around about with some densification you might actually make a pretty compelling area with lots of identity. My kids are on the Xbox. Thanks. All right, thanks, Andrew. Chris is the roundabout project are going to happen. Chris said it is. Hi everyone may Malloy, I guess, you know, ham Rooney asked a few questions earlier but I feel like we. Maybe we've already just decided that right this is not just duplexes and triplexes it's much denser housing and so I kind of agree and I feel like, you know, do we have it, some of it be called the student housing zone. It's just going to be built unless we have some strict controls right so the housing market study also said, if you up zone some areas have some protections in other areas so you know there's a balancing effect and I mean I like the conversation the housing section of route nine, the north side and had you know four story buildings and trying to create a streetscape there so you know you could more than quadruple the density and still have it look nice and you know I think that maybe we have a higher percentage of affordable units if we don't want to be students and so you know the 40 are downtown didn't go anywhere. And I thought that was really great I think the gateway is a great project to look at again with design controls and other regulatory requirements and so. But you know I think the student demand is so great that unless we can satisfy 2000 beds it's just going to be students. And so a mixed use building is going to be studios and one bedrooms is what we're seeing rented at $2,000 a month to all students, and then bacon retail because the residential can subsidize it and the owner has no incentive to put in something desirable on the ground floor for retail so I'd like to see, you know, I like this discussion I think we could have greater density and a lot of areas. And then let's talk about what are the details like I'm not even considering zoning right now because our zoning wouldn't allow this at all so let's just figure out where we want it and then figure out how to do it. Maybe it's an overlay maybe it's, you know, right now right so Amir and South Amherst or East Amherst is taking advantage of BBC right it's like on four parcels it's like, well why is there not BBC everywhere. So commercial doesn't allow it if, if commercial became BBC, we'd see mixed use buildings that are four stories, because we have no cap on the number of units that makes use building. So, you know, right now I think their people are taking advantage of the zoning we have by doing mixed use buildings but if they could do it somewhere else they would do it somewhere else and so I think we could control it better if we do have something like dog you're suggesting whether it's an overlay or we change zoning or something. Thanks Nate one one thing I was going to say, kind of following that I have been keeping a chart of housing approved since 2010, and the total that I have is 1500 and four beds. Beds, since 2010, and I've shared this with Chris every now and then. Beds. Yeah, in terms of you know whether it's a studio or one bedroom two bedroom three bedroom or four bedroom. I mean bedrooms. Yeah, yeah, some some of those rooms will have to or whatever students in them but. So that's, since 2010, and I don't, I didn't start any earlier than that so it starts with boltwood place and then Kendrick and then goes through the pot pot that we just approved. And so, you know, I think the housing production plan talked about doing about equal that number kind of in the future another couple of thousand beds. And I don't know what the timing was that that was the what you quoted today, Janet. No, these are multifamily multifamily developments. Yeah, yeah, Karen. Yeah, I'd like to ask a question. So Nate, what I'm hearing is that we need, we want to somehow stir this spirit, be able to have some control, so that we can encourage really mixed grocery stores retail. And how do we do that. I'm not quite sure what is it that we do. Yeah, I don't have all the answers but I do think that right now the residential market is so strong that it can subsidize commercial space so you know developers that said they're willing to have their commercial space sit vacant for five years knowing they can have a top dollar for the residential spaces and so, you know, I don't know what the tools are you know is it may be right non zoning it can be tax incentives it can be other incentives. But you know what are the mechanisms. You know, it's, I don't know you know I don't have that I don't necessarily have the answers but I think that right now what's happening is just because the resident residential market is so strong that's the driving factor it's not even a consideration what's happening with the non residential use. Right that's just an afterthought. So do we have the power to say to have some kind of a zoning, where you don't have residential use where you just well right now we have a zone called the RF, the residential fraternity zone, which is designated for students. Those are the only people that can live in that area that how do we how do we have something like that, which is not for students and beds but is for a grocery store or for commercial space, which is what we need, and which is not happening how do we do that, do we have a mechanism. So we can list grocery stores as a use and allow them in whatever particular zones we want to. And so we can allow it, we can't cause it to happen but we can create conditions to allow. Well can we also not allow residents in other words, this is only for this kind of thing. The commercial zone does not allow housing residents. Okay, so if we want in that area. People with farms if we want a grocery store and we want to avoid what's happening people coming in building these things that they're primarily considering milking students for profit. Then we have to zone it in that way. I guess that's the step that we have to really consider. So, thanks. I mean, I think that there's two parts of that right one is that Ignate saying, we need to satisfy this demand. So we need to make a zone where we can put all the students right or, or overlay zones or make it more, I guess, affordable or possible to add density I think on the flip side. If you put 4,000 beds in Pomeroy Village Center, Mission Cantina would be overloaded with people wanting burritos so then another burrito place might open or something else so I think the notion of these village centers. I think the mix of commercial and and housing is problematic. I think it's problematic because we don't have the density of the housing yet. And I think we do raise that. And that's the same with downtown right I mean I think we're not filling those spaces all the time because there's there's not enough people down there to go get those burritos and so I do think that like places like Pomeroy, where they're somewhat isolated. And then get a mixed use to function really well there because those kids are going to want slice of pizza on their way up to their, you know, four story tower of dorms that we put there so I do think there are, you know, there are ways to do kind of both of those things in some of these zones, but I think creating the opportunities is what we want to try to accomplish. On that, on your example, at least, you know, if you put 4000 students at Pomeroy, we probably ought to talk to PVTA. Like, you know, somewhere in this the, the public transportation system and whoever runs it probably ought to be consulted on what we're thinking about if we're really going to going to create a huge amount of demand in some part of campus or some town that doesn't have it now. Chris. We've actually received an inquiry from a property owner or from a representative of a property owner who owns who has the desire to develop property on the, I guess it's the north side of College Street, and we were showing an image before where there's it's all commercial, and they have an idea that if a lot of that property were rezoned to business village center that it would be much more developable for mixed use buildings. And that seems like a good use of that property to me that more of that area should be rezoned as BBC we didn't have BBC when we put in commercial here, but BBC is really more flexible than commercial so we should consider doing that. Would we consider increasing the dimensional allowances for BBC. We could consider doing that. I don't know those off the top of my head but it's, I wonder whether similar to what happened downtown where we added allowed another story or two to happen. Whether if we did the similar something similar with BBC, would that, you know, finally get us over the threshold where something is financially feasible to invest in. Chris answer that and then we'll go to the other hand. Yeah, you're already allowed to put three stories in BBC and there's a special permit modification that's allowed a dimensional modification that's allowed with a footnote a so you could have four stories in BBC. So there is already that you could do that. Okay. All right. I don't know Bruce you go next. Thanks. No it's okay it seems that that two things to say I guess it seems that an unintended consequence maybe of allowing the five story buildings downtown I guess. And it might have been that it certainly then becomes, you're saying that more possible to do what to achieve what you're describing which is essentially an underuse or a non use or video. We're not paying any attention necessarily trying to rent out the lower floor. And so maybe we should be a little more careful perhaps to not create the economic situations where that unintended consequence that happened. But more particularly on that score. In the areas that they're thinking about where housing could and particularly student housing could be more densely accommodated with say four story buildings. It would seem to me nice to be able to take that residential use right down to the first floor. Then if you if you can take that residential use right down to the first floor then you can connect the residential uses to exterior spaces whereas the way we've been doing it or it's been happening in the downtown cost. And it might be really nice for that kind of housing that would make it more attractive I would imagine to be able to integrate the whole building and then to have indoor have exterior space that's connected to the living more particularly. So that's a question I guess tonight or Chris. Would there be a problem with that is that is that require a presumably that somehow that could be solved and that that type of housing could be accommodated in those that type of denser housing could be accommodated. Chris yeah right now under zoning it'd be difficult. We cap a number of units in an apartment building so you know we can have multiple apartments on a site that allows it to get to the ground floor but it may not work with say the density or the models we're talking about the mixed use does have the requirement of you know most of the street front has to be non residential use so I think we'd have to have some type of zoning change or flexibility there to achieve what you're saying you know depending on that you know the density. Well it's exactly because the mixed use doesn't have the 24 unit cap that is creating the situation we have. So that if the apartment type building type were allowed to have more units that was presumably more financially feasible. Then you might get a larger apartment building that would start with the first floor and wouldn't have to do the token commercial space in order to justify the larger number of units. Yeah depending on the location you know if it's a if it's a village center where we might want to have at least some suggestion of commercial space. It's probably different than something say up in a already dense student area where you probably do want to have some connection to the outdoors. Okay. Alright, Janet. I'm not sure I have the whole I have the housing production plan here and it looks like we it goes from like 20. You know year one is 2013 and your five is 2017 and I think we definitely have hit the total number of units. That's 10 years. But we haven't hit like, you know, in year five we were supposed to build five 100 units of student housing I think we built hundreds of, you know, unit units of student housing and so I think the question is, how do we make the space for non students You know, I've said this before I think UMass has to step up and start housing more students thousands more students because we can build 5000 units and we'll have 4000 filled with students and so, you know, I feel really strongly about that or if we're going to have, you know, lifting caps or increasing density we have to make space for regular folk because that actually will build our economy to our year round economy and kind of kind of prevent a lot of the problems we see. And I apologize. I've read the housing production plan several years ago and so, you know, this is a, you know, depiction of how East Amherst Village could look or Amherst Center. In terms of density and on particular lots and stuff like that so I'd like to pass it around, you know, kind of it's been done already by our consultants. We're looking at three stories in the Village Centers and four stories in Amherst Center, but I just thought it was kind of like taste them again for the first time but I really do think we have to figure out some way to control the impact of student housing on the town because we've been hearing from people and it's just, we just need to figure it out I think UMass just has to step up and I think the, you know, the studies show that the more students who live on campus, the better it is like you know, people is trying to build more on campus housing people have better experiences. And so I don't think we can solve this just by zoning or, you know, putting out lures for development because we've seen I mean, we're in a building boom in our town it's not like we lack for, we need to bring developers in but we need developers that are building housing for workforce for families for just regular people. I feel very strongly the same way that Janet has just expressed it. UMass has all this land we have to think about transportation to we want to get into a pedestrian kind of a downtown. So much land off of 116. They could build student centers they could have private people come in and help them build that they could have electric shuttles heard those people to downtown, but the town has to be preserved for a mix of people. And we are really faced with here we're talking about well we could put students here we could put high students there. This is UMass is problem they've got to somehow solve, not destroying the ambiance and the historic nature of the town by overwhelming and we then they can have bicycle paths they, they can have their own, you know, they have their dining commons and we can develop in the way that is good for everyone. So, I think we should stop sort of thinking this center could be a huge massive dormitory over at Pomeroy and then we could have it here and we could have it there. We have to somehow have a conversation with UMass they have the land. They need to do more. Chris. I just wanted to mention the fact that UMass is building dorms they're building them on Massachusetts Avenue and part of the reason they're doing that is because the town. I've been talking to them about doing that for a long time the town talked about a public private partnership, and it took a very long time for it to come about. It took probably 15 years or more for that to happen, but it is happening and I guess I feel optimistic that you have a good experience with that. One of the reasons UMass has told us in the past that they can't build residential more residential units on the campus is because they have reached their bonding cap and when their bonding cap opens up again they'd rather spend the money on academic buildings and they would on residential building so now that they have the opportunity to have public private partnerships. I'm optimistic that they can then move along to build more housing on campus. I'm not, I haven't had any conversations with them so I don't know that that's the case but if this is a successful project I wouldn't see any reason why not, and it will bring in income to them, because the people who are building these units are leasing the land from UMass so that's all I had to say. Thank you. Sure, thanks. I mean I was actually thinking like 5000 beds in Pomeroy. No, I know realistically I'm not envisioning that at all so again the housing production plan had, you know cottage style development. You know next to Taylor Davis there's a slowly lot that's vacant between, you know, the transporter building and then Taylor Davis and it's a few acres and so it was envisioning you know like 40 to 50 units cottage level, two and a half three stories you know third story under a roof. You know, and to me that's an appropriate development there. I think my concern is that the demand for you know by students for housing would overwhelm with development like that so even if we say wow that's a nice scale. It can be a mix of bedroom types it could attract all different types of people. It just it'll get absorbed by students because they can pay a higher price so even if we think it looks nice and is appropriately scaled, and I think families or non students will have a hard time getting there. And so I think we have to talk about where can we actually allow students and have a student zone or zones I mean you tack the you tack report identified three or four areas around you know the UMass campus one was University Drive. Let's just say it's a student zone and we're going to allow really dense multi family housing. And maybe in the other zones where we don't want the students maybe we require 25% affordable like a 40 our district, 20 or 25% of the units has to be affordable so that can't be students, maybe we try to restrict students. They're not a protected class, and we try to start encouraging other types of housing for non students, I mean I think has to be a little bit of both or many different things so I'm not envisioning right I don't want to have Pomeroy Village become five story buildings, you know I don't think that's appropriate either in East Amherst, but I think in certain areas and maybe it can be, you know maybe on, you know up in the fraternity zone or University Drive or certain places, more along Mass Ave but I think there has to be a little bit of both because the market is so strong here for students is really peculiar to Amherst, you know I don't think it's the same in Northampton I don't think it's the same in other college towns. So I feel like we have to wrestle with that. You mass is building but I can't say I don't think it's all you mass responsibility right I feel like we've kind of been in this problem because in the 60s when you mass expanded we had all these, you know the town developed and then we put a, then we changed all the zoning we said no more apartments and so now every apartment complex is non compliant, because after they were built we change the zoning not to allow them anymore. And so, you know the reflex was oh my gosh it's going to keep happening around town let's change the zoning and make it illegal which is, you know so for 40 years, there's been not a lot of multifamily development. For the longest time in Amherst, you know it's like 5060 single family homes are permitted a year, there weren't duplexes triplexes or any multi unit development and that's changed in the 2000 teens. It really swung the other way but what we're seeing is not the multi unit development everyone, you know things is happening it's not for families or professionals or singles or you know anyone. Thanks Nate. Let's see we'll do Janet and then Tom and then Andrew. I definitely think we need to look at strategies for limiting students like the stick. And it could be, you know, 50% affordable but affordable could be defined as middle income people like I remember decades ago. Concord built all this housing and when people could apply who are making $100,000 a year and this is like 20, more than 20 years ago because they were, they were seeing already that they were going to have, you know be losing the middle. But I also think we should talk about carrots. And so, you know, getting back to Doug's original idea of taking the kind of low density small apartment complexes, like what would be the incentive to build more housing, you know, you know, 50% for families or if it's all students already just more students. And I also wonder, you know what can be as carrots but also I wonder in terms of your problem. Is there a way of doing phasing, like, you know what if they just took one section of the apartments and they were three stories or three and a half stories. You know they make their money there they're not like going okay we're going to make this a blank slate because I think I wonder if we could talk to people and say is that you know a reasonable way to go. And is there enough money in that for you to want to do that. Okay. I just wanted to comment on the idea that students can live and stay on campus has a really detrimental effect on the commercial district downtown, and that when you mass built its wonderful new food center on campus. Every business, every food business in the Amherst suffered dearly for a really long time until that business kind of slowly came back so I think we also have to be. We want students to be scattered in the name of we want that to be part of the community so I think we need to be aware that they feed the, the people who work in this community also so we have to find about I think maybe just talking about, you know, we have to do a little balance so I think we can't be exclusionary I think we have to find a balanced practice to do that because I think our community relies on that as part of their income. Andrew was next. Thanks. I actually my comments were kind of similar to what Tom was saying I think I'm worried to some of our conversations sound like we are anti student and they're the enemy when they're the driving force of our economy so we should you know we should be cognizant of that. I do think, Karen how you mentioned you know the university developing along. I think there's there's, it would seem that there's ample opportunity for more dorms to be added, but we also have, I guess what I'm not something I'm not clear about is the relationship between you know the university and Amherst and the university with Hadley because seems like a lot of that empty land is actually in Hadley, not an Amherst. Certainly if you're looking to develop along right. Bruce is pointing to university drive if you're looking to develop around there that's where it's sort of the endless fields are that maybe there's an opportunity to build around the football stadium as a, you know, as an example. I, I love having students around town, you know, I, we have, we have had some periodically my street and I enjoy the energy that they bring. And so, again, I don't know that we hear that enough in this forum that there is a lot of great benefit that they provide and having them interspersed in the community is really a wonderful thing. I agree totally I always said that the only place I wanted to live with the university town obviously me, my husband teachers there my kids all go there my daughter teachers there. There I've always had students that have lived with us. It's this what I'm talking about is really the balance. And so if I sounded extreme it was only because of the lack of balance that this is causing. It's such a grievous sort of over, sort of charge market for them that I see the rest of town being kind of in danger of leaving the people around me in the center of town. My neighbor for the first time said to me this is the first time that he's really thought he lives on Lincoln. They've been thinking about moving because of what is happening that's, I see it all around the young families my daughter with a four year old son. These are the people that were losing. So if I sound so emotional and extreme it's only because the balance is gone. Obviously, I care about, you know, the students and I, I do think they have to come down town. I, I go to those places to eat to in the center they have very good food, but we have to somehow find as you said, a strategy that we don't lose the town because of this influx of massive amounts of students. And Janet. I just want to speak and praise of the new mass grads that were in the house next to me in their speed metal band which fortunately practiced in the basement, but um, so I, you know, they're had there are rental units in my house in my neighborhood but not many but I wonder if we could look at it in a way that we drive really closely because I know. I wonder if you could pull up on the map and we could talk about it like I do think it's a great place for student housing but it also has the arbors, which is, you know, obviously it's a housing for. I think we should, I wonder if we can just. I didn't realize you can go so deep but I just wonder if you could look at it because there's a lot of. There's a lot of single I know there's a lot of wetlands there because Chris has mentioned that but there's also a lot of just single story buildings like the post office. The little bicycle shop the pizza place. And I always just think like, why can't that go up or get bigger and then it has like the weirdest configuration of streets. Someone told me I think Harvey Allen said that the idea was to create a boulevard in the middle of University Drive. And instead we have two parallel streets with these. Chris, why don't you give us the history on why the parallel street on University Drive is there. Certainly that was supposed to be a road that went all the way through to South Amherst, and it was going to go. You know, continue on where it goes across route nine and where the one university drive is now I was going to just keep going straight. I was envisioned to be kind of like, I would say a highway but sort of like a limited access highway, and they only allowed six access points along the area between Amity Street and nine. And so in order to have access to all of the side properties, they need to needed to have that strange access road on this on the west side. Because they couldn't have access off the divided road. It isn't really is that a deed restriction. And I think, didn't town council have to approve the curb cut for 70 University Drive or something. Yes, either town council or town meeting had to approve that. Yes, we had to go through a process to get that. So is there a process each time to add occurred curb cut. I think there would be allowable if the town, if the town agrees to that to doing that yes but it's not as it's not simple. Okay. So the, I mean you've got the pot shop on the corner at Amity Street and then what I think of is kind of a little legal office with the Zomek legal office in it and maybe a real estate firm in there. And then you've got another pot shop. And then the old printing house with that has the pizza joint and the bike shop. And, and then there's the little looks like a little bank that's empty right next to the slow body building. And that so that's that's obviously an office building. And then you've got the post office. And then you've got the mall and kind of the area between the mall building and the street. I was kind of thinking well you know if you had a 80 foot overlay right along the street you could put a put put a four or five foot housing block in front of big why and turn it into being more of an urban, you know, maybe a mixed use building with the actual street edge right on University Drive. And across from that, you know you've got the urgent care center on the corner, and then I'm going to not know these as well. That's like an extended care home. And then there's the large extended care home that's farther back. Yeah, that one looks like the Pentagon. And then there's the 100 University Drive little square office building that's only two stories that's another lot where that's kind of underutilized if it were to be in more demand. You could probably have a little more something built up along that, you know, along that lot, then you've got the wetlands going north, north. And then I think that this map doesn't show the new 70 University Drive building. It's just short of the mall where Savannah's is too. So it's a little out of date. I would not want to do something that threatened the kind of medical complex that we've got on that corner. I mean I think they're there, partly because we that's what we allowed but also because that's a pretty good place to get an ambulance if you need to go to Cooley Dickinson so I kind of like keeping that as our little in town medical corner. But it seemed to me there were a couple of spots where if we wanted to kind of shoehorn in some more housing, it wouldn't be impossible, I guess, you know, even the mall up at the north in the BL there. You know, if the financial incentives were right, the folks that own the hanger and the greenfield savings might consider building more there, or instead. I said a quick comment you brought something up the other day we were talking about duplexes and triplexes and mainly Joe's proposal. And it had to do with thinking about how we might treat things along certain main roads or thoroughfares, as opposed to how we might think about those zones and this seems like one of those places where the university drive might have multiple zones that are happening there but there's an overlay zone because this is one of those thoroughfares and it's a setback, however many feet from the road can be developed as XYZ. And the same thing I think can happen down what we're talking about in South Amherst on route nine. Belcher town road, but that's a zone where you can imagine okay give me however many feedback from the road on either side. That's a new zone, you know, overlay zone and I think that that logic makes a lot of sense for a lot of places. In our town because I think you're right there they've been underdeveloped over time and we need to give some incentive for those things to start to grow some density. I first thought about that with when we were thinking looking at the RM, and how it's so varied and some of them are really on major roads and some of them are not. When I think about the historical sort of urban condition of Amherst I think about the streetcar. The streetcar route was which I think was from North Pleasant Street near the university down through downtown all the way to where the DPW is now as kind of the original urban spine of the town. And, you know, obviously, I wouldn't want to allow the area and that creates the Amherst college image to get completely redone to me I mean that's kind of. If we value Amherst college as an essential part of the image of the town and the fact that the town image is important to Amherst college to attract people it's like oh I'm coming to the quintessential New England town. That's the area to keep the essential New England town, but the other areas of town I'm less attached to. Right. Right. You're you've left that zone right you're not in front of the Dickinson house anymore. Yeah. And is the south side of college street. Actually not owned by Amherst college. Parts of it are owned by Amherst college and parts of it are owned privately. It's also very wet, the south side of college street yes. I've always assumed that that was Amherst college land and it was just going to be undeveloped forever. So that's, that's an interesting information, Bruce. Andrew, could you just slide back to the university drive in per minute because I just want to ask a question related to that area. You're giving a broad and well informed, I think, summary as we go up on the east side of university drive there that whole zone is a office park. Correct. So and, and I seen you remember from 25 years ago on this board we were one of our priorities and was to maximize the opportunity for the kind of development that we believe was going to generate more taxes. And that the town being very poor in that direction would then anyway have bought tooth and nail not to give up a zone that was attractive to that. So, I imagine that that would be still germane or how does, how does that zone affect what you were saying so far as that side of the road is concerned. Well, I was kind of taking the same approach that Nate was describing where let's figure out what we want to do and then figure out how to do it so I wasn't. I feel like the R&D that's on the west side of university drive has really never panned out. Right. I mean, what, what research and development office parks happened in that area. I don't know, I mean, you know, when early in my time on the planning board there was, wasn't there, wasn't there some project that was going to happen in North Amherst that was going to be an R&D. Was it the eruptor. And then it went away, but it's like, it was like the only thing that I've ever heard of that was actually an R&D initiative in this town. So this seems to have some information about what happened to R&D in Amherst. The reason the R&D was established on the west side of university drive is because there actually was a business that went into that building that is the sort of pink and blue it's belongs to the community family. So 101 university next to the post office. Yeah, so in there, there was a business that did they turned something that came out of the soil into oil. I forget exactly. It was digesting something and turning it into oil so Amherst thought oh boy this is going to really be great and they're going to, you know, grow and we're going to be able to keep them here. So it turned out that they did grow and they went east they went towards Boston so you know they could get more people to work for them in a bigger place whatever. So that's why that R&D zone was established there to allow that to occur. And it is true that we've had a hard time getting R&D to come to Amherst in general. So the floor plates of all the built those buildings are so small. It's like R&D you think you need a warehouse right you need a lot of room to expand and do things you don't even know about that you want to do today. Janet. So this, this is a great topic because you know if someone's going to build the big research and development facilities they're probably going to go to Holyoke because there's tons of space and it's cheap energy and you know it's not going to be here. And so, you know, in a way, we should focus on our strengths and you know sort of stick to our knitting because what you see is what we have. And, you know, we need housing, we need businesses, we need a nursing home, we need medical facilities, you know, but I would say putting flexible zoning there that would allow different things not prescribed like on this lot you have to have a research facility, but to open it up in university in SUNY Binghamton, they have a huge housing student housing thing right behind the this whole kind of strip development of grocery stores. Remarkably no coffee shop anywhere you could find, which is my search but that that whole kind of the whole shopping area is a great place for students and behind it was a bunch of housing and maybe that does put us into heavily. But that's okay too, you know, we need to sort of look at things regionally also. Well, your regional comments sort of reminds me of a lot of the concerns we heard when we started talking about the solar moratorium proposal last year and how everybody was worried about doing solar on farmland or on woodland. So, personally, I cringe every time I see a new another single family house go up in Hadley. It's like that is such good farmland. And someday we're going to not be able to import things from California to eat. And so personally I'd rather build more in Amherst where I'm not on our farmland and most of our town is not really great farmland. I'd rather build it here and let Hadley be rural. So that's part of where I'm coming from. Bruce you asked about the office park zone on the east side of University Drive. Okay, I thought I talked mostly about the R&D side. Okay, okay, that was enough. Okay, great. Yeah. I'm not sure. Yeah, go ahead Chris. So the Brown is now 70 University Drive, 36 apartments and in mixed use building, and just north of that is Savannah's so that whole thing has been developed. That's the problem because we have a flight of Amherst that for imaging that was done in 2019, but our maps are all based on 2009 so there's been a lot of development in the last X number of years that we don't show on our maps. The other thing is I want to say about this is that the BL zoning district was extended towards the south. It was extended to that building that's I think called the Lincoln paper company building that square one and on the right. So that whole brown area and the little white area north of that is now BL, although it doesn't show that on this map. Okay. All right. Andrew, could you also scroll down onto route nine, because we go a little bit west, and we've got some housing. We've got the new one university drive. I guess I was just wondering if there was any opportunity on the south side of route nine, kind of between the railroad and the Hadley line. Chris. That's also very wet that whole area from one university drive south. It's really not land that can be built on. Okay. All right. So it's 20 minutes after about 20 minutes after eight. We scheduled this meeting for two hours so we have about 40 minutes left if we want to continue. Are there are there more thoughts people wanted to have tonight. You know we can have a conversation in a future planning board meeting about whether we want to try to follow up on any of these areas or not. I'm not sure how much to say about this. I don't really know much but I know that because the North Amos in North Amos the district one neighborhood association, which is I guess pretty active neighborhood group that arose after the council was basically created. And I know that donors they call themselves are talking pretty regularly with Cindy Jones and and and her push is everybody knows this fair amount of land and senders become quite thoughtful about housing and various types of housing. I can't speak to her and I wouldn't even try. But I think we ought to recognize as we are talking about housing in Amos that there's a player in North Amos whose owns land and is as incentive to create housing. So just let's just recognize that and and see how see what happens and what extent we should or can engage. Okay, Karen. Zero in on one of these spots that you mentioned Doug, rather than I mean this was good because so broad but if we're really going to make progress, should we sort of zero in on one spot and see what we can do to drive it further. Well, I think it partly will depend on how, how we think we can make progress. And part of that is how much time the staff would have to help us versus having some of us trying to come up with a zoning proposal of our own. And, you know, we. Anyway, that's, that's where I would start and, you know, this was billed tonight as a just a discussion. So I'm actually a little bit leery about trying to make any decisions tonight because the public really wasn't warned that we might make a decision. So, right. So, okay, so I see Janet's hand and I see Tom's hand. So I really, I think this has been a great discussion and I really appreciate what people are saying and just sitting around and talking. And I would love to do a discussion, or maybe not a two hour meeting about design standards, which sounds like the most boring thing and you know when I look at the housing production plan I like the scale of these buildings, but they all look the same to me in a way it's the same kind of storefront over and over again. And it looks like a place I wouldn't really want to go and so there are like village center design standards like that different places and I wonder if we could just have a meeting and kind of look at different design standards or like the physical depiction and say, oh we want that we want that for Amherst or for a village thing or downtown because I think that's, you know, like getting even just getting a sense of what it could look like and I don't mean to have everything look like a small house where you know everything's white with a black shutter but you know even innovative kind of buildings need to come in and things but I think a lot of what we are getting is just like the same building over and over again or the same. Or what I see is just like, it's like, you know I could be here that you could be that you could say that's Amherst but I could name 25 other places it could be and I think the sense of uniqueness we have in the downtown is what we keep on showing and we all like and so how can we recreate that different village centers and it would make a plea for East Amherst Village Center which is kind of a really unattractive area that's really hard to walk around. Okay. Yeah I was going to say if we're not making decisions we might want to just come away with a strategy, you know, kind of what are two things we want to tackle how do we go about that. We could take two sides of the coin where would we want to concentrate and limit students to be and where would we want to try to create more mixed occupancy, you know, civic life. Yeah, and what would that look like so we would want to, we would need the planning board to do work on it right so that there is a transfer of labor that happens. That's the question like what does that process look like that they require us to do work could we walk away, take two or three weeks, do some stuff on our own, whatever. I know that a couple of town counselors can come up with a zoning proposal, and we could do the same thing. You know I think one of the, I hope that it's a value to at least town council if not CRC for us to be having these conversations. I would like to give them a little bit more of an opening to feel like there's a little bit of broader support for talking about this about going in this direction. But yeah, I mean as far as I know, one or two counselors can get together and do things without and come up with a proposal without violating open meeting law, right. So we've got to be really careful not to be, you know, not to be, not to be a quorum. But, you know, a couple of people could come up with something and bring it to a meeting, whether it's actually zoning or whether it's just, here's a vision for what it might be and here. And we don't know how you do it. So me. Thanks. I mean, I do like the idea of trying to come up, come, you know have some takeaways from this. You know there is the new building on Mass Ave and we haven't really talked about it, but it's pretty big right so I mean someone would be. Do we like that size that style, the height. We have one he's pleasant we have Kendrick place we have others downtown and I think, you know, I agree with Janet, you know it's on me a little bit with the design standards but you know the way we define height of a building and then we allow utilities on with screening you know essentially a building can be 15 feet taller than what we're allowing because of how we define the height in it, and it has an impact the visual impact and so, you know, you know, I guess some of it is, you know what we're taking away from this is, you know, what do we like in terms of what we're seeing height density massing, we have an example right now being built on Mass Ave that's, you know, pretty substantial and it's like, is that okay I haven't heard a lot I haven't heard a lot actually negative or positive about it and it's like well, could we have two more of those along Mass Ave and that's a huge help to housing and you know, why not I mean but so I haven't heard from many people I haven't heard you know sometimes people call and be concerned with certain projects and I haven't heard much of either way about that one and you know it's it's a really massive building buildings going in. So to me that's you know that's the upper end of what I'm thinking about in terms of scale and density and then you know it's down to like I was saying like two stories three stories in those centers maybe you know a story under the roof or something but not incredibly dense like that in many places at all I think that's an extreme example but I love to consider where could we allow that type of housing where is it appropriate to have really dense multi family and let's think of other areas have different types of housing. The only community comment I've heard was from someone in the Fearing Street who was worried about the noise potentially coming out of that U shaped structure. Let's see. Chris. I would love to look at the East Amherst Village Center that's been kind of in our, you know, idea of things that we need to look at. And I think that there's a support for that and there aren't really dense single family neighborhoods down there that would object to things happening in that village center and there's already a lot of things that are happening. Amir is building and building now he has plans for building one across the street from there. We just saw the 20 belcher town road service and that project go through. So I think there's a lot of momentum that's the word I'm looking for. And, you know, the Fort River School and Janet mentioned the community gardens so I think the East Amherst Village Center is really a place that is is ripe for development and is ripe for help. Yeah, I think it could also be a case study for what we might do in other village centers and I think Pomeroy is another opportunity. I think it's behind in terms of development compared to where East Amherst Village is but it definitely has the potential to become another center like that. And if it has the right design guidelines and zoning that it could actually grow and prosper. Thanks, Doug. I agree with those in terms of Amherst and Pomeroy being some great starting points and then relative to the student question. You know, I would just point out as well universities getting new chancellor this fall I don't know to what extent, or how the town interacts with the school but just with some new leadership, probably a good opportunity to make sure we've got conversations going relative to the interest but the areas that you pointed out at the beginning. Puffton North Village seems like a logical spot I mean you've got synergy with the university I don't know that anybody except for students are going to want to live there anyway. So if we think of this as kind of two zones we've got maybe East Amherst as a logical spot for some of the design standards, you know, testing some of the waters, building something that may be more of more interest to maybe more accessible to the workforce populations and then sort of north of the university being really more geared towards trying to make this more make it able to be able to build some greater student density in the housing. I guess with the north of the university area that would we want to limit that area to students or would we want to make it an area that's intended for students but if there are others that want to live there. Would that be prohibited, because I don't I don't know who's living there now and maybe they are mostly or maybe they're entirely students but say there's you know a few just low income people that this is where they want to live and it's on a bus route and it's close to where they work at the dining hall at the US or whatever. Is that a problem. As I was saying those words I wanted to take them back. I know I mean I, I grew up in town I had, I had some very good friends who grew up in those apartments and yeah it is, you know it's not just students who live there for sure. And one of the reasons why maybe because affordability of those units so. I remember when the university was taking down north village before the recent construction. There was at least one really moving sort of memoir article in the Gazette by a guy who had grown up in north village. And it wasn't that they were all poor or it wasn't that they were all in small apartments it was that there were all these kids. They were all from all over the world and it was a wonderful experience for him. So, you just never know what, what people value and it's, it varies. Yeah, everybody took care of each other right. Yeah, okay. Janet. Okay, two unrelated things, one of them is about the East Amherst Village Center is. Amherst has great soil, like we have prime and soils and soils of, you know statewide important so heavily has amazing soils but we have great soils to. What I like about East Amherst Village Center is it's got farms all around it and so there's, and there's more cultivation now than there was 20 years ago. And so I would love as a kind of a stake in the ground to say, no more conversion of farmland in that area, but we can put density around it there's no I get a lot of my vegetables just driving home. So then there's more farming going on, you know the Amherst. Remember it was a nursery but it's now turned into you know farming so the Wentworth family is farming and then there's just more farms and more food and I think can we preserve that and do some really good village center, kind of zoning or changes there making it more livable and walkable, but I wonder with the apartment complexes is let's go talk maybe that could be a separate thing like what do you do with these very low density apartment complexes. How do you keep that sense of community but build it up and I think that's a planning process of talking to the people there and asking and what they would like to see what they want to preserve and then we think oh what can you do. And then talk obviously to the owners or any builders like how could you make some money doing this without with the protecting that I think that would be sort of not a, we can do this in a few meetings but to talk to the people who live there and see, you know, what would they like to see, you know, including the owners. Okay, thanks Janet. I see one public hand that has been raised for a little while from Pam Rooney. Good. You have three minutes. Yep, Pam Rooney thank you for letting me speak again. I'm very very happy to hear the conversation tonight and I appreciate you looking at different parts of town thinking about what the potential is for those areas. I think it's a much wiser approach than what we've been reacting to which is a broad sweeping zoning proposal that people are spending a lot of time and energy trying to analyze. And this to me is where really zoning conversations should originate in the brainstorming of the 6910 people sitting around the table. And I'm thinking about these things holistically rather than sort of piecemeal. So, I want to, as liaison to town council will also support strongly this effort. I hesitate to ask staff what their, what their staffing load is and their workload and their ability to shepherd this along but I think with a group willing, as you all seem to be to take on some of the, some of the burden. I'm very excited about the possibility of this. And I, and I would love to hear this sort of. I don't know how you, I don't know how you sort of summarize, but I think someone could probably do a good job of summarizing this approach, as opposed to what's trying to happen now. Otherwise, thank you. Thank you, Pam, Bruce. I just want to ask what's here. Can you bring that up and then it's basically the big blank RN between strong street and and till then it's basically the reason I'm asking is it's, it could be an extension of the RF zone. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Just riddle there. Yes, I, I'm sorry, Chris. It's till then. Oh, sorry. Isn't that that's in there. Oh, Olympia. Oh, Olympia Oaks is back here. Yes. It was it's a big bank area and the reason. Yes. Yeah. I was, I was just thinking that that the one zone that we have in town that is designated for the type of housing for students at least that we're talking about is that RF zone. But part of the problem is that letters parcels and so forth there, there's most of the parking or all of the parking is being put to a put to use, so to speak, so trying to find trying to enable that area to become more more usefully exploited for housing. I was thinking what, what, what opportunities exist beyond the Browns. It's already there and there's this big white gap in the map that looks very interesting. I just wanted to comment in response to Bruce, that the RF zone is mostly owned by the university. There are really just two parcels there that are privately owned. And those are both, one of them was developed by archipelago and the other one is about to be developed by archipelago so there's really not much, even though it looks like there's a lot of land up there there's not much that can actually be developed, unfortunately, but I also wanted to say something not with regard to what Bruce said, I wanted to say that I think that the conversation here that we've had tonight is very much in the context of our master plan because we're looking at areas that are already developed and we're thinking about how could we add density there we're not looking out into the hinterlands and thinking about how we can sort of scatter more housing out in those hinterlands which I don't think we want to do so I'm really supportive of this conversation tonight. Thank you. Janet, you used that one in front of you. Could the, could the RF be a public private partnership. You know, another series of dorms. You know, I just, I think it depends how the university wanted to what it wanted to do with it I think we heard when archipelago was here talking to us about their project they're doing now that a pretty good number of the parcels around that street. The streets are reserved for parking for the, you know, or recreation, whatever that means. So that there's some deed restriction on how that area is built out that, you know, you could, unless archipelago agreed and they changed, you know, the deed arrangement. There's going to need to stay some parking in that area. There's the planning board communicate with, say the new chancellor or something like this to say, how can we brainstorm to attack some of these things like could we help you with a private hub, you know, putting in more high density dorms into this area, we would pay for them and we would profit but you give us the land. Are we in in communication with them. Chris correct everything anything I'm about to say. It's my experience planning board doesn't communicate really with anyone other than the town staff and CRC and just town council. So it's through the town, you know, authorities, let's say that the town communicates with the university. So, I think it would be unlikely that we would ever have a conversation with the chancellor unless the chancellor showed up at a meeting and wanted to make a public comment. Which is not impossible. But but Tom Tom would have to meet and moderate that that meeting. Well, I mean, one of the reasons that I haven't felt that I mean I'm going to take a digression and come back today. I received from Chris. Another email from someone who is claiming that I have a conflict of interest, because I work for the university, but I'm on this planning board. And I've had two previous instances where someone made a complaint. And I have talked to the state ethics board both times, and explained that. First of all, the university is not subject to any of our local zoning. So on state land, they can do what they want. And they never have to come to the planning board. So in that sense, I don't have a conflict participating in these conversations because they're never going to affect state land. So conversely, in my job. I'm working on state land and planning state land, which is never going to directly impact town land. Now, are there indirect relationships between them? Yes. But I'm not prohibited as a person to wear both of those hats since there isn't a lot any direct response. So I to come back to your to your question. The proposed really should be about town land that we can do zoning on that somebody might actually have to pay attention to. Right. I mean, we could do a zoning proposal for you masses land and they won't bother to even read it. Right. So, I think we're better off dealing with the things we can control. And letting the town or letting the mass deal with the things they can control. And so, and then the conversation is really between the town council and the town manager and, you know, the university's leadership however the university wants to have whoever it wants to have talked for them. I mean, I was on the UTAC committee, eight or 10 years ago for a while, as a UMass representative, and there were people from the town who were in that conversation to and the reason I was allowed. I was nominated to be there at the time as a UMass person. So the university chooses who they want to have in what conversations. And so, you know, I mean if the planning board had something it wanted to say I think we could communicate to the town council and if they endorsed it, they might say to the town manager. Hey, would you go talk to the chancellor or whoever it is in university relations that has those types of conversations. So we originate sort of ideas and then people hopefully support them and they can carry them wherever they need to go. I just wanted to mention that this was important enough this this problem of the housing spilling over and having a chance, you know, perhaps being very detrimental to the town. How would they solve it and both of them said they had no idea how to solve it, but it seems like it's there and it has to be addressed. Well, it's a, it's not an uncommon problem in college towns. So we are an independent board, and we don't, we don't have an overseer, you know, so. Actually, Chris, Chris, I mean so we're an independent board created by stake law we have all these different things we can do and I think that it'd be great to talk about what we're talking about but not just we don't have to go through, you know, certain channels and things like that but I do think that how do we elevate this conversation or reach out like maybe we could have the planners from UMass say here's you know maybe we should meet with them saying what's your housing plan for the next five or 10 years because this is I will say, yeah, my experience as an employee is that the university is very deliberate about who they have speak for them with the town. So you could make that request and I'm not sure that the planners would be the ones that would show up at the conversation. Yeah. Okay, so just sort of like exchanging ideas and informal but Bruce I was also wondering like what's the status of your your research about college towns and solutions and things like that because I think that'd be a great thing to talk about too. You mean now you've had you've had a week Bruce. It's, it's the conversation tonight has been mostly about large scale. Higher density and how to find it and locate it. And what I'm doing is more related to what the proposal of any Joe and the Joe and Patricia which is starts with duplexes as proposed triplexes and then converted dwellings and townhouses and stops there. And, and just for a moment. What I'm intending to do, because typically, people like me will say, well, we should do something about this as a comment either as a public comment or as a comment as a member of a board and then with the best will in the world not much else happens. Well, because I'm a retired gentleman or person I guess I should say, clearly an old person. I think I can put some time in. So I've often and discuss with Nate and with Chris but with none of the rest of you really. Because I didn't know whether I do it and I thought I'll talk to you guys when I've done it. It's probably appropriate because if I don't do it, it's just moved. But what I'm proposing to do is identify 12 to 15 towns that are similar across the country to this small towns like Amos. I'm doing it on the basis of proportion ratio of population, total population student population 1.5 to three on relation to median age, somewhere between 22 and 26. 50% and one other criteria that slips my mind for the moment, but I've got 15. And then I've got 10 questions that shall ask playing directors of another two or three others from each of those 15 towns. And Nate and Chris are helping with those questions. Generally, the next step which I'm halfway through is looking at each of those towns and downloading essentially comprehensive plans from each of those towns, housing studies and any, any, any other pieces of regulatory data or that there are conspicuous, but mostly compliance that I can then read, particularly the housing sections of and understand something more specific about those towns that will allow me to focus those general questions specific questions for each town. And I'm going to look at Google in circles so I can get a general sense of the looks like from the air because there's going to be some differences there that might treat some questions as well. And then when I get back from the Bahamas and phones can be used. I'll make 30 or 40 phone calls. And I expect to do that in the month of April. And I'll write all that up. Well, I find that essentially I'm the kind of questions I'm asking is does your town designate a student residential use student some use like that and if it does, what is the definition. And do you have minimum distance type regulations. Do you have rental license fees and and and are they calibrated to equally across all rentals or do they have sliding scales depending on the type of rental and nuisance houses defined and a few other things like that basically probably had a couple more night because you remember them. But that's what I want to do I want to answer all those questions and come back then with some basic understanding of how we might be able to get a better and more comfortable engagement with student accommodations and particularly at the lower end of the scale. Thank you Bruce. So we have, we have, we have about eight minutes left Chris you just raised your hand did you want to add to what Bruce was saying. I just wanted to say, you know, in response to what Jen it was asking me for, we don't communicate directly with the university town staff doesn't the town manager does, but the town manager learns a lot from. I'm sorry. From our conversations and from talking to us planners and watching the planning board meetings once in a while. And here's the conversation and then he reads the paper and sees what's being talked about in the Gazette and the Amherst Indy and that is also read by people at the campus. So there's kind of a groundswell of, you know, ideas that comes forward and that's kind of what I was getting at before because, you know, 15 or 20 years ago, people started talking about well why can't you mass build more housing on on their campus. Well they don't have enough money to do that. Well then what about a private public private partnerships and then people were talking about that and, you know, I just remember the kind of growing and eventually you mass went to the state, guess to have it determined whether they could do public private partnerships and it came out that they could do those and so, even though it took a really long time to get to that point I think it kind of grew out of conversations that the planning board was having back then and conversations that the select board was having. So it's, it's kind of a collective effort, even though we're not going and talking to the counselor, this group, it, it kind of all filters into the university mindset and affects decisions that they make. So that's all I wanted to say. Thank you. All right, thanks Chris. All right, so maybe we're done for tonight. We can stop a few minutes early and thank you for thank you all for coming. Are there any members of the public that would like to make a comment if we can make the technology work. I do not see any new hands. So, thank you. Thank you. Oh, there's one Janet Keller. Pam field Sadler, do you think you can bring what Janet Keller speak or not. Hi Janet, we think you have the ability to speak. Yeah, I just wanted to thank you for a very thoughtful and it was a great conversation and I appreciate it very much thank you all. Janet. Okay, I think we are finished for tonight. The time on my analog watch is not 856. So, we are adjourned. Thank you all for coming.