 beautiful. It was made by a woman in Amherst. Oh, and right at this moment, I forget her name. And I'm like, what's that? I was just saying, Janet, you like quilts? Well, you know, I'm not a quilter, but I might step my stepmother-in-law's quilts for everybody. It's kind of it's a lovely. Yeah, she makes them for everybody. Yeah, I had a friend that made a quilt out of my dad's ties because people wore ties back then, but and I don't know what the heck happened to it. I feel so bad. Jack, I want to let you know that we are live and recording. I have seen Amherst in the attendees. And I have also made you co-hosts, so you are good to go. All righty. Welcome to Amherst Planning Board meeting of February 17th, 2021, based on Governor Baker's executive order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law, GL Chapter 30A, Section 20, and sign Thursday, March 12, 2020. This planning board meeting is being held virtually using the Zoom platform. My name is Jack Jemsak and as the chair of the Amherst Planning Board, I'm calling the meeting to order at 6.35 p.m. This meeting is being recorded and is available via Amherst Media Livestream. Minutes are being taken as normal. For members, I will take a roll call when I call your name, unmute yourself, answer affirmatively, and then place yourselves back on mute. Maria Chow. Tom Long. Tom was not here. Andrew Medulla. President. Doug Marshall. President. Janet McGowan. Here. Johanna Newman. Present. All right. And myself. Board members of technical difficulties arise who may need to pause temporarily to correct the problem and then continue the meeting. If you do not have technical issues, please let, if you do have technical issues, please let Pam know. Discussion may be suspended while the technical issues are addressed and the minutes will note if this occurred. Please use the raise hand function to ask a question or make a comment. I will see your raised hand and call on you to speak. After speaking, remember to unmute yourself. Opportunity for public comment will be provided during the general public comment item and other appropriate times during the meeting. Please be aware the board will not respond to comments during general public comment period. If you wish to make a comment during the public comment period, you must join the meeting via the Zoom teleconferencing link. The link is shown on the slide and can be entered into a search engine. The link is also listed on the meeting agenda posted on the town website via the calendar listing for this meeting. Or you can go to the planning board web page and click the most recent agenda, which lists the Zoom link at the top of the page. Please indicate if you wish to make a comment by clicking the raise hand button when public comment is solicited. If you have joined the Zoom meeting using a telephone, please indicate you wish to make a comment by pressing star nine on your telephone when called upon. Please identify yourself by stating your full name and address and put yourself back in a mute when finished speaking. Residents can express their views for up to three minutes at the discretion of the planning board chair. If a speaker does not comply with these guidelines or exceeds their allotted time, their participation will be disconnected from the meeting. And we can get on to the agenda here. And I don't believe we have minutes. Is that correct? That is correct, Jack. I finished up and sat at about five o'clock, but I didn't think anybody would have a chance to read them. So next time. That's fine. I think, you know, we're kind of caught up. So that's basically or do we have any that that are outstanding more than like a month or two months? I am not exactly sure because I've been so busy with other things this past week, but I think we have one from July 1st and I take responsibility for that. I'm sorry about that. Okay. Well, we'll get that one done. Alrighty. So we can initiate the public comment period. And I actually have to see here. I have to get that view up. Sorry, participants. All right. There is one hand I see up in the attendees. I see Susanna and I will allow her to speak. Okay. Hi, Susanna. I've allowed you to speak. Can you unmute yourself? I have done so. Can you hear me? Yes. Yes. I'm Susanna Muspratt, 38 North Prospect Street in Amherst. And I would just like to commend both the zoning subcommittee and the planning board for the excellent analyses on footnote B and footnote M that you've done in the past couple of weeks. As somebody who's still trying to get up to speed on zoning, I particularly appreciate the visuals, the drawings, and the chart that kind of distill down what the findings have been. And I think many other people in town will be interested in those. We heard a few weeks ago that the planning board was going to put up a website somewhere on the town website about tracking the progress on these various zoning studies and where there could be these images and maybe some hot links and even a place for people to register their comments. And I hope at some point in this meeting someone will update us on where that project stands. Thank you. Thank you. Very good. Thank you, Susanna. And I don't see any other hands. Chris, do you want to speak to that in terms of? Yeah, I'm Chris Brester, Planning Director. We have had conversations with the CRC about this and they are doing outreach and they are planning to put up a website about the zoning amendments and we need to coordinate with them. So our intention is to put something up on the planning board web page but we just haven't figured out exactly what that should be given the fact that CRC is also doing the same thing. But I think that now that we have three PowerPoint presentations that we could probably put up on the website and try to create some kind of comment space for people and maybe Pam could speak to that a little bit because she's more of a website guru than I am. Sure. I'm just kind of waiting for some real solid concrete direction of how CRC's web page is going to complement what we're doing in the planning department and the planning board. However, currently all the documents that are included in the planning board packets as well as additional presentations are posted and you can find them by going to the planning board page on the website and looking down when you're looking at the computer it's down to the right hand side you'll see a little spot that says PB packets and everything in there is up to date including tonight except for I had difficulty right before the meeting posting the updated presentation that Maureen Pollock has done about footnote M. So we're going to work on that and I promise it'll be up there tomorrow in the morning. Very good. Thank you. You're welcome. We have Ira, Ira Brick. Yes. Hello, Ira. Hi. How are you? Very well. How are you? Good too. Thank you. So I'm Ira Brick from 255 Strong Street. I'm not going to surprise you with anything I have to say except to say that when you're trying out a big idea like Obamacare it's good to look to where it has worked for instance Romney Care in Massachusetts. Before McDonald's tries anything new of pancakes or Mclopster they try it in their secret test kitchen in Chicago and I would just suggest if the planning board and the town council are dead set on making some changes make them in a village center not that the village centers are you know ripe for destruction but downtown is not the place to try a big experiment like removing footnote M so that you could fit more housing where in my opinion more business should go. Everybody's complaining there's not enough ways to build more dense housing in that area on Triangle and Prey Street and all of that but people want more business downtown and also to just challenge some of the assumptions as I have said before the housing study is quite old. I heard somebody who's been involved with town politics for many many years saying that she heard today that there's actually enough student housing in town and the several hundred additional dwellings that have been built since the housing study really changed the picture so I'm just requesting one more time that we slow it down figure out what it is that we want to do not have this ready fire aim approach of where you shoot arrows at a wall and then paint targets around where the arrows landed we really need to figure out what kind of town we want and I know that there's some effort on the town council to get that feedback system going but you would not be a representative government if you found that a lot of people in town don't want the repercussions of what would happen if you remove this footnote or allow this you know kind of vague aesthetic design element so I'm just saying let's slow down and do some planning before we do some executing and I know that you are doing planning and I'm not trying to insult anybody's hard work and I can see it's hard work but I think we're heading in a direction that a lot of people think is bad so thank you so much take care thank you and at this point we can get into our next item which is the zoning priorities again we're hitting this pretty much on a weekly basis in February and March and our first topic is a continued discussion about removing footnote M section six table three zoning bylaw additional lot area per dwelling unit for town houses and apartments in the RG zoning district so I will turn this over to Chris. Hello we have Maureen Pollock tonight to present an update on footnote M and then following Maureen's presentation there'll be questions from the planning board members and then there's a 10-minute public comment period. Hi everyone. Thank you. Hi. Hi. Is everyone ready? Yes. Well thank you to everyone for inviting me back to tonight's planning board meeting as you know I attended last Wednesday's planning board meeting and provided PowerPoint presentation beginning the conversation about footnote M which is part of the dimensional regulations found in the zoning bylaw and as Pam had mentioned those slides are from last week I guess that would be the February 10th meeting should be available on the planning board webpage and tomorrow morning these slides will be made available on the planning board webpage as well okay so tonight we're going to pick up of where we left off from last week and we're going to talk about the history of footnote M and how it was adopted into the zoning bylaw we'll touch upon the percentage change of in net change of number of units per parcel with footnote M and without footnote M we'll discuss the topic of determining how many additional units can be added to existing parcels that also maintain the existing use on the lot and I will provide the board a example that accounts for various factors such as lot size existing use parking requirements building and lot coverages and setbacks so I'm going to I guess pass the baton over to Chris who has done some research about footnote M and how it how and why it was adopted in the zoning bylaw in the first place so I'm Chris Brestra planning director and hello everybody the history of footnote M begins in the spring of 1993 when John Roblesky filed a special permit application with the zoning board of appeals to construct a 16 unit development at 22 high street that's the location of the current Spruce Ridge townhouses there was an existing house on the property that contained three apartments and an existing barn mr Roblesky proposed to construct 13 townhouses at the rear of the property and retain the three dwelling units that were already in the house after the public hearing the zoning board of appeals granted a special permit to construct a reduced number of dwelling units only 10 new dwelling units and to renovate the existing house into two dwelling units for a total of 12 dwelling units the neighbors appealed the zba decision and the court upheld the granting of the special permit but sent the site plan back to the zoning board of appeals for review regarding an issue related to lot coverage and the appeal was finally resolved and a building permit was issued in 1998 but meanwhile while all that was happening in the fall of 1993 which was right after the special permit was initially granted and before the appeal was resolved about five years before the appeal was resolved were actually maybe more like three years but anyway the neighbors filed a petition to amend the zoning by-law to require that there be in addition to the 12,000 square feet that we know for the first unit that anybody who was going to come in and create a new development that there be 15,000 square feet for the first additional unit and 6,000 square feet for each additional dwelling unit of lot area for new townhouses and apartments in the rg zoning district this became article 15 of the november 1993 special town meeting and simultaneously the petitioners filed a petition to ban the construction of townhouses and apartments in the rg zoning district the goal of the first petition was to cap the number of units per acre at around seven units per acre rather than the 13 units per acre that were allowed with the existing zoning by-law the planning board held a public hearing on the proposed zoning amendments on october 6th and october 20th of 1993 and the planning board voted not to support the ban on apartments and townhouses in the rg district because it was too restrictive but to send it back for further study and the planning board voted to support the revision of the dimensional table by a vote of five to one and that was out of nine members total with final wording to be worked out between the petitioner and planning staff so what ended up coming to town meeting was a proposal to not to require the 15,000 square feet with the first additional unit but to require 6,000 square feet for each additional unit in addition to the 12,000 that is ordinarily required for one dwelling unit on a property in the rg district and article 15 was unanimously approved by town meeting on november 8th of 1993 about 12 years later in november of 2005 town meeting voted to reduce the additional square feet per additional dwelling unit to 4,000 square feet and i still need to research the reasons for this 2005 change and i'm hoping to have that information for you by next meeting by the next planning board meeting so thank you great moray here so thanks chris um so continuing on so uh this was a chart that i showed uh last week and i i just wanted to just sort of repeat it um because i'm about to show you a figure that is um um based off of this so uh on the left side you'll see uh this chart figure one and then on the right side is figure two so over here on the left side is um really outlining the lot area requirements for units using the existing footnote m which remember uh on the and on the top of um the screen it shows you what what the basic minimum lot requirement is in the rg which is uh 12,000 square feet and the additional lot area per family or additional unit with footnote m which is 4,000 square feet and so over here it shows uh if you um what the requirement for a lot area for three units you would be required to have 20,000 square feet or uh almost half an acre um and on this on the right side of the your screen is figure two and it shows the lot area requirement for you units with footnote m removed and um that would be uh the requirement as shown up here it shows the additional lot area wouldn't be 4,000 square feet any longer it would be 2,500 square feet would be the requirement for the additional lot areas per unit so um here it shows the three units would would require 17,000 square feet so you could see that the the lot area is decreasing while is decreasing from what is required with footnote m and then the chart just shows what what the differences are for each amount of units so if they'll um here for um for uh eight units uh you would need 40,000 square feet which is less uh you know just shy of one acre and um on the right side with footnote m was removed and you wanted eight eight units still uh you would be required uh 29,500 square feet which is um also um uh converts to 0.68 acres and um the next slide I'm having hold on a second see here okay we go the next slide is just showing what you know the requirements would be for for these additional uh unit types up to 24 units in total here and so you can see um the with the footnote m and and then with it removed and so um in figure six this is taking those two slides and showing it a different way and it really sort of gives a give visual and understanding of taking those tables and now applying them to a a column table here so here again you would see um you know the same information from the previous slide would show that you would need 20,000 square feet with footnote m um in order to have three units and here you can see the um this uh the small incremental decrease of the of the lot area required for three units um it is to note that I you see these lines going up here and so I'll walk you through that so this bottom line and it's listed down here below the chart as well the bottom line represents um 0.5 acres this gold yellow line is uh represents one acre this blue line represents 1.5 acres the green line represents two acres and perhaps this is black line uh represents 2.5 acres and so you can see as the amount of uh and then of course the blue column represents uh what the lot area requirement would be for each given amount of units and the orangey red represents if if uh footnote m was removed and so as you can see as the um as the amount of units um increase with the removal of footnote m you can see that the lot requirement decreases and um and so you can see that while you know between units maybe three and eight or nine they're pretty incremental changes in that the lot area requirement is reduced while the amount of density allowed on that unit is increased and um when you get past eight nine units allowed on a parcel you can start seeing a more expansive increase of difference um and of between the lot area requirement and the amount of units allowed and so I wanted to show you sort of that visual um in your for your consideration and then here in figure seven this shows the number of unfortunately this is in my way so hold on a second the number of units allowed per lot um per lot by lot area requirement with or without the footnote m and let's see here so this is just a another visual so this is actually this figure so let me back up so this figure is just showing you just what the requirement is for footnote m and without footnote m and uh for the amount of units by lot size this is not looking at any parcels and armors this is just math so here in figure seven this is using um as we uh is using the sample size that we discussed discussed last time which is that I am looking at 343 parcels that ultimately are part of this study and in the previous slides I list out in the in a few in in the presentation of what was excluded as part of the study so for instance lot sizes that um that only could accommodate a single family home that was removed split zone lots were removed removed um what else uh church properties that have churches town of amherst properties cemeteries parks things of that nature we're all removed from this study and so um this study is only um looking at properties that could uh you know realistically be you know that could accommodate more units um and are you know not churches and etc those those aren't well who knows uh but uh sort of institutional properties that are not going anywhere so so anyways I digress so um oh and I guess over here I I guess I I cut um this is from the the slide from last year so I um I didn't even realize that until now so um this lists what what is excluded and so this is showing that in the rg which is you know surrounded by the downtown area um is primarily a very uh are small or small lots um you know there's a lot of lots that can accommodate you know single family homes but here if we're not we're not looking at that we're we're specifically looking at you know what can accommodate three or more units so here um the blue again is representing the amount of units allowed per per lot with footnote and the vertical axis here is showing the number of lots so um in this first column here um 76 units would be 76 lots could accommodate three units and the orange footnote was removed it would actually slightly decrease to 72 units um and uh but you you can see uh this is sort of an exception um of why it sort of decreased I think because it jumped to the the next available um amount of units but here you can start seeing that there's a gradual increase of an amount of units on a lot um if footnote and was removed so you can see the small incremental change for lots that accommodate that could accommodate three units four units five units six units seven units and then you actually see a pretty dramatic decrease for properties that could accommodate eight units and that might just because there's just not enough of those specific you know parcels in the rg that could accommodate that type of development um um and um but again there's um the the majority of lots that are part of this study are smaller lots and um here you can start seeing that there's actually uh you know um here is a small incremental increase of units that could be uh added to to lots here you can start seeing maybe uh you would argue that this is uh a moderate increase of the amount of units that could be allowed on each uh parcel and um while there are not a lot of them of larger lots that could accommodate this um it it it should be said that um and which is outlined here that the larger lot you have actually accommodates a significantly amount of more of units and that's something that should be considered here why why it kind of gets a little vague here is just because there's just there aren't any larger lots so um i i did consider to actually just chopping this off and not including it but i i wanted to be consistent where i'm all in each slide if i go up to 24 units um so thus far we've only looked at lot sizes in respect of um the amount of units that could be allowed with footnote m or without footnote m and that's only solely based on the lot area we haven't factored in anything else we haven't uh analyzed what the existing uses are on the parcel what the parking requirements are what the building and law coverages are uh setbacks floors building height the possibility of combining parcels and um demolition of existing structures um so here um this shows um so at the last planning board meeting um planning board members had asked so you know i like your maps but there's a way that we can sort of combine them and show sort of the net change um and so uh this is what i came up with so this shows um here shows uh with this uh color range here shows what the number of units allowed per lot with footnote m currently so this is what again we're not looking what the uses are currently or setbacks and building and lot coverage so this is purely just looking at the lot size with with the consideration of footnote m which requires 4 000 square feet so you can see that that overwhelmingly uh a lot of the parcels that are part of the study uh that are in the rg zoning district are this are smaller lots they're they're um you know they're half they're half acre lots uh acre lot you know i would say a half acre to two acres are the majority of lots that are part of this study and so the net change and you'll see all these little numbers i'll explain that is that if footnote m was to be removed which then would require that the additional lot area would be then 2 500 square feet instead of the 4 000 square feet that um for instance i'm just gonna randomly pick one that this like if you can see where my mouse is sort of circling here which is along the southern side of chestnut street is that that lot currently you know could um you know provide uh you know maybe three or four uh parcels current um three or four lot uh units sorry uh currently and the number represents that they could add three more and so that would be the net increase um and so you'll see these gray ones uh gray parcels where you're going to see my mouse hopefully that's uh hovering over the eastern side of Lincoln Ave that gray parcel represents that that's a duple that um a duplex could be currently um constructed there or you know that could be placed there and that with footnote m was eliminated that you could add actually one more so that would be a total of three um that would be a total of three units there and so you sort of get the sense of how many um additional units could be allowed and um this data this map shows that on average we're talking about for for a good chunk of these uh sample lots if you will um you know you're going to typically see you know one or two or three additional units could be provided um and um and uh but then you you do see that there are some lots that could accommodate more um you know this one on oh i know that street i forget that street it's called but um you can see that there are some that could accommodate more um here's a here's one on triangle uh or mass av oh this is the vacant property um that the old frat houses used to be on so they could actually um have 11 additional units if they if they ever decided to do anything with that property but anyways you can um get a sense of of um how many additional units could be added to these properties uh in in the rg and so this next slide shows um i wanted to break down and provide a visual of of the properties in the rg that are part of the of our study here um this lighter green represents the properties that are up to and half an acre so you can see these sort of lighter proper lighter colored parcels along Lincoln um and they're sort of you and they're sort of you know sprinkled around the neighborhoods and then the um brighter green are parcels that are um with are between a half an acre to one acre um and then um the red represents anything that is over one acre and the reason why i did this was with the thinking of um you know i look forward to our discussion at this end of this slideshow is is that if we go back to this slide which where's the line here this is the um this represents one acre um you know once we sort of get to one acre um you can see that the amount of units allowed or the opportunity to add um additional units per lot really uh increases uh in a in a in a more expansive way than for what could be allowed for lots that are under one acre and so another consideration to think about is um combining lots so oh wrong one so um say if you have three or four small little lots and then you combine them and then suddenly you have an acre and a half or two acres uh you know that could be something that could be great or maybe maybe for some people that might not be great um and as i had just said in the or showed in the previous slide is once you kind of get over an acre you can see sort of a real you know increase to the amount of units allowed so it's just something um it's just data so um i wanted to just mention that um and then here i wanted to provide i was all i i ran out of time i i i was able to provide one example um and i wanted to provide a couple more but here here it is here's my one example so this this property or let's see here so um before i get into the property i wanted to look at the existing use on the on the parcel i wanted to look at the parking requirements and the dimensional regulations set such as like lot frontage building a lot building a lot coverages floor and building height and so um here i wanted to give a little calculation so everyone can um follow along here so i am in this example um i am proposing that this this two family home which is located along amity street perhaps could um could this turn into a six unit apartment building and so um we want to um look at well what the what would the lot requirement be lot area requirement be so again you would take the basic minimum lot area and that would be used for the first unit so that would be 12,000 square feet and then the additional lot area per each additional unit would be um would be uh 2,500 square feet so that's if footnote m was removed and multiply that by five five being the five additional units so uh that would be 12,500 square feet so the 12,000 12,500 square feet plus the 12,000 square feet equals 24,500 square feet or 0.44 acres so that would be the lot area required for six unit apartment building if footnote m was removed okay so um so uh i guess uh yeah so we know that it's a two family home the lot is 20,000 that is 20 20 uh 27,918 square feet or 0.64 acres um um and that um you know the the lot area requirement for a two family home is 14,500 square feet and they could add up to four additional units and so that that was uh we already know that so let's see here so um this is um i'll just walk you through this quickly here this is showing 15 feet if you see this line here that represents the front setback the 10 feet on the western least side of the property represents the 10 foot side setback side and then rear setback is also 10 feet and on the east release part pretty line that's also 10 feet and i calculated what the the the building and law coverage would be for the existing use here and so let's see here so the existing building coverage is 9 or 2,624,000 square feet and the um if you go to your table three the requirement would be let's see here 25,000 square feet uh or 25 percent sorry it would be 25 percent um so they meet that and the existing lot coverage is 19 percent or 5,314 square feet and they meet the law coverage requirement for that which would be 40 40 percent and just to say they meet all the requirements for the lot frontage the setbacks and the lot area um i unfortunately i actually don't know what how many floors um are the floors associated with this house or the building height i believe anecdotally it's a two has two floors i'm not sure what the height is and there's at least two parking spaces provided and so for each per dwelling unit there are there's a requirement for two parking spaces for each unit so they meet that as well and so here um and i also would like to put a disclaimer that this i used uh GIS viewer which is a on the town website it's a web-based GIS and it is a planning tool and so this is um just a concept and is not um i'm not a surveyor or anything like this so this is just a quick and dirty estimate of you know what the setbacks and coverages are um and so here i am again propose i'm i'm not proposing anything but i am seeing you know could six units be put on this property uh total um and if so what would that look like and so um so as i had said two parking spaces are required per unit so they would be required to have 12 parking spaces um and so you know i line around here you know who knows it could wrap around this is just a just a visual um there is also a uh a parking um in the zoning bylaw you know an applicant that could actually ask for a parking uh reduction for parking spaces you know to from like two parking spaces to one or or or something similar to that um and so but that's that's a whole other conversation um and let's see here so and also i this was the original footprint of the building and i added another section which is additional 900 square feet um which would total it to be a building with a footprint of 3,531 square feet it would meet the building and law coverage and you know there would be enough space for open space for stormwater treatment on the property uh you know if a if they had like a trash pickup that came um and you know if they had a dumpster or what have you or just bins that you know that you know there i would say that there should be enough room for that vehicle to also come down and turn around you know maybe that would get expanded out here but um since they are well below what the what the building and law coverage requirements are you know if needed they could expand the building more or the parking area or or you know have provide more walkways or what have you um and so let's see here so that is just giving a snapshot of what could um a redevelopment project look like on on a property in in the study area and so for next steps um let's see here uh i would love to hear your input but i was i was thinking you know do we can does the planning board want to consider if footnote M should be considered for lot sizes that are more than one acre or does the planning board want to limit it to you know less than one acre um i would also you know be curious to to determine how many additional units could be added to existing parcels that maintain the existing uses so that example that i just walked you through does address that it'd be interesting to see um you know maybe uh seeing what a whole neighborhood would look like in reality of looking at what are their current uses and providing more examples um to get a real sense of what what what could be possible given the parking requirements and the law cover the law and building uh coverages and uh requirements and all the all the the dimensional regulation requirements and um and then uh and then of course maybe if the board wants to see other examples and it'd be interesting to see what what would what would look like if if parcels were combined um and i think that was it questions comments so um just that last slide was informative i was gonna do um can we have this presentation marine you will or i think it was emailed to you um in the last couple hours and pam will upload it to the planning board web page tomorrow morning okay so i'm gonna let uh well christ you have some comments first yeah i just wanted to note that um when we planning staff and rob morrow were looking at this um we realized that there was kind of a breakpoint around um one acre and um beyond one acre of lot size you started to get more and more dwelling units per property and so we started to consider the idea of removing footnote m for properties that were one acre or less and that would allow infill but it wouldn't um it wouldn't be large scale infill it would be on the order of you know one two three four units per property um and not taking footnote m away for properties that are over one acre and that would do a couple of things it would discourage large developments but it would also discourage um you know sort of combining of properties and knocking down existing buildings so we thought that was um kind of a good direction to move in and we wanted to make that suggestion to you that that's something that um you might consider or we might consider in proposing um you know not eliminating footnote m for properties that are over one acre but potentially eliminating it for properties under one acre that would give you the kind of developments that are more in scale with the um neighborhood and and with that um the number of lots that are eligible are greater than one acre is it what a dozen or so yeah it's not a lot let me pull that slide up give me a second um let's see here which one would be a good one this um your question was how many how many lots are greater than one acre ye and yeah that are eligible um yeah let's see here yeah so this map shows that you know the majority um uh oh i forgot to point this out i pointed it out last week so the lighter green shows that there are 117 parcels that are less than one acre there's 100 um 100 there are 180 parcels that are between a half an acre and one acre and then there are 46 parcels that are between one acre and in six acres thank you thank you um yeah that sounds like a good good proposal uh chris uh dug thanks for that presentation marine whoops am i still yeah i'm fine can you hear me yes yes okay good um i guess it your if we're one example made me think uh you know i don't know if that's enough of enough of uh of examples but i think the question is whether parking and the setbacks would temper or reduce the apparent increase in units by removing this footnote the example you showed suggested that parking and the setbacks are not a uh a drag you know they don't they don't reduce the actual number of units that could be uh added or you know the capacity of the lot um is that have you looked at this enough to know that in fact that's generally the case that setbacks and parking are not going to be reducing the numbers you've been showing us well i would say that since the majority of lots are on the smaller end that providing additional units uh it's only going to add you know one or two or three more units i think for the majority of of of the parcels so there wouldn't be a dramatic increase of parking spaces i will say that the larger lots the lots that were shown in red uh and lots that are greater than one acre that's where you start seeing that that there's a real sort of um increase of units that could be allowed which then um would you know factor in a greater need of parking so if you have now a unit a parcel that requires that could you have sorry that you could have 20 more units that would be 20 times two um so that would be 40 parking parking spaces which that is you know that's that's a good good amount of parking but um i would say again the majority of units uh majority of lots sorry are um on the smaller end so i i don't think that parking would would be an overwhelming um concern that being all said i mean you would have to look at you know where the house is placed currently on the property um what the building and lock coverage uh looks like um but that's i guess that's that's like another conversation so it's everything affects one another but yeah i think for the smaller lots parking or setbacks wouldn't be impactful thank you is that is that good dog yeah i guess so thank you um janet so um thank you for that presentation marina i can't tell you how much that helps me and just seeing the different ways and the lot um just going lot by lot that i mean everything you've done has created a better picture my mind about the effects of this change and i i do think we could look at it more ways in terms of build out and things like that but you know i'm sort of wondering like what what is precipitating this change because it looks to me that you know when i look at the current zoning in rg it's zoned for a lot more density that we see and some you know some of the houses do have you know four or five or six units in them and um you know the idea of adding three or four more i think would really you know change the character of the rg and so i just don't know what the impetus here is because we have a district that's zoned for a lot more density and now we're zoning it for even more density in a way that would sort of push for more apartments and townhouses um and then we're doing it without inclusionary zoning protection of historic properties no design standards you know questions of no real owner occupancy and then we know that there is a huge demand for undergraduates to live close to the university so that will have another impact on neighborhoods so i'm just kind of like wondering like you know why are we there and so the way i kind of look at it is when i was looking at um marines chart about the lot area requirements for units under a footnote and then removing it and if you could pull that up marine maybe the first chart for the the smaller sure oh sure uh you might have to guide me of which it's figure it's i think it's figure one on oh perfect um although i'm looking at a note y'all good thank you oh i can go back to um the last do you want me go back to last week no no we can just stay with yours i i'm i'm looking at one but whatever i think it was on pay it's it's the one that says lot area requirement for units using existing footnote one and starts with three and goes down oh yeah um a little bit maybe oh but it was um next one this one oops the sorry oh this one sorry sorry yeah so you know the way i could visualize it is i live on three quarters of an acre and so i see that under the existing zoning i could have six units in my house you know or you know on my lot and then if i look at three quarters of an acre or 0.73 i have nine units and so to me i think six six units of housing on three quarters of an acre seems pretty hardy um you know because you know that's a that's a lot of people and you know if there's three people in the house that's 18 if there's four that's 24 people living on three quarters of an acre and then when i go to nine that's a lot more people and so i'm just kind of wondering like what you know isn't this you know you know we it seems like town meeting and the neighborhood have come in and sort of said you know we can have increased density to a certain level this is what like to see we still haven't seen build out in rg so why are we here like looking to increase density again in a way that i think we'd really fundamentally change the character of the neighborhoods even at the smaller lot size or you know between half an acre to an acre you can go up to you know from nine units on an acre to 13 or 14 and that's a lot more people that's a lot more density that's a lot more cars that's a lot more building and if it all looked great maybe that's where you know maybe in 20 or 30 years we might think that's okay to be there but i don't really understand why why we're i don't i don't understand what the goal is or what we're trying to do here when we already have a zoning area that's done that is zoned for a lot more density thank you um neat sure thanks can everyone uh i was you know hiding for a minute the um i was going to respond to a few comments uh dug i think you know about the parking and lock coverage i think there's a lot of variables there and i think the difficulty is you know how would someone determine um if they're going to tear down the existing structure and add on so in marines example you know it could be likely that someone may run up against lock coverage if they um you know if they don't do such a compact development so you know you know there's just so many variables so i think that you know in parking um you know may or may not be an issue so you know this this lot is pretty big here it's you know it's it's almost you know it's almost three quarters of an acre so i think on some of the smaller lots depending you know i don't know if it would be profitable for someone to tear down the house just to add two two more units so my thought is they would add on outside the existing footprint and so i mean that you know that's just an assumption and so i don't you know at some point you you know someone would have to do the math in terms of is it worthwhile to tear down the existing structure and add a few units or you know can you do that with the law and building coverage or not so i think that you know i think there's i can't say that staff's examined it enough i think there are so many different options that could happen with you know redeveloping a property um and then janet most of the properties and marines map it you know along lincoln there's 200 properties in the local historic district and so uh it's outlined in kind of a dark gray on this map but you know many of those properties would be subject to review by the local historic district commission so if any of this these changes are visible from a public way which i imagine they would be you know it would have to be approved by the local historic district so you know although there aren't necessarily design standards for apartments or townhouses you know there is the local historic district bylaw that would be reviewing you know changes and then there's a dickinson district so you know that encompasses you know 260 properties or so that would be 250 properties that would be subject to a local historic district review the um yeah i mean i guess that's it i think um you know the local historic district can be a really good tool and so you know there's different layers of review that would happen and so it's hard to say you know if the zba you know also has the design review principles they could could use too as a review project so there are some standards that could be applied that's all yeah and just to piggyback off of nat um you know uh well uh that these sorts of projects um you know two or more units would be required to go through the planning board or the zba for a special permit um yeah i was um okay uh andrew you want to chris do you want to go first um i just wanted to note and i'm glad that nat is here that um our housing market study said that we needed like i don't know how many nate 700 more units many and that was back in 2015 so um what we're doing here is looking for potential for infill um rather than having you know large apartment buildings um at the outskirts of town um or you know on the highway or whatever there's potential for infill in the neighborhoods where people could walk to services walk to the bus walk to umass walk to emmers college um so you know infill in the rg district is a good thing as long as we don't overwhelm or you know change the character of the rg district so i just wanted to add that good to know thank you chris andrew thanks jack um moraine never really thought provoking presentation uh and i'm i'm still absorbing it uh so i don't have like many formulated questions at this point but one i was wondering just based off of janet's comment um and if if i've seen if you show this and i missed it then like sincere apologies but we we have this is all sort of geared towards the number of units allowed do we have do we have good data of how many units are currently there i'm glad that you're asking that um i need to i need to get that data so um which is available um i just there needs to be some data cleaning to get to that so that's going to take a little time to um okay to get but i think that is an important question um to have for the board's consideration of what's there now and you know what's there in reality and uh you know if if someone wants to add more units what would that look like um and to provide sort of real real examples um and to see that on the site scale but also to zoom out and look at the whole sam uh the whole study yeah you're reading my mind i think we've been this is i like getting the delta between footnote m and not uh or removing footnote m but it seems like we need the first piece right of like here's what you have today the delta to what you had today with footnote m and without footnote m um would be i think pretty fascinating and then and getting some aggregate summaries of that so like we are just with our current zoning we could accommodate on paper and additional 300 units and by making these changes that increases by you know another two or 300 uh i'd love to see that um and yeah i'm with you i was pulling down some of the data myself and it's there's a lot of cleaning that needs to happen so like i will just acknowledge like the effort that you put in here to probably clean this was significant i i know i was running into a lot of challenges so um anyhow again great visuals um i like the story and i would just make that that at least right now that that one recommendation of of getting the the baseline units um added if you can thanks thanks yeah i like that andrew so you you only had a week right to kind of pull this together because we just yeah oh yeah that's good but uh so maybe you know one or two more slides and and we'll be home but yeah i see that good uh dug yeah um i guess uh i had a couple of comments one is uh just kind of thinking about what andrew just said um it's it's interesting from it's just interesting to have the existing number of units and the existing number that could that is the capacity of the district uh under the current zoning with footnote m but the actual evidence is is it's not profitable right now to add units in our g because we don't see much happening and i guess the question is what would we see more units being added in our g if we took away footnote m and allowed a couple of more units uh on lots of these little parcels that might spur a little bit more infill building uh and it might actually be profitable and then it might happen because it's not happening now so then the second thing um i guess there's kind of a lot of dancing around not changing the character of the neighborhood and uh uh you know i think it's a question of the pace of change and what we're talking about is would this would this would removal of this footnote result in a change that was dramatic enough to be highly objectionable and you know spur a lot of uh distaste in town and and resentment um because you know we could we could allow a lot of development and it would happen and then we'd have a solution to the 700 acre or 700 units that we need uh and we'd have a lot more people who aren't driving around um but i think it's a question of whether we and particularly town council think that what they're going to allow is politically palatable to their constituents very good very good dug um chris off the top of your head do you know how many you know lots in the rg have uh you know done you know expansion in the last couple of years uh pursuant to very few it's one one unit here and there and maureen could probably speak to that better than i can um because she deals with the zoning board of appeals yeah and they're the ones who have to approve um you know converted dwellings and two family houses and all of those things so i don't think there's been much um development on that scale in the rg in recent years okay uh but i i i like your comments dug because yeah i yeah there's not been much going on then yeah it's a good good observation i'm maria uh thanks maureen this was great change uh that you from what you showed last week and um i agree with andrew i i i wanted from last week just to see that delta that change from what we have to what we could have and i know that's a ton of work but maybe you can just focus on like uh a street in the local historic district or you know a certain certain area is not all 300 parcels and then the other point that keeps coming up that i want to make sure is not taken as fact is that every time people say like okay it goes from six units to nine units that's a difference of 24 people to uh you know 36 people those square footages in particular that option you showed um you know you can't really get four units four people per unit for all these scenarios you're showing so people kind of keep saying you know each unit could have four people and then that's you know that many more parking spaces i just want to be careful that we're not assuming like worst case scenario every single time because the point of this i think is unlocking more infill housing and it's doing exactly that and i'd like that suggestion chris gave where you know the staff study that really for one acre or less those kinds of impacts would be more in in tune or in kind of with the neighborhoods and um i think that's a good point and maybe one study marine is to just take one of those larger parcels and see if you know that prediction you have in your chart actually can come true based on setbacks and parking because it's it may not be like that um you end up actually having that number of units possible due to site constraints for um parking and setbacks but um overall i think it's getting really close and and showing us like the path ahead and i i really liked the green and red chart you show but i think like andrew said just one more step is just like what's actual versus possible would be great because i think that one is just showing math right now but overall i think yeah it's incrementally getting there every week so i'm so excited thank you yeah yeah thanks you know i would just add that like um you know in these examples i'm not getting into how many bedrooms are in these uh units so it could be a one bedroom apartment or it could be a three bedroom apartment so it's like that could also dictate how many parking spaces are required so uh or or could if they wanted to ask for like a parking waiver for instance um so i could play around with that sort of break down for some of the examples too thank you marine and maria thank you uh janet so um i'm hesitant to say um you know why you know i don't know how much buildout has happened you know i know when i was looking at property cards there seemed to be some condos some two families and things like that um i'm hesitant to say that more buildout hasn't happened because it's financially infeasible because i don't really know the answer to that and so i don't want to like jump to conclusions like i think people who own those properties could probably answer that question more i would imagine that you know i when i was looking at property cards a lot of them are owned by the owners live there and so they may not want to have build a you know four unit apartment in their backyard i have seen those you know and i see increasing condos you know close to the core um so i don't want to jump to conclusions and say it's not financially feasible because i haven't seen any numbers and i don't know how much that would cost um i it's very likely that people really like living in the rg and they're happy there or don't want to you know put the money into you know they don't want to invest the money because you know it might be financially feasible they just don't want to do the project so um so i so i just wanted to say that and then the other thing is is the reason i brought up inclusionary zoning and protecting historic properties and neighborhoods historic neighborhoods are the quality and character small town character of amherst and design standards and talk about owner occupancy and the issue of students is because the master plan talks about all those and so i'm i'm wondering why you know i feel like i support increases in density but there's no controls we have no controls on that on what it will look like we have no inclusionary zoning that's comprehensive um there are historic properties that are protected in the rg and it's largely been a very defensive move by the neighbor the owners who didn't want to see the changes that were coming around them and and when you're in a historic district you can increase the density of the apartment you can add on to your house you just control the look of it and someone's overseeing that you know the entire downtown is historic i mean it's filled with historic buildings the rg is filled the entire rg most of it is historic buildings we could make it into a historic district um and the master plan does call for the downtown properties to be protected um or we can do protect it with design standards too we're not doing any of those things and so you know the master plan doesn't say just increased density without these other things it's saying consider all these things and do them simultaneously and so if if the town council had said let's do let's let's do some rg planning or you know let's do some downtown planning or let's protect the character of amherst let's you know do the inclusionary zoning let's have design standards as we increase density i'm completely behind that but i'm bringing up these issues not to be a naysayer but just to say that's what our master plan says we should do so i think we should do that yeah i mean janet do you have a like with the inclusionary zoning do you have some sort of uh a concept of you know that in mind that that you want to propose you're muted thank you father rule um the housing production plan and the housing market study all called for a comprehensive inclusionary zoning um a 15 percent for 10 or more units um in the zoning subcommittee over a year ago we were looking at two options three options for you know how we would do a comprehensive inclusionary zoning i've actually sent two to chris and i think rob um there was one that almost passed town meeting um that you know has i see some problems with it but it's something we could do it's it's not it's not super hard i think to i mean there's ways we can just expand our existing inclusionary zoning to cover all permits you know the language change is very simple and there's they there's a density increase that you get for that or you can get a tax benefit or a tax break so i you know to me i think we're just going to keep on bumping up against this issue of let's but i also i don't think they're competing interests i don't think the character of a neighborhood or historic protection is like anti-density i think that you can do both but we can't do the density increase without the design standards and you know i keep on sending those excerpts from the master plan because i'm just kind of like saying like let's do that let's do that simultaneously so chris can you help me out on on this a little bit nate nate has his hand up maybe he'll speak to this nate sure i can't speak to everything but i i will say that um staff is looking at updating the inclusionary zoning bylaw to capture you know all development except for the subdivision of land i think janet you raised an interesting question um you know most of the thresholds are 10 units or more so most inclusionary zoning bylaws and communities wouldn't capture an incremental change in units you know i just wrote a note to myself you know is it would there be a different formula for ownership or you know compared to rental development so you know there is some things to consider but typically you know anything under nine units is not captured by inclusionary zoning uh just you know it's it's a such a small um you know there's there's not a lot of numbers there um and i was just gonna say two more things one is marina was really gracious in saying she could get the actual number of units and i don't want to say our data is flawed but it's not really well kept in terms of number of units on a property so you know there isn't a simple place in our permitting software where it says you know this property has three units this property has four units it's it's you know based on the property card is based on permitting and so it does take a lot of work and so i you know i'm you know i just want to say that and maria i like your idea of maybe doing a sample area because it really isn't a way to just aggregate the data and then filter it it's really i mean marina almost has to be like every property card and go through permitting history to verify the number of units because a supplemental dwelling on a property you know may not be on the assessor's record so it might just say it's a single family home but it has a supplemental dwelling so it's actually two units so it actually is a really difficult thing to do and you know she said she could do it but i just want to say thank you for speaking up name it is a lot of work it is a lot of work and i think you know the town's getting some new software and you know we've discussed this with staff that it'd be great to have some of these fields that aren't necessarily permitting requirements but would be great for you know planning studies or reporting out on data so there's a number of things that you know i've been speaking with the assessor that she loved to have uh in in in software just so when we asked for these these numbers or these these statistics we can gather them a lot quicker um the other thing i was going to say is that almost every use that marine has or that we'd envision happening with new units would probably be regulated by special permit so you know we haven't we're not changing the permitting path yet so you know unless it's an affordable duplex everything else typically would be by special permit um you know to add these numbers of units and to janis point i mean we could have requirement that they all have an owner occupancy requirement so i don't know if that's necessarily been considered but i i agree that there's probably conditions that we could write into you know the use standards if we think something like this would move forward and we're worried about you know changing from ownership properties to then all rental property so you know i think that there probably are conditions if this moves further along that we could have you know maybe there's a standard set of conditions or parameters we could apply you know to different uses if you know this moves forward but you know i like that idea of having you know having a few different conditions i guess i can raise my hand thank you um thank you Nate uh oh moraine you had your hand raised yeah i was just going to say i i think that part of the zoning amendment work that the planning department is doing is that we're also going to look at the definition of apartments and perhaps townhouses and and then look at the actual section for each of those so this could be you know a really great opportunity to you know consider everyone's comments tonight um as as the town is is i believe is is going to also look at those sections very good um yeah the owner occupied stipulation i've heard mixed things from some folks on the zva that that it's you know really enhancing that particular property that they're um but i can't really put my finger on what the exact conversation was but um andrew thanks jack um i i was just reacting or thinking Nate about what you'd mentioned um about the difficulty of getting that information and i guess is it so so a couple part question is is the difficulty just getting that down to the parcel level right or is the issue like we don't really have it um it it's okay i was gonna say um so um it's in decisions it's in special permit decisions or site plan approval decisions and for whatever reason it's um that some of these land use types are reflected in decisions and are not being translated into our like parcels layer that you know in our attribute table okay we're speaking we're speaking in language now but like um that no one else can understand but it's not getting it's not getting exported into excel into uh programs that we can just you know easily click up a button and identify that there's a supplemental dwelling unit at a on a property or that there is you know um a six unit building um and the way that i would have to look into that for example would be going to the rental permit which is on our web-based GIS program um but it's um but it's it's it's dive it's it's researching different links and different documents to find the answer it's not in just one database already uh which is unfortunate but as Nate had said that you know the you know the planning departments you know we're we're very interested in coming up with a uniform system that when there are permits that are you know coming through that that be recorded so for scenarios such as this um we don't have to waste you know or spend not waste but spend uh you know a decent amount of hours of now researching it so got it yeah i would then i would sort of echo Maria's point of um you know doing that small like a deep dive for a small subset that i think that would be particularly useful because it it does just make me sort of squeamish um that you know like i think to to jan it's original question of like why are we even here is is do we really have a sense of what the problem is like we know that there's a there is a a shortage of housing but i'm i'm now like questioning how the math is actually determined to figure that out and i think being able to say well this is what we have for actual units this is you know again what we think we can build won't really help us understand the stuff much better so thanks yeah one comment i have is like in terms of the the you know reviewing these things you know looking to simplify the bylaws and with the stipulation that we have it for you know we keep zone uh footnote m for for you know lots that are larger than one acre it's there's still going to be a footnote m sort of thing so uh but again that that's more uh just you know a logistical point to this but uh dog lowercase or uppercase n instead there you go yeah jack i just i wondered if nate could or chris could uh talk a little more about situations with owner occupancy um i guess i'm a little bit hesitant to try to make that a condition of of of most uh zoning regulations because it seems like you know if you have somebody who is the owner occupant and they die does everybody else get kicked out you know uh or and you're you're probably depressing the value of the property because if you have to be the owner occupancy to have all of the units occupied uh you know there's only so many people who want to actually live in a multifamily lot so i guess i'm just curious whether anybody on town staff has has had good experience or bad experience with owner occupants versus non-owner occupants i guess i could also see that if owner occupancy is really required you know an owner might contract with a property manager to just manage the complex for them and they'll just stay living there but they won't have to deal with it thanks thank you dog chris do you want to so some things are automatically owner occupied like supplemental apartments if you have a supplemental apartment one of the two units has to be owner occupied if you have an a duplex that was permitted by um by site plan review in the rg zoning district and it uh therefore needs to be um owner occupied that's part of its permit um the plant the zoning board of appeals chooses to put an owner occupancy condition on some units but for the most part that's not a very common um it used to be a common condition but i think these days it's not a very common condition because of the rental registration that we have um i think the zba has become more comfortable with a resident manager which morin could speak to in more detail but i think you know commonly we don't require owner occupancy unless there's some peculiarity about the property that would you know that would warrant that um so that's that's kind of my answer but morin may have more detail about so in my uh experience with uh working with the zoning board of appeals and uh hearing from you know inspection services uh frequently that sort of the the problem properties um have nothing to do with the owner uh whether the the property is owner occupied or not and that the the the real issue that has been observed is that you know the sort of problem properties are properties that don't have any special permit or site plan review associated with it and so for example do single family homes um are a by right use regardless of its owner occupied or not and that that means that um there aren't any uh conditions that are placed on that property for upkeeping and for noise and park in parking and lighting and and um things of that nature and so um inspection services has difficulty you know enforcing these properties that don't have a special permit uh associated with it and there um and so when there is a special permit for instance placed on a apartment building a duplex a converted dwelling a supplemental detached unit the list goes on um that it gives teeth for you know dbw fire police inspection services to go out enforce complaints that they've heard from a butters or uh or whatnot and so it gives it more um sort of teeth or power for the town to enforce um so um as chris mentioned there are you know duplexes you can get a in the bylaw there could be a owner occupied duplex or a non-owner occupied duplex um for converted dwelling um you know there is a criteria that could require that that could be owner occupied or that there's a resident manager um really the other ones apartments townhouses um they don't get into whether uh they need to be owner occupied or not um and so there are you know it it's it has been pretty common for for um a lot of a good amount of special permits that have come through that uh professional property managers are the ones that are maintaining the these properties um and again when there are conditions put on place on these special permits um that's when we see uh that that there is more maintenance and um orderly conduct uh being provided on these properties and has nothing to do with the owner occupied occupancy good morris so permits are good permits are good although i kiss my life very busy i'm just circling back on this owner occupied in the master plan and in the the only thing that i saw was that the master plan asked that we make it easier uh for owner occupied you know uh properties to expand and add you know this kind of loops into the next item with the accessory dwelling units but so are we making it easier um i guess it's a question we need to keep in the back of our minds uh with this phenomenal m uh discussion because that speaks to the master plan unless i'm missing something janet so um so anyway we do need to look at the impact of undergraduates on neighborhoods and that's part of the owner occupancy thing discussion for sure because um we are a town with 70 percent of our population our students and i'm sure people in the rg and the rn and everywhere can talk about how that can work for them or not work for them depending on who's living next door so um marine i was i was hoping i know this i know this is a hard ask but did you say you could do sort of a buildout of a neighborhood like a 3d buildout like you know um i mean not not the entire town although i think there actually is a buildout of amherst um that i saw a thing at umass they did a presentation like a year or two ago but that would be useful and um and i would i would max the the lot or building coverage because if you're gonna you know build six units or if nine units on a you know three quarters of an acre an acre you're probably gonna want to fill up as much as you can and get your stuff as big as you can so is that is that something you could show in a 3d format or i could show that for a few parcels but um maybe next to each other or something yeah some yeah i could do a couple parcels uh when you get into discussions of like how about the whole neighborhood or uh that that would be um very um time consuming yeah when i say time consuming like weeks or no months so i at umass i was at a conference and they did have a buildout of amherst like you know it was pretty remarkable and you know under their current zoning so the other thing i i did recently is i drove around the rg and parts of you know like i think sometimes dipping into rn and i was looking at different townhouses and apartments and infill and and things and some places were really pleasant and some places were really kind of unattractive and so i could send that list around to the planning board if people want to in their covid times a little extra time for that and then also i think you know i think there's all of these changes that we're looking at there's time to mull them but i do think we need to get the impact of the community and neighborhood and who's being affected and figure out a mechanism for that so okay well i see no more hands and again we're getting we're an hour and a half in and we're going to talk about fentanyl and again with with some with help from moraine so i suggest like we wrap this up and if there's any you know objection to that or anybody has you know one you know something more they want to say i'm fentanyl and then i can open up to public comment i see one hand up in the attendees so any other planning board members have comments on this good see none all right so uh we'll move it to public comment and we're again this you know we definitely want to keep you know to three minutes uh and who do we have here pam so we have pam rooney first followed by Dorothy and hilda and susanna sounds good so we got who first him rooney hi okay i'm rooney can you unmute yourself i can thank you welcome thank you good evening everybody i heard i heard a couple people mentioned that again that's net the net between what is currently on a property and what its total capacity might be and i totally appreciate that that could be a lot of work now maybe that's something that a horde of volunteers could walk around the rg and try to take notes on how many units that appears are in each of these buildings but i think it's it does give us a little bit a little bit better sense of um what additional growth actually you know might look like um just in looking at uh a quick question for maureen on her sheet eight um there the title is net change of units allowed by lot size with footnote m removed but in the legend it's number of units allowed per lot with footnote m and so i was sitting looking i i picked one example this is the um north pleasant street you mass property that you pointed out i think maureen and your conversation which shows an 11 and is a bright orange and if i were to read the 11 that to me says that it really should be green and so i'm not sure if i should read it as 16 or 17 or if i should read the number and and think of it as green so that's just a question i don't know if i'm confused or the map is confused probably me um when i think about the the conversation that you had about footnote m applying to things over over one acre um i did some quick math on page um i think it was page nine and the numbers of parcels under one acre are almost 300 so we're talking about 40 or 50 parcels that are greater than one acre um things 46 pardon i think it's 46 i said i said approximately 50 and under under one acre is approximately 300 um and so if if if it were up to me i think i would i think we're we're going to be talking or you are going to be talking about uh accessory dwelling units and my gut feeling is that with 300 parcels that have some capacity perhaps for accessory dwelling units that we're really we really are covering that base of providing and allowing for infill should people choose to do that on their properties thank you pan on just like on the acres above uh are the parcels above one acre i would like to see footnote m retained and and kept in place i think there are not many people in the rg neighborhood who really do want to see a nine unit or a 12 unit apartment building being built next to them thank you pan except along perhaps the corridors that dug and maria's maps showed a couple of weeks ago thank you and we have uh dorthy pan hi dorthy could you unmute yourself please did that work yet hi yes we hear you good thank you um couple of questions um in terms of discussing um owner occupancy and problem um apartments we've had several presentations in uh precinct 10 um with john thompson from enforcement and um we have had different information roll calls from did a study of apartments in the rg which is between amity and the university and um the problem houses were the ones that were non-owner occupied with one exception the owners were away on a sabbatical every every house that was not owner occupied whether it had a resident manager or not were the ones that had two things um where police were called their often student problems and also deterioration of property um and you can just tell by walking up you know if you're delivering a flyer walking up the stairs you know whether you're entering uh an owner occupied property or not so those are but that's why the rental rental registration program was set up and that has allowed uh if uh the inspectors to get in and to say okay you self-certified yourself as having these things now let's see how they go so um that rental registration program helped stop this massive buying of private homes and turning them into um you know small mini student dorms uh it's it's still going on but it has slowed it greatly um the other question i had a problem with chart seven or eight um looking at and i do love being able to see the individual lots and so i look at my lot and i know from your blue and white chart from last week that right now i could have three um accessory units or some sort but that that that without footnote m i could have nine because i'm on 0.75 it's 0.73 acre and you noticed that on your chart you said that that level three quarters of an acre was in fact the mean of properties um in the rg the historic district so i was confused by that because the number that you had written on it was still three um which is not you know it was not that disturbing but my my big question is i thought that the impetus was more affordable housing that by increasing the number of housing units somehow we would bring down the cost and we'd be able to have workforce housing people who work in this town could afford to do it we could have more families coming in but i don't see that with removing footnote m i see um it really making it um very attractive to developers um to come in with it takes a lot of money to build these additional units to come to come in and to build more things and recent comments have been made about did rents go down with the new apartments and the answer that i've heard was no the rents are high in the new apartments and they kind of set the tone and maybe have increased rents in the rg so i see a lot of difficulties with this footnote m and i i think um keeping it in for properties above an acre is good but i think um the exponential nature that you're showing in your your bar chart which is really really interesting um it starts a little bit lower than that um going from three units to nine extra units on a three quarters of an acre um is a pretty big increase so thank you i'm gonna look at that some more thank you thank you he'll look i have a series of things that i picked up that i first of all when they were talking about rezoning out north armors about five years ago i did a cross correlation with the 2010 census with the street list and got a big blow up of xerox the huge enlargement of the of the area on the map and colored it and i did not have the software it took me days to do this but i filled in every single loss north of hobart lane to see what the proportional rental housing the home ownership at that point which as i say i think was about five years ago we were 12 percent owner occupied housing in north armors north of hobart lane and that's one reason that i've sort of been pushing for more owner occupied because in you know we have very low voting turnout increasing one up here for the most part unless there's a presidential election so owner occupied and workforce housing will bring stability to the town and allow people to develop equity but basically the reason i brought up a making the map is that i'm willing to do that again when the 2020 census comes out if people will help me with it or if there is software but but i learned a lot with the map and just be able to see the rentals and then the maraline black and the couple owner occupies were in red and then i had the duplexes in there and the apartments a different color and i still have that map in my closet i don't think i threw it out so that was one thing that i wanted to say that that census whenever it comes out has incredible amount of information in it that may not necessarily be in in the file of permits so the other other two things i wanted to bring up was now might be a good time because marine did put her finger on it the size of the units now is a good time and i've been plugging this one for 25 years is that the impact of a studio apartment of a one bedroom is not the same or even four studio apartment so four one bedroom is not the same as one four bedroom house and especially downtown you don't need to have eight cars with four studios this may be a real good time when it's considering footnote in and they get around out about infill is to maybe getting rid of the dwelling units as a as a datum and and look at the number of bedrooms or the number of possible people and i'm thinking sort of in terms you can look at the parcel that you have and what would be the maximum foot print that could go there and how it would look and determine how many dwelling units would go in it by by what building you could put there and that way you may get more smaller units for for are you please don't interrupt me well you're at three minutes all oh well i have one more comment and okay and that's the fact and this is because i've used it myself that most of the older houses that were built pre-zoning by law pre-1925 are non-conforming in the rg and 9.22 was used a lot and especially in the area of the house i'm thinking about is 738 main street which is 7500 square um i think 7500 square this might be that small and like 60 feet of frontage it was a personage for the second church and we we were able to apply 9.22 because most of the buildings within at least five or five hundred feet or a thousand around it were all multifamily so when you think about these units on the size of the lots down time you've got to think of how many people are going to go in and say that it's not substantially different from what's there and it's not going to be more detrimental to the neighborhood if if you've got a six bedroom house with two three bedroom units in it or a six bedroom house with however many people are living in it without a permit so i mean you've got to think of the how many people of those lots that are under an acre are going to come in and say i want to apply 9.22 because it's not substantially more detrimental those are my points great thank you uh susanna hi susanna hi there um this is maybe he'll just answer my question but i'm not sure because i don't know what 9.22 is um if your lot is non-conforming because it doesn't have enough frontage do these do all of these uh calculations about how much could be added if footnote m was removed do they apply to that or not someone want to answer that chris or i'd say it's a case by case basis we'd have to look at why it's not conforming and whether and whether that would be applicable to what um the person who was applying for something wanted to do so you can't really make a blanket statement about it i was just going to suggest that if they don't apply that those properties be eliminated from your analysis but if if it's case by case i guess you can't do that thank you thank you susanna uh and ken rosenthal please hi ken hello i'm ken rosenthal i live on sunset avenue there's always a tension between housing for students and workforce housing for year-round residents who will be in amherst and contributing to the economy of amherst one additional way we might think about this is for subsequent units to be built with or without footnote note m is to change the definition of family in those subsequent units to be no more than three unrelated individuals rather than four that would encourage those units to be for a smaller groups with fewer cars or perhaps make it easier for small families or young couples with no children to move into those units and help to serve the workforce in the community a little better thank you thank you ken great okay so i think that uh wraps up any other comments from uh planning board or the planning staff on this item which we're gonna talk about next week again good okay so we will move on to uh item 3b discussion about expanding size of supplemental dwelling units from 800 square feet um which would which is 900 square feet of its fully ADA accessible to 1000 square feet including potential changes to the permitting process and we have a presentation from the planning staff we have ben bregger who's a planner in the planning department who's going to present information about the supplemental dwelling units and the potential increase in size great thank you chris and thanks jack and thank you to the planning board hello everybody um so let's see here i can share my screen i have the power point up all right um let's see here so yeah i'm going to be talking about the our proposal for adjusting the adu bylaw that's a accessory dwelling unit or supplementary dwelling unit this was a recommendation from the crc i guess a directive to the planning department to put together a proposal for supplementary dwelling units and i guess backing up a little bit i just want everyone to kind of transition from footnote m which was focusing on the just the rg and really focusing on townhouses and apartments whereas uh supplemental dwelling units are this is the proposal townwide and it's really for the provision of one uh accessory dwelling unit for on only lots that have a single family dwelling so we're like looking at single family lots and adding an additional dwelling unit to that lot and this is townwide um and so looking at the clock now i mean it's 8 30 i had a long pretty long fairly long presentation plan i can go quickly through it um just for the sake of time uh there's some background get it right ben you know take your time okay all right sounds good thanks um so yeah let me i'm just going to start with a little bit of background information just to make sure everyone's on the same page about what we're talking about here so accessory dwelling units um and i will say too as a just so everyone knows i'm using accessory dwelling units and supplementary dwelling units pretty interchangeably um our bylaw says supplemental dwelling units pretty much every other bylaw i've seen says accessory dwelling units um and that's actually a change i'm proposing we're proposing to make is just changing the language and terminology a little bit but um when i say accessory dwelling units i'm referring to the supplementary dwelling units in our bylaw so um so accessory dwelling units are small dwelling units or apartments that exist on the same property lot as a single family resident um they're a fully contained living space with a kitchen bath and sleeping area and they're often you know three categories they can be fully located within the primary structure they can be attached to the primary structure or detached from the primary structure um these are very common and they're often referred to by many names throughout the years carriage house a back house a backyard bungalow um granny flat in loss suite guest house so lots of different names do all refer to the same idea um so adus accessory dwelling units adus are an important piece to the housing helping alleviate the housing crisis they help with housing affordability in a lot of ways as they can generate rental income to help own homeowners cover mortgage payments adus are less expensive to construct because the land is already owned by the owner of the primary structure so you're really just paying for construction costs um furthermore this is a way to provide small scale housing in majority single family neighborhoods and it's a way to do that as an infill um into an existing neighborhood fabric and furthermore it's this kind of sweet spot where it's not as small as an apartment but it's not a large home it's kind of the size of a small it's a small small dwelling unit and it's important middle housing between the apartment and the large home adus also help with multi-generational housing and add to kind of housing flexibility um there's a lot of different ways adus and a single family home can work together um intergenerationally so adus offer young families entry level housing choices adus enable families to expand beyond their primary home for empty nesters that are looking to downsize but don't necessarily want to leave town or leave their neighborhood they can downsize into the smaller accessory dwelling unit and then rent out their larger home or vice versa you know adus you can have your your grandparents or your parents um live in the backyard in the in the backyard bungalow and be there to help with the with raising the family and taking care of the children so they really offer a lot of flexibility and opportunities to just make it easier for families to live together and for generation of rental income furthermore um they have a lot of environmental benefits and sustainable development principles um there are a way to you know include smaller relatively affordable homes in established neighborhoods with minimal visual impact and without adding to sprawl they require fewer resources to build and maintain and then furthermore for adus that are especially the ones that are fully contained within a primary structure it's less energy to heat and cool them um so where did you know this isn't this isn't a new concept at all these accessory dwelling units it's been a long standing you know idea and development um you know in the pre-zoning in this country people often built as many homes as they wished on their property it wasn't they weren't only allowed to build one home you know moving into the early 19th or 20th century you know larger homes often had a lot of associated outbuilding such as barns and carriage and carriage houses um many of these carriage houses have subsequently been converted into rental homes likewise you know car garages were built uh with housing units on top or or subsequently have been converted into housing um but with the onset you know the first post-world war two suburban development um boom you know uh lots were often you know with the onset of zoning it was often very uh adus were often highly regulated and and in a lot of cases made illegal because it was a simple like one home per lot regulation however um in the last you know 20 years um adus have really come on the scene again uh AARP and the American Planning Association have taken a lead on advocacy in this regard and releasing a lot of resources for states and local governments to update their codes um you know some states California and New Hampshire are pretty much requiring all cities and towns to allow adus completely by right uh Oregon as well in Massachusetts um I'd say we're a little bit behind the rest of the country um however the Massachusetts Housing Act that was just passed geez I think within the last month um has some language in there regarding accessory dwelling units um in the Boston area you know it's kind of a mixed bag uh of towns of the hundred towns in the metropolitan Boston area um you know 37 allow accessory dwelling units you know and 32 have no accessory uh dwelling unit zoning at all um and the towns that do have adus they often have a lot of uh zoning and dimensional regulations permitting requirements that restrict this uh their build out and there was a stat in this uh uh report by the pioneer institute that it's really you know it's 2.5 permits annually per town so it's a really not adding a lot at all to the housing in the Boston area looking at this area in particular um I looked at comparing bylaws for adus for towns cities and towns in western mass amherst northampton eastampton greenfield montague and then just two uh in eastern mass lexington and summerville um what I found was you know amherst is kind of in the ballpark with a lot of these other cities and towns um in terms of the types that we allow the permitting requirements special permits for most types of adus square footage requirements this is one area where amherst was we had a smaller square footage maximum than most others we do allow 900 right now for ada accessible units um but often 900 or a thousand is seen and I will say you know just a quick google search of what other mass towns are doing right now like I came up with a lot of cities that are reviewing their adu bylaws you know now or have in the past year barnstable Salem newton are all kind of looking at the this issue right now um a lot of most bylaws have design requirements for the accessory dwelling unit as well and I'll get to that um so now I'm going to focus in on amherst and accessory dwelling units the history of adus here and kind of what we're proposing um so I found that in uh in 1968 is when the ad supplemental dwelling unit first appeared in amherst zoning bylaw and at that time it was only allowed in the residential outlying district and only for fully contained supplemental apartments um between 1968 and 2014 this was amended multiple times and it was eventually expanded to all residential zoning districts excluding the rf district um and then in 2014 is how when we amended uh updated the bylaw to get to where we are now um we added these new categories supplemental apartment one supplemental apartment two and supplemental detached added these uh added the requirements that they had to be one one unit had to be on your occupied there's no additional lot area required no more than three adults in the accessory dwelling unit um they can't be used for lodging and then we also added the dimensional regulations the planning board endorsed this change seven to zero and it passed town meeting and then subsequently in 2018 uh there was a proposal to increase the maximum square footage allowed only for detached dwelling units to 1000 square feet or 1100 for ada accessible units um the supplemental one and two they would remain at 800 square feet this change uh this proposal had unanimous support from the planning board and was viewed as a way to allow a wider variety of living arrangements such as two or three bedroom units which normally might not be possible in an 800 square foot unit um and would add uh house add to the housing stock especially for families looking for rental units and neighborhood settings the amendment received a majority of town meeting support but not the two-thirds that was required to pass and my understanding it was a town meeting kind of thought that this was after the charter was passed and they felt like town council should be the ones to um make this change and um just briefly adus are you know referenced in the Amherst in various plans that speak to this proposal um the Amherst master plan talks about making it easier to create attached and detached accessory apartments the Amherst housing production plan talks about possible buy right provisions for supplemental dwelling units adding design guidelines and reducing parking requirements and then finally the Amherst housing market study uh recommends to allow supplemental apartments by right in all residential zoning districts as a way to meet the housing demands in Amherst um just briefly this is what we uh pulled up for the number of units number of accessory units permitted in Amherst over the past uh five years 2015 to 2019 um you know the 2019 numbers they maybe didn't we made this in February of 2020 um so about a year ago so it may be that the 2019 numbers hadn't been counted yet for whatever reason but you know it's on average three to five accessory units permitted in Amherst per year so um if you're like me you are confused I was confused when I first started looking at this about the difference between adus duplexes and converted dwellings all which are included in the Amherst bylaw so I just wanted to quickly clear up any confusion um and about different uh how they're related and how they're similar different um adus don't require additional lot area for the single unit whereas for a duplex or converted dwelling you you need an additional lot area for that added unit however adus are capped um our proposal is to cap them at 1000 square feet currently they're capped at 800 square feet whereas for a duplex or converted dwelling there's no cap on the square footage however you know you have to meet uh building coverage lot coverage set backs all that and that that goes with adus as well um so for adu you're required it's there is an owner occupancy requirement for one of the units either the primary dwelling or the adu itself however it's not required for a duplex it's required for a converted dwelling or you can have a resident manager on site and for an occupancy limit adus are uh limited to three adults whereas duplex is in converting dwelling dwellings are uh limited to four unrelated as you'll see in our proposed bylaw change we're proposing to change the adu to three unrelated individuals as opposed to three adults and we'll talk about that later um and now I'm just going to quickly bring us around town to show us some of the adus that have been permitted in amherst over the past I guess 12 years at this point um I can go kind of quickly through this but this one is on page street as a 724 square foot converted garage that's two stories one bedroom I believe this one is on best in street you can see the adu at the end of the garage it's a studio and is 422 square feet this is a 900 square foot ada accessible detached dwelling unit on a log town road so those three were all detached the next one here is an attached accessory dwelling unit so it'd be a supplemental two it's 425 square feet um and you can see this is the old an old image of the house and then the proposed rendering and I believe this was built so they basically added an addition and bumped out their garage and added a 425 foot square foot studio and then just to show you that you can add a supplemental apartment that's fully contained and you you might not even see it at all from the from the street you know there's a 560 square foot one bedroom apartment in the basement of this house and you wouldn't really even know it at all looking at it from the outside this is on wildwood lane and then also the the grist mill in south amherst on mill lane I found out that had it fully contained one bedroom supplemental apartment attached to it as well so you can add you can add these things and they don't really change the character of the neighborhood and they don't add much visual clutter especially for the fully contained or attached units so now I'm going to just jump to our proposal so we were tasked with looking at the 2018 proposal that failed that town meeting and looking at kind of reviving that and then then the more we looked at that we subsequently made other changes to the bylaw to allow to basically reduce the barriers to adu development and so I will go over those now the 2018 bylaw proposal all that did was changing the maximum square footage allowed to 1000 square feet 1000 square feet and so what we did is we're building on that bylaw proposal so this bylaw update proposes to increase the maximum square footage of adu's create a more streamlined permitting pathway and add additional design guidelines so what we're proposing is to increase the maximum square footage for adu's to 1000 square feet for all three types and that provides an opportunity per adu's with more than one bedroom we proposed to streamline the permitting pathway to reduce barriers to adu development and reducing costs especially costs associated with going through the permitting we add design guidelines to ensure that adu's are compatible with the scale and the character of the primary structure and the surrounding neighborhood and then lastly simply simplifying the bylaw structure to make it easier to interpret as well so now I'm going to go through the specific changes so like I said changing from the terminology changing the terminology from supplemental to accessory becomes consistent making it consistent with federal state and industry terminology now even as I was going through town by town looking at their bylaw I would just do control f and go for look for accessory dwelling unit and if I didn't see it then I assumed they didn't have anything in their bylaw and I imagine there's developer homeowners that come into Amherst and quickly want to see oh can I build an accessory dwelling unit in Amherst and if they see they might look through our bylaw and not see that word there and so I think replacing supplemental with accessory could make that just a simpler way to search the bylaw secondly we have kind of a confusing terminology in addition to the supplemental and accessory issue we have supplemental apartment one and two and then detached supplemental dwelling unit and so what I'm proposing is to just have three discrete types of adus contained adu attached adu and detached adu to simplify the bylaw even more thirdly we're proposing to increase the maximum square footage for all three types of accessory dwelling units to 1000 square feet and also to eliminate the minimum square footage so I'll talk about the first one increasing one to 1000 square feet like we mentioned allows for the development of not only you know a sizable one bedroom dwelling unit but also two and maybe even three bedroom units and that's in line with a lot of what what other states and towns are doing across the country and we also felt that eliminating the minimum square footage which is at 350 right now allows for the development of very of small dwelling units that you know sometimes you need to fit a fit something within a building or attached to a building in a garage that might not be it might be less than 350 square feet so we felt there's no really no reason to limit the smaller size units and I will say there are building code and health codes that you know stipulate the smallest a unit could be based on like livable area and you know amount of space for a bedroom so it's not like you know they can build you know there are still limits that come into play with building codes so I will go to the fourth bullet point now we're proposing to kind of adjust the definition of the supplemental to which is kind of analogous to the attached adu right now the way supplemental to is written is that it's it's limited to a 10 increase of a prime of the primary structure square footage so that means you could you could really if you had a thousand square foot house you could really only bump it out a hundred square feet to meet this requirement and so if we're allowing for larger attached dwelling units then we thought you know there's no reason to limit the size of the attached dwelling unit relative to the primary structure it's it's simpler just to say that the attached dwelling unit needs to be attached to the primary structure you know because from the exterior if you have a you know for example if you have a very small house say 800 square feet and it's a single family home you could add you know a 2000 square foot addition to that house you could add sorry you could add a 1000 square foot addition to that house um you know and call you know uh and it wouldn't trigger any it would trigger you need a building permit but it wouldn't need any review and so um whether or not it has a dwelling unit in it uh it's um it doesn't necessarily matter if it's a 10 percent increase I guess from the attack from the primary structure um and so we just thought it was simpler to say that and it's again still limited to 1000 square foot maximum um so for permitting pathway we're proposing to make attached and contained accessory dwelling units allowed by right whoops attached and contained accessory dwelling units allowed by right and those would still come with a host of requirements that I'll get to um and if they don't meet those requirements then um they would be subject to review by special permit and could be denied as well so um we felt that you know reducing these barriers to permitting could promote this type of development in our in our neighborhoods um finally we propose to allow detached accessory dwelling units by right with those requirements um if it's a less if it's less than 50 percent of the primary structures habitable space and so for example if it's a uh let's see 1800 square foot home um they could add a 900 square foot adu by right but if they wanted to go above 900 between 900 and 1000 then they would need to get a special permit from the zba and that's a way of kind of controlling the scale of the uh detached dwelling units to make it so we can add we can enforce the these design guidelines and make sure that the detached dwelling units in scale with the primary structure as well and then furthermore we add these design guidelines requiring that the architecture and the scale of the accessory dwelling unit is compatible with and secondary to the primary structure so i know that was a lot um those are all the changes that we're proposing i have the word document as well that kind of shows the line by line uh things crossed out and things added and i know that's probably easier way to show it um i have this table that i included that kind of shows in gray the existing bylaw and in black the 2021 proposal that we're talking about today um showing the you know new names for these things the square square footage regulations right now we're proposing to have them all capped at 1000 with no minimum um and then contained and attached by right with with the requirements and then detached by right if less than 50 percent of the primary dwelling and special permit more than 50 percent so the habitable space has come up a lot that's how we're determining uh the square footage so a thousand square foot max of habitable space and also the um it would have to be 50 percent of the primary structure's habitable space we didn't just come up with that term it's a defined term in our bylaw and is one that's used throughout it so just to remind people it's the gross square footage of pretty much the living sleeping cooking or eating uh of space with those purposes um so it excludes uh what does it exclude kind of everything that's not these areas um so that's it's it's it's different than square footage um and it's a way of capturing the space that's actually used for living i i guess it doesn't include garages for example or unfinished basements um and then moving through this i guess i just wanted to show the kind of some examples of what these could look like in different neighborhoods um and again so this is in Lincoln Avenue um a house that has you know the square footage is written here 1500 or 1850 however these are you know two or three story buildings so they have 2280 square foot of liv livable area and so these how these uh units these properties they could build a 1000 square foot adu detached adu in their backyard by right is what we're proposing here we this is an orchard valley another neighborhood where it's all single family homes often on lots that extend quite far back um so there are rooms in the backyard for accessory dwelling units this house has 1200 square foot of livable area so they could build you know a 625 square foot um accessory dwelling unit by right and if they wanted to go up to a thousand um we're proposing that would be by special permit and then here's in Echo Hill North kind of same same concept you know that these these folks could build a 900 square foot adu detached adu by uh we're proposing by right if they wanted to go to 1000 it would be by special permit over here they have way a much more livable area so they could go up to the 1000 square foot limit if they wanted um by right is what we're proposing so those are a few examples um and I'll almost at the end here um you know well I assume we'll post this PowerPoint online here's a host of resources all about accessory dwelling units if you're curious about what's going on nationally or in the state um you can put these links for more information um and with that I conclude and I just want to thank you all and welcome your questions for feedback so thank you for bearing with me through that long presentation appreciate it Ben that was very good appreciate it thank you and we can open it up for discussion Maria thank you so much Ben um I was part of that whole 2018 start uh and so is Jack I think we might be willing to or part of the um original dwelling unit um increase to the to town meeting and um I think adding the by right is a great thing to add because it unlocks it and then when you added that provision of that up to 50 percent it's still by right it's a good protection layer because I think we sort of thought through like what if you have a small 800 square foot house and then you put a thousand square foot supplemental dwelling that doesn't make sense so I think all the little tweaks you made um make a lot of sense and um I hope this moves forward because it was already close but now you've improved it even more so um yeah thank you so much for the presentation and um that's it thanks Maria uh Doug yeah um I had sent some questions to Chris uh a couple of days ago and I'm we don't need to go through them now but I'm just helping Ben and Chris can send me replies to that to that email thank you good Janet Doug I'm interested in your questions I have a couple of questions myself um one of the questions was um so if if this is by right does that go to the building to the building commissioner or is it going to come to the planning board I mean are they is it just you know they're just looking for a building permit or in this case that's what we're proposing okay I thought so um I just pictured a lot of planning board hearings that makes me feel better um and then I'm I have some concerns about the I'm getting rid of the minimum 350 square feet um I'm channeling my grandmother who grew up in a tenement on the lower east side and I'm picturing three people living in a very small house and so um or you know or a family you know if they're related people and I just wondered it just seems like you know how small can it go um under like state codes and things like that so I have a concern that going below 350 it might just become inhabitable for large groups of people and we're back to a situation where led to zoning right um so is there a minimum size for a unit under state law that that is somewhere in the building code and I'm not sure offhand 350 was it maybe it's 300 so I'd love to get the it's it's whatever it is it's less than 350 because there's been cases where that minimum comes into play and people are stuck isn't it the health code that has a minimum on the size of habitable bedrooms inside I think it is the health code and I think Rob more quoted to us something like you could have a dwelling unit that was like 150 square feet so he's he's here if he um is interested in answering that question okay Rob he's got his hand up yeah I did have my hand up oh there he is yeah so you know the the building code does allow a dwelling unit to get pretty small can be down to about 180 square feet we've worked that through multiple times with the idea of a tiny home um you know so you know there are it gets complicated because you know each space in a dwelling unit has a minimum square footage but that's what it amounts to now the the sanitary the state sanitary code that are health inspectors in force has a little different standard and that that's based more on the occupancy so you know that starts at 150 square feet and then goes up 100 square feet for every occupant um and you know that might have been years ago where maybe the 350 was generated from but we thought it was a good idea to to think about eliminating the lower threshold because in every other use group you know that we typically deal with these types of permits like converted dwellings the the smaller size unit the minimum is there 350 so this would be something different that that could be offered in a bio-right use um and we know units can be that small and be successful I mean I think we know uh spring street is permitted with units that are you know about 240 260 square feet on the smaller side so it is something that you know could be done to create a usable dwell a livable dwelling unit okay that that's very helpful thank you um the other question I had was I I I can look at my window and I can see three houses that are 1,000 square feet and there's like that that's probably the predominant square footage of my neighborhood and so so if they wanted to build a house that was more than 500 square feet they would have to get a special permit would would you probably would they probably be building like a two-story cottage I mean it seems sort of strange to have like two ranch houses on the lot like what is it that you would expect them to do differently or why do you want to do that extra protection and scrutiny who wants to take that rob or chris or ben sure um well I'll go to shot and then can add to it but you know I think what we're envisioning is you know the situation that we can't account for a sloping lot that maybe you know there's a an expansion of a footprint but the square footage gets bigger because a lower level gets used or is incorporated into that we know we've seen examples of spaces over garages that can that can be part of a improvement to a property that includes something both for the the primary residence and for creating an accessible or accessory dwelling unit so I think we're just trying not to limit or totally lock out the potential for something to be expanded if it's appropriately done to a design and standard you know to to limit that possibility and what the zoning board of appeals to the special permit process find that it's you know suitable for its location and and the building that it's being associated with so I was kind of going between thinking like two ranches on the same property would look weird so maybe you would want to design it in a way that doesn't look so strange and and then the other hand I feel like if you have a thousand square foot house and you want to build the 750 square foot um adu why would they have to go through more procedure than somebody with a larger home because that seems sort of unfair to me on the other side so I was kind of bad my thinking is kind of going between those two things my um my last question is what the phrase secondary to the primary structure like what does that mean um so we we were playing around with that for a little while um the idea is that kind of gets to your point exactly that it uh the detached dwelling unit you know should look secondary or you know um to the primary structure I guess maybe maybe secondary is not the right word but I guess it should be clearly like not the main house it should be um you know something that's uh I don't want to say subordinate or just like yeah yeah it's fine it's a fancillary yeah is it a legal term or is it just like a I just didn't get it in a way so I think it gets to the scale and and it gets to the scale of the house I guess okay okay and then my my comment is I thought that I would tighten up the language about um the design maybe saying the same architectural style or match the appearance of the primary house and and you know so I felt like that would be make it kind of fit in more and then I also wondered thinking about Maria like maybe you would want to have something that looks a little different and so I just kind of tossing that back that's just a comment thank you um believe Maria yeah Maria you had something okay sorry no I was gonna mention tiny homes really quickly that that those are a new type of home that's under 400 square feet and there's an appendix q bylaws specifically to that type of housing and it's a new trend for people who don't want to build abus but build really tiny homes so I I'm glad that minimums take it away that's it very good Nate sure yeah I think the um Janet your questions are good I think the difficulty with some of these is you know how do you regulate the design and do you really want to prescribe something that has to look like the existing single family home you know so when this was discussed previously um by the local historic district commission and then the historical commission at one point for a property you know some of the members felt like why why wouldn't we want to promote contemporary design like what's wrong with you know a structure that has a different type of siding and roofline then you know why have it be a gable and you know greek revival style like why do we have to match that style for an accessory dwelling unit so I think that it's a really difficult thing to have you know some design guidelines then and then you know the balance of being overly prescriptive so I understand right secondary to the main house you know may not really say anything um so then is it you know is it the massing is it the entry ways is it the location on the lot so for instance someone could put an accessory dwelling unit on the front lawn you know and that's permissible uh you know they could put an addition on the house so you know those a thousand square foot ranches you have someone could buy it and tear the roof off raise the roof make it a whole you know second story house and then also put a two car garage on so they could you know almost triple the size of the footprint of the house without even doing anything other than a building permit and um and there's not many design guidelines there so I think with the accessory dwelling units it's interesting right the balance of how much do you regulate the design and character and then what do you allow for creativity of the of the home homeowner or developer and so you know we've at one point we're talking about doing some 3d mock-ups and it's really difficult because if we show something um a design people might say oh that's what it'll look like but it may not at all I mean it may look completely different it could be a modular structure that's brought in or it could be you know something different so I think you know I think those are good questions it's you know it's you know how much do we want to regulate that or have some design guidelines if not if they're not standards you know what what do we have to help with you know staff make those decisions when there's an application so I have a general question say you want to convert your two-car garage into this adu but then you want to you still want to garage and you do uh you know an unattached you know structure out there for a garage is that that be a by right situation I'm seeing Chris and Rob nod their heads yes yes yeah I mean because you know you've got all the water and sewer you know within the main home reasonable thing to do yeah and again just to clarify you know we're still talking about meeting setback requirements building coverage lot coverage all all of that um is still still in play it's just I guess the only difference with an adu is that the additional a lot area per unit does not come into play so by the way my computer must be really buggered up because I see nobody's pictures right now yeah I see no I see no videos except myself sorry about that so people are nodding and I don't see it that's that's why and any other comments from the board I see none uh we can go whoop uh Johanna Johanna just popped up thanks sorry I've been quiet tonight just kind of taking it all in um but I I don't know I'm really impressed with the work that the planning staff has done and I really appreciate all the presentations and the thoughtfulness that has gone into preparing these proposals absolutely and so I think we can open up to public comment on this I see um Dorothy Pam yep hi Dorothy wait a minute I didn't do it yet oh sorry hi hi Dorothy hi how are you very well I I I love this little presentation and even the pictures on the front page with the orange part showing where the addition is it just clarifies it so much what I like is this is family housing it is workforce housing it's affordable it has design guidelines and it's connected to owner occupied so I see it as really being very very suitable to the RG um I have a lot of grave doubts about removing footnote M but I think this would be great and I think giving the examples was wonderful so um thank you very much yeah especially where you know applies it's as Ben said is town-wide uh so I'm going to allow Pam Rooney to speak next oh okay we have two more yeah I see hi Pam hello if to keep the pams differentiated here I know uh nice presentation from Ben thank you very much the charts were really great in just um the owner occupancy uh differential between ADUs deflecting converted dwellings that's very handy so those two tables went to the heart of some of the questions I bothered Chris Brown I started off earlier earlier this week so thank you very much for those um I support uh accessory dwelling units in the many shapes and forms that are being suggested here I think it's very much very much a New England tradition I actually I actually am more in favor of the attached and and what the other one contained simply because that is in fact more the the style than having a detached building again it's greener it's the the reduction of perimeter in envelope is makes sense all of that and it's very easy to make the the add-on look like the back room of an old farmhouse so um thanks for all the hard work on that I'm sure there'll be some time to go through the text and you know look for little odds and ends but I think in general it seems really solid and should work very nicely in uh every every residential district except fraternity thank you thank you uh Hilda hi Hilda hi um all right I'm gonna put another bug in your ointment here um it's coming again from my 60 years experience in this town and that's what's an owner what is an owner and apparently there's no site plan review involved here it also there's no conditions on any kind of a permit it would be Rob who would decide and so when I ask what is a young an owner we have houses that are bought by daddy who lives in Boston and weather who both maybe live somewhere else and have a kid that goes to you mass who he and three friends live in the main house and they just bought this house and there's a thousand square foot outhouse in the backyard which that's for a lot of kids in that thousand square foot so is this kid considered that the house's owner occupied how are you going to define it and how are you going to enforce it and how are you going to limit the not to become a student complex with no no parents or anybody around supervising whether the trash gets taken out so I'm just raising that as an issue because Rob looks like he's stunned same thing can happen now um you can have a house that's um a single family house and the supplemental apartment a detached apartment can be built in the backyard whether it's a garage or whatever it is and um you know you could have that kind of situation now so you know we kind of rely on rental registration and other things to control those um situations and um complaints from neighbors etc but maybe Rob has a better answer uh not not a better answer but um you know it is something that we have encountered uh our bylaw does define an owner as uh someone that establishes principal residence at the property principal residence is also defined on how you achieve that uh so I guess the the scenario that we're seeing is that the you know in very few cases but we have seen students be named owners of the property so it isn't as simple as a parent buying a property which happens all the time but that's not an owner occupied situation but uh where a student is uh you know either a member of an LLC or an owner of the property they could establish principal residence there and satisfy the order occupancy requirement and that has happened great um onto ira please hello ira hi how are you again i'm ira brecker 255 strung street um the idea of tiny houses in yards uh strikes me as more feasible as uh darthy was saying than removing footnote m it seems more of a controlled and deliberate thing that an owner would want to do for the various situations within their family um but also if i was a homeowner that wanted to consider building a thousand foot building in my backyard and even though i own the land it's not cheap to build a building i would still want to know the supply and demand situation um is it going to be students that are mostly knocking on my doors is there enough housing now so that all of these little houses that it will fulfill you know the dream of lowering prices because there's such a glut somebody i know this morning that's been involved in town politics for many years was just describing that there actually might be a glut of student housing if we permit something to happen to increase the supply like this and don't understand the demand um that's a disservice to every homeowner that's going to invest in one of these buildings um so again it needs to be studied i commend um the study and then i thought that was a really good job so thank you so much very good thank you uh going back to the planning board or Nate you have your hand up sure i think ben mentioned it and i just wanted to reiterate it that these accessory dwelling units you know we you know we would call them lowercase a affordable not capital a affordable so they're not deed restricted and they wouldn't you know necessarily count on the town subsidize housing inventory so they wouldn't be affordable you know as recognized by the state it's just there's too much uh you know too much work to do this for an accessory dwelling unit so even the housing production plan you know had said that these could be affordable because you know by their size or what have you they could be rented or purchased at a lower price so there's nothing i mean you know when i was talking it just you know it's it's interesting you know and pant Dorothy said that um they'd be affordable and i think they could be but you know these aren't necessarily deed restricted units and i think in most cases they never would be you know they would just be affordable possibly because of their smaller size they would not be rented for as much or you know i just wanted to say that because it'd be very difficult to have these be a unit that's on the town subsidize housing inventory it would it would um you know that there's a lot of work involved there and they're typically not that type of unit so um you know the landtruster there could be other mechanisms that could be used to keep them affordable but in terms of the town you know the state recognition recognition of them that's unlikely thank you Nate okay i see more hands up from the attendees Dorothy and Hilda is that just a quick follow-up or i don't know i generated i generated some more comments hi Dorothy hi yes i think that's i i meant small a affordable but it made me think when the this was brought to the town council was it there was a talk about more affordable housing and i think most of us thought oh housing that doesn't cost so much so people can afford to either buy it or rent it um i think i'd probably have to go back and look to see what that charge was because um when you talk about affordable with the capital a i know that the for example even the small number of units at 132 northampton they have to hire a company to do it it's it's huge searches all kinds of paperwork and you're right a homeowner's not going to do that for one or two accessory dwellings in the backyard it was not really in position to do that so so there was i thought the connection was that i really have to double check it that if there was an increase in the housing supply that the cost would somehow go down but not be capital a necessarily affordable that is done in a more formal process so that's thank you for bringing up that possible confusion thank you thank you pam and hilda has another comment but hi hilda hi i i just was card to me listening to this because like he's thinking about owner occupied would it be possible down the line via other sections of the bylaw that this accessory dwelling unit could be also on a park occupied as a co-op arrangement could that be like to owed or would that come under a duplex bylaw if somebody wanted to make two owner occupied units on the parcel is that is that going to be something that what might be possible down the line like under fifty age fifty two fifty or something like that again i can't i can't see people um chris breastrup has her hand up um i think the permitting might need to be changed but um my first initial reaction is that the zoning bylaw doesn't really deal with um the owners the types of ownership like condominiums we don't talk at all about condominium so if that's what you're referring to things like you know one of the or condominium could be possible but it would be a legal um a legal mechanism outside of zoning and that that would be my opinion but would the zoning allow that to happen if if you've got an extra unit that's not becomes non-conforming as a duplex we probably need to ask our legal counsel about that but it seems like it would be possible unless rob has a different point of view yeah there's nothing that prohibits the condominium but the form of ownership as chris said isn't regulated by zoning so there's nothing that would prohibit that from occurring even right now because that sounds like a good idea when you get two units without the added square footage required for duplex to owner occupied units thank you helta very good uh janet so um i was going to say which seems strangely pertinent right now is i went to a presentation by chris lee about backyard ad use and he did point out that you could have um an adu and then you could turn it into a condo so you know the property would be owned in common and they could be the condom you know the adu could be sold as a condo or the original house and so you know there is a way to change the you know change that from owner occupied with the adu to just two condos sharing the same property but that is something that just is not covered by our zoning so yeah i will say i'll just jump in you know habitat did that um on the duplex on 235 east pleasant street and they did that also further up on north pleasant and i think you know it's like a convex it can be difficult if there's common areas like the driveway you know if there's not you know if it's a shared driveway and shared um you know storage areas for trash or other and recycling then it can be difficult to you know come up with a condominium association just on two units so you know habitats done it they you know it is a lot of work the town worked with them with the one on um you know the hawthorne property and it is a lot of work for two just for two units and especially depending on how the property is configured you know it would be easier right if it's a detached structure accessory dwelling um but you know i do think that something that the zoning doesn't regulate in it you know i think legally it depends on i think a number of things number of factors with the property owners and also the banks uh depending on how they would view it you know the mortgage holder on the property but it is possible good good um rob yeah i just wanted to clarify uh an earlier comment that you know i i was responding to what i thought hilda was asking about a duplex example um when we're talking about the accessory dwelling unit permitted under this section even the way we're drafting it now uh when you create a condominium and put them both into private separate ownership it's no longer an accessory situation so you ended up with two principal uh dwelling units essentially so that would be something different so i think we'd have to to janet's comment if we wanted to um embrace that possibility we want to build we would have to build that into the bylaw that doesn't uh wouldn't permit that now because just the simple relationship between principal and accessory use good okay so i see no further hands up so i'm wondering we're definitely going to take up footnote m uh next week what's what do you see the action item here uh chris for for this item the adu item i don't think there is an action item i think people need to have a chance to look at the material that's been posted and sent to them and then maybe next week they'll be ready to um decide if that's what they want to go forward with okay good so i'm also you know so we're like uh three hours into this and the and the next one the bl um is a big one i'm i'm wondering if uh we could you know take a a poll here do people want to gut out you know more complicated item uh you know at this time at night um and so that that's just my opinion i'll forge for it but i i feel like the there's been a lot of a lot of heavy lifting here by everyone and i just want to make sure that it you know it doesn't fall on deaf ears if we're doing this presentation uh given um you know it's 9 30 so often it's going to do a quick straw poll um is that sound reasonable to you chris my recommendation would be to um ask nate's for baron's and put this off till next wednesday if nate is available to present it and i think we'll all be um you know much more bright eyed and ready to accept the new ideas okay nate what do you say uh sure maybe maybe i'll even update the presentation a little bit then okay oh you know again i i know we have a lot uh but i just um so i mean i i think you know i i think the slides were at least emailed to the board and you know um like with the adu if there's comments you know board members have comments individually you can also send them to staff and you know that could help you know refine the presentation okay well i know they weren't in our package i know i'm i'm they're they're in my email i'm sure if you say so uh i'm behind any here let me get anybody want to put a hand up on the board with regard to moving forward with with the next item which is dealing with the bl uh janet um i would love to start next week with the bl i'm i'm tired yeah good uh and maria i wonder if we could just do two topics per meeting so you know three was a bit of a stretch i think so maybe next week start with bl and choose one of the other two well um yeah i guess three you know uh we can always do what we're going to do tonight it looks like uh andrew yeah i would like to postpone it i think actually maria that's a pretty good suggestion just to help keep us focused um yeah i would i would support that okay all right with that uh let's put um the bl and we can kind of discuss what's in order because i feel like we're close on them um it'd be nice to kind of and i know bl was the first one that that the zoning subcommittee took on so you know maybe we can talk chris and work out what what order uh we don't want to do and kind of get some feedback on that but um we'll be meeting uh next next wednesday uh on these zoning priorities so with that um we can skip to old business you know business no new business and you don't have to do any reports and we have a form a that's coming in but it's not here yet and yeah you as far as uh new things that are coming in i know that the north amherst library is probably coming in tomorrow so that's something for you to look forward to for mid march and there are other things out out there in the wings sure okay uh and then you put in the packet the there's a little summary from the planter valley planning commission i did yeah on the highlights so um um and i want to apologize to dug for not having answered his questions i think i did forward them to the planning board members did i not oh i forwarded them to ben and expected him to answer them in his presentation so we'll look back at those questions dug sorry and another good reason to uh to push this to next week is is tom uh never was able to make it um he gave us warning that he's he was dealing with a personal issue so um with that i mean reporter the chair i have nothing i want to thank my wonderful planning staff for all the work they've been doing in the last few weeks it's really impressive thank you it sure is all right i think we're gonna adjourn um we'll see y'all next week hey thank you can i jack hey i might i gotta turn up the recording how do i do that do you want to stop cloud recording