 Good morning. My name is June Cosley, and I'm representing the San Antonio Conservation Society. And on behalf of the Society for the Nike Rocket Union, the second workshop, we are having important workshops with a theme in mind. In the first workshop, we talked about why can't the neighborhoods get what they want and what they think they need. And in this second workshop, we're going to be talking about so how do we say what we need, so people will understand what we need. People have a third workshop, which we're talking with the city about how neighborhoods can work with the city in order to get what they need. And the fourth workshop will be specifically talking about recommendations that we might make about the unified development code. So there is a method in our madness for all of these workshops. And the conservation society has one or four partners who is putting this on. So I'd like to turn it over to Kathy, who represents another partner in this effort. Thanks, June. Good morning, everybody. I'm Kathy Wiberius, Deputy Historic Preservation Officer for the City of San Antonio. I'm a city staff person. Thank you so much for coming. Can I have everyone who attended workshop number one, raise your hand? Fantastic. Thank you so much for coming out again. And tell your neighbors next time you come to the workshop number three, grab a neighbor and bring them with you. We are already planning to have workshop number three on the west side of San Antonio. We committed to holding these at different parts of town to make sure that neighborhood members can get to our meetings and can participate. So workshop number three will be on the west side of San Antonio. And as soon as we get a venue and a date, we'll definitely push that out to you all. A couple of housekeeping. Our restaurants are just right across the hallway here. We do want to thank New Frontiers Public Schools for giving us this space at no charge. They're a community based charter school and they are always looking to have community use this space. It's just beautiful. So I wanted to thank them. June is correct. So there is a partnership for these neighborhood meetings and we have committed to capturing the conversation. There's a report from the first meeting that's available online. We have a few hard copies, but it's available online. And if you want a hard copy, definitely we can get that to you. And we are committed to do the same for all four of them. So they'll be a written report of the discussion. And the idea of the written reports is that you as community members representing your neighborhoods, you can take those reports back to your regular meetings, your monthly meetings, and have that conversation continue within your membership groups. And so that's why we're committed to creating these reports. Enjoy the morning. It's going to be a lot of fun. If you have any feedback for us on how we can improve on these, be sure to let me know. And thank you again for being here. And I'm Jay Lauk, current president of the AA. I just wanted to add my welcome as well. We're one of the partners here. We feel like it's our responsibility as architects to get out in community and help facilitate and moderate discussions like these. And so you've got a lot of AA members out there today. And also a proud president of Tobeth Hill, so really excited about this discussion. Yeah, sorry, I'm pretty quiet. But that's about all I've got to say today. I hope he'll stand in the middle and help his voice as he carries on. Yeah, we can stand in the middle then. And if you're having trouble hearing that, just for the first 45 minutes, maybe you can just pull your chairs up. Well, I'm a former teacher, so I know how to talk loud. Loudly. I'm a former English teacher. I'm on the steering committee in this coalition of over 50 downtown neighborhoods, as well as 15 part of the 15 organizations and advocates. And we're proud to partner today with the AA, the Conservation Society with the Office of Historic Preservation. You know that our neighborhoods are facing unprecedented change, development and stress. And we're hoping that these tools, and education is power, these tools will help you make good decisions with your neighbors about the development that's coming in. Everything intersects, everything else. So we don't address today issues of sustainability, of affordability, of preservation of all of our communities. But that is also part of our discussion. Whether or not we say it out loud, it is always present in something we're working on. So thank you for being here. This is going to be the introduction that you've been leading at the Department of Health, and at the School of Education. Thank you all for coming. So first, David's going to talk really about the building form, and about urban design, and talk about some of the concepts we're going to be exploring today. And Nisa's going to follow on with some case studies, you know, San Antonio specific examples of some of the challenges and opportunities that we've run across. And then I'll take a few minutes to introduce our table moderators, and talk about the sort of fun events that we have planned for the morning. So with that, I'm going to go over to David. So I'm going to try to read from my notes for brevity. So in workshop one, I spoke about how design matters for infill development. I briefly touched on rationales for why infill is important, and how goal number one of SA Tomorrow, our comprehensive plan puts maintaining the character and integrity of neighborhoods first. Next slide. So I asked the audience how is character and integrity of your neighborhood being described and documented, and how is it being measured, and how will we know if it's being maintained, if we don't describe document and measure it. That's still a lot to do with this, for my name. We began to address how to describe the character and integrity of your neighborhood for the last session. Next slide. So I'll be covering some of the same topics as the last workshop. Scale, massing, and setbacks. Denise is going to talk more about a couple of case studies to using these elements to analyze project case study characters, and she'll explain the density and density of our list. Using these concepts to describe our local environment and how we perceive it will help us find ways to design to create compatibility between infill and existing neighborhood contacts. Next slide. So this is about scale, and scale of buildings and spaces contributes to character. Scale is the size of buildings, the size of buildings in relation to other buildings and spaces around them. We talked last about generic or relational scale, objects to objects, and we talked about human scale, the relationship of object size to people. And I'm going to quote, many building elements have sizes that are familiar to us and can therefore be used to help us gauge the sizes of other elements around them. Such as elements of residential window units and doorways can give us an idea of how large a building is, how many stories it has. This is the main house, and even the cat here is small next to the large brick building, especially because of the large windows in the brick building. Neighborhood character in massing, we talked about how the shapes of buildings constitutes massing, and also the relationship between masses and voids can be considered part of massing. Voids includes the streets, spaces, porches, even the penetration openings in buildings. Next, one big part of massing is roofs. And just briefly, couple of the most common pitch roofs here are the gable, which is at the top of the side, and the hip roof, which is the lower left side. You can also combine them and you can have a hip gable, the lower right side, the lower right diagonal. And so how these affect, next, how these affect the character. So, and this is an example of an apex in all divisive, we use the medium slope hip roof to an effect, and that's to recede, the roof recedes from side, it doesn't perceptually add scale to the building mass, and so its character, street presence could be very different if it's called gable. Next slide. So these two one-story homes, you know, create your street presence more wordfully using gables. Then if they had hip roofs, similarly the effect of the multiple sheds high in the background, presents a significant portion of the character of that building, at least from a half block away. That's the part that we see. Next. So setback is the third term, and here we're using a word that describes the distance between the building and the part we learn, or the site part we learn. Usually when people talk about the setback of the neighborhood, they're talking about the front setback. And really it's about how will I, our street spaces feel, how will I know our frontages of our yards feel. Next. So, last time we talked a little bit about how to become more prescriptive, and this is from a form-based code about private frontages. So this is the way you prescribe the frontages of the building. Setbacks can allow different kinds of frontages, front guards, or private frontages, as defined here in the form-based code. So last section I mentioned, the form-based code will be more prescriptive. The private frontages, the layers of the building, it's important as it presents the manner in which the pedestrian meets the building itself. So this illustrates more different types of frontages. And this is an example that caught my eye in my neighborhood. This yard is different from the other yards on the block. So how variation occurred from property to property is also an important part of heritage. This example of private frontage on our home in Austin has elements of scale and proportion that relate to the surrounding buildings. And by conforming to the regularity of the building setback it appears to be a pattern, at least to my, and again, a lot of this is culturally based, and certain things may be compatible with others that aren't to you. So speaking about compatibility, one approach to compatibility development is called the missing middle and it's residential multi-family building forms that are widely accepted as being compatible in single family or detached development items. So new plexus, trip plexus, courtyard apartments, bobo, townhouse, multi plexus, and even live-work buildings, character types of missing middle houses. In the bobo examples, I forget from my neighborhood the trip plexus, the blue one, the two quad plexus to their right. And then the next diagram, this is their illustration from missing middle.com, of how missing middle, which are the yellow yellowish buildings, can blend into a neighborhood of detached low density, which are the purple buildings. And the next slide is how they're compatible and also can provide transition between a detached on the left neighborhood and their more commercial or more intense urban area on the right. No, it doesn't work. There's 7 million pointers up there. We'll get through it. I am Anissa Schell. I live in Toverhill and I'm part of the tier one neighborhood coalition. I'm going to talk about density and intensity. We think density is always part of our conversation when we're talking about neighborhood development. We know that the population of San Antonio is planned to increase and so we're trying to make more housing and room for more people. And part of that is going to be density in our neighborhoods. Part of the reason we want to talk about density versus intensity is because a lot of times when we have development proposed in our neighborhoods and it has increased density, people kind of say, oh my gosh, that doesn't fit. We don't like that. It's too much. But really it's not always the density that we think it's too much. Often it's the intensity. Density is the number of units on a lot. The number of units per acre. So that means a four flex is four units. A single household is one unit. And many times when they're proposed, they say, oh it's going to be 18 units per acre. Intensity is more about the size of the scale for massing of buildings. It's how big the buildings are, how big it looks from the street, and more about how many or how big the buildings are on the lawn. So it's actually different. This slide is from the State of Portland and I think it's a really great example that illustrates the difference between intensity and density. All four of the color houses are the same density. They're all one. They're all one single family home. But you can see the house on the left is much, much smaller. It's much less intense than the house on the right. As it goes, it gets more intense. The house on the far right is three stories. One on the left is one story. So that is kind of the difference between intensity and density. So this is the project that happened in my neighborhood. This was a pair of duplexes across the street from me. And there were actually two blocks and they were four one bedroom one bathroom duplexes. And the first thing we're going to talk about when we look at this project today is the design. You can see the massive is what we say. We were talking about the general shape and size of the building and how we perceived that. So the solids are not pink and I included the house next to it. And boys with everything else, maybe you can just have a look at that. The stuff around the buildings. What hasn't been built in its place is for demolished. We had a developer come in and built six single family homes that are going to be sold in a condo scheme. And now the massing will show we're going to paint. It's different. I tried to get the same perspective. The first one is from the Google car so I can pick it up a second. But you can see that there's a lot more mass to the new development than there was before. So here is kind of an aerial view of that a lot with the builders site plan superimposed on there. And the thing I want to point out here is the step back. You were right in line where the step back is on the homes that were established. Or original homes. The six homes that were built, the front two are much closer to the street than the rest of the homes. The step back is what is the term you use when you're trying to describe how far the building is set back from the public right of way. Some neighborhood that's going to be the sidewalk is always the property line. Visually we see it as the street. This is the development that my neighbors were pretty resistant to was much closer to the street than the street. When we were struggling to negotiate with this developer I met Jim from our press and he did a drawing for our neighborhood to just sort of show us what might be possible with the same density that this developer was working. They wanted six units, they needed six units to make the project work financially. And Jim came up with a described site plan. This is also 16 units. It's two duplexes in the front so that's four and there's two small ones in the back. I've shown this before at a lot of different events so it might look familiar. But one of the great things about it is that you can match the step back of the existing homes. My neighbors were really excited about this. It's also one story in the front and two stories in the back. And that matters because the scale of the building surrounding it are also one story. The scale, like David said is what we perceive to be, it's the size of the building in relation to either people or the buildings around it. So this concept matched the building around it. And you can see very, very, very small on the white drawing. There's a little person standing on the porch. So the background of the store industry is the scale of the buildings. So it's not just the houses next to it, but you can also see a little earth on the floor. This is the houses as they're built. You can tell that the scale of the houses that they built is much larger than the scale of the houses surrounding it. These are two story houses. And although there's no person, you can see a board fighting for them. And we all know what's helping the board fight, which is a great illustration of the scale. So now I'm going to talk about some development that has happened in the last couple years in Minky Park. We're going to look at just one section of Kway Ma. These houses are in an area that I believe I was told is called the Louvre's Road. They're duplexed. So the left of the Louvre House is a single family home. The Louvre House is an up and down duplex. The one in the middle is also an up and down duplex. The one to the right is a side by side duplex. And then on the far right, well, there's a single family home and then there's an old family on the very far right. These three duplexes were demolished and a developer came in and built a different kind of concept of homes. Here's an area of view of those same houses. So I wrote this density in and kind of divided it into a plot line. So the density is one for the single family home, two for the duplex, two for the duplex, two for the duplex, and one for the other single family home. So that's a total of eight in this little section. So the developer tore those middle duplexes down and built more single family homes on smaller lots. These are people called them the skinny houses. They were called condoms. But you can see the existing single family homes on either end. And then one, two, three, four single family homes to the right. And then we did a front and a back single family home on those two larger lots. So the density here increased to eight. You can also see that the maxing increased, right, much more of a lot as we've taken up by these houses than before. So they're all skinny houses. So they're all two stories, you know, very close together. And you can see there's not as much void as they're solid now, right? Much more solid than the void. So, and then the other two, or four I should say, or the others, the two-story house on the front and the two-story house on the back. But you can't really see. You can kind of see the one with the dark, the one with the color, the second story back there. So the massing has really changed on that street. That's where it was before maybe going backwards. So here's just a quick glossary of those terms. A lot of times when developers come to our neighborhoods, again, we're staging that feels too big, that looks too dense. I don't think that lot can handle that density. But today we're really going to practice using different terms to quantify what we mean instead of using this qualitative things. Like it feels like it looks like it seems like we want to say the density is appropriate, but if it was less intense. Or we want to say it looks like that's out of scale. Or the scale of that is really great. I love how the setback matches the houses on the street. So that's sort of the goal today, to practice these terms. So we can get on the same page because developers need to understand what we're saying. And we need to understand what they're saying. And the city also needs these quantitative terms. You talked about that it was demolished. Is there a reason why that demolition happened? Because the developer wanted to make room for that development. So then there's only one thing we'll give you. And I have a question on the density. So if the density actually increased the number of housing units provided or would it increase or would it stay the same? So the one in Tobin Hill, the density increased from four units which were all one bedroom duplexes. So four units to six single-family pumps. There are three, four of them are three bedrooms and there are two bedrooms. So the density increased to that. The density in Mickey Park also increased from eight total to ten total. The number of vehicles the number of vehicles. Well, the density does in a way because how many people can live. Oh yeah, I'm sorry. She asked why doesn't density take into account the number of cars we're trash can in a new development? It does. There are rules about how many people can live for housing units. I think it's tied to the number of bedrooms. So that is accounted for. But how that lays out looks. I mean, you know, you can have a family that has one car for a family in the same size house with four cars or even six cars. Someone in my neighborhood just this week. We have six cars. Yeah, we have six drivers. Well, you know, part of that is how families choose to lead to the impact cars. I have a question for you. There is a required number of parking spaces that the city requires. Well, what I'm getting at is I have seen some properties to be very honest with you where it looked like the developer completely killed the yard in order to accommodate the city's parking requirements. And so what you really ended up with was a building and a parking lot. And the idea of having a yard got sacrificed. And I'm wondering, are we in that situation? So I think that that's part of what this exercise is about. And I know we all have questions and commentary and we could spend the next three hours talking about each one of these issues in detail. I think the point of this exercise is, and that's what I'll explain right now. Maybe this will answer some of your questions. So we have six tables. And if I could have folks that are sitting in table seven, I don't think we have anybody in table eight to maybe come up here to table four or short on books. And we don't have enough moderators for more than six tables at the moment. All of them are going to come up here. So here's what we're going to do. We have six tables. Each one of you tables is a newly-infected neighborhood design review committee. Okay, so I'll look around the table and say hi to your neighbors. So the first thing you can do when I get that talking is ask a group. They're going to have the chairperson for your neighborhood design review committee. So we'll spend three to five minutes just talking amongst yourselves, deciding who you want to nominate, have a quick vote. Now this is important because that chairperson is going to be responsible for helping run the meeting and ultimately do the report out for the group at the end of this session in conjunction with the moderator. And then finally, make sure that what was communicated in this session is accurately reported in the written report that will go into the public record. Okay, so this is pretty important. So here's what we're going to do. We have six, well, seven volunteer table moderators. And if I could ask you all to stand up. We have Anissa Schell from Toven Hill Neighborhood Association. We have Alan Hett from Denver Heights and also sits on the Board of Adjustments. We have David Bogle from Alameda. And who's also an architect and obviously involved in these issues for a while. We have Vince Michael from the Conservation Society. We have my partner, Irving Michael from Alameda Architects. We have Gary Ragsdale from the City of San Antonio's Neighborhood and Housing Services Department. She's also the neighborhood liaison. And then me, I'll probably jump in and work at Anissa's table. My name's Jim Bailey, LMO Architects, recently Mayor's Housing Policy Task Force. So these moderators are going to wear multiple hats this morning. The first thing they're going to do is they're going to come to your table as a developer with the first development proposal that your new conformed neighborhood design review committee is going to tackle. And they're going to lay out this proposal and they're going to tell you what they think the benefits of this proposal are and you're going to consider it. Then the moderator is going to put on his or her neighborhood advocate hat, rollercoaster sleeves and sit down at the table with you to have a conversation about how to express your thoughts about that proposal that has been presented to you and come up as a committee with a response. Here's what we want to see from you developer. You know, here are the things that are important to us about our neighborhoods and we're going to use these terms that Anissa and David have talked about, you know, density versus intensity you know, scale, setbacks, massing and we're going to formulate our response as a committee in those terms. And the conversation can be a little more free ranging than that. So then you're going to communicate that to the developer. The developer is then going to come back with another scheme that hopefully addresses and then they may or may not hopefully addresses some of the things that you brought up and there are two or three or in some cases four total options for each site that we've developed. These options obviously can't encompass every possible comment that someone might have but hopefully it will serve as a good sort of exercise to allow us to just begin to talk about these things and form a kind of common vocation. So the way it's going to work, hopefully we'll have a good time. We're going to try to limit this to an hour. We're hoping that the first component, the presentation of the initial scheme, your conversation and feedback is in a 20 minute frame. That will allow 10 to 15 minutes for a counter proposal and perhaps a very short period to look at one or two other options. We then need time as a committee to sit down and write up the report what happened. Can we raise our hands to table scribes? One, two, three. We may need to have a couple more table scribes. So we'll have table scribes. So the group will work together to generate a report out and that each group, the chair of the Neighborhood Design Review Committee will stand up to take the moderator and get just a quick report. So with that, let's get going. We won't have much parking on the street. It'll really be a beautiful environment, beautiful historic looking homes that respect the setbacks of the neighboring properties. This has the appropriate zoning to allow us to have eight units on the property. So we'll have no problem. We won't need a zoning change. What is the appropriate zoning? What is the zoning? You're saying it's appropriate, but what is the case? It's one large lot, so it needs the multifamily zoning. We only have eight units and it's on a half an acre. So it's a Zoned MF? It's a Zoned MF. Two stories about that could be possibly offices or different kinds of housing units. They have very small... Small-time storage? And the whole development together, the very cost part of it is eight stories. And you can see that I've taken a little cost part of the building and set it back. And you said that is right to the sidewalk. You said that is a matching... Right. So it's the fifth December units for our performer. In the economics of this, it's so expensive. Development costs... Development costs are expensive. It really has to be six units. And why are two units the possibility of this development? How many units are on that? Oh, when we bought the lot, it was big. And how does this impact single-family home property values? This is a prison-like interest. It's very institutional. I've heard more of a setback in sidewalk stuff. I've heard concerns about the overall height and windows looking into the neighborhood. I didn't have any room for any greeners. That's a good... So when someone mentioned earlier that it was too close to the street edge, maybe you could push back a little bit. When you push back, who else are you pushing back? The parking lot is his property. First of all, what are you going to knock down? This could be a case where you might say, okay, it's a sadder because it's a tight deal that this is 32 units. The reality is they probably need 24 or 26, but they're going to ask for it. So push back and say, can you knock it down? Yeah, okay. Okay, everyone, I know we're having... Thank you. Okay, so do you have a good time? Okay, great. We're going to walk around at each table and have the moderator, the table scribe, and the neighborhood design review committee and cheer person stand up and deliver a brief report. So we have three different sites that we tackled. There were two tables tackling each site. So when you stand up, give a brief description of the initial proposal. At least the first time it comes up, the initial proposal and then begin to talk about your process and the conclusions that you ultimately arrived at. So let's go ahead and go into table one. Table one was a largely single family detached mix of one and two-story homes, residential neighborhood, and this is a mid-block condition. It's probably one of the hardest conditions that we find ourselves tackling. There's neighborhoods and designers and city review people. So table one. In the middle of this... We felt like the massive was just over over state. We just felt like the setback seemed like it was our favorite most part, but it was really about the massive seemed like it was just too much. It seemed like it was too dense. So we went back and talked about the fact that the orientation to the main street wasn't there. We were having kind of acknowledgement of the porches and the scale and everything of the rest of the neighborhood. So we went to option two. So we're going to develop a list of the risks and the questions were, well, are these going to be sold or rented and he's involved with the owner? She said she didn't know. I'm sorry, I'm going to direct you back in here. Oh, maybe it doesn't matter if it's a rental or are you going to be sold as a homeowner. Because there are great homeowners, there are lowly homeowners, there are great rental renters, there are lowly renters, and this neighborhood decided it didn't want to discriminate renters or homeowners. So we decided it didn't matter. So that was the end result because we talked about renting and that we were going to need some rentals. So we were okay with rentals. Alley was an issue about coming in all the hours. Some of the committee members felt that they didn't really like, they didn't really value should be used in terms of access that way. Other committee members felt that seemed okay. We stayed in the agreement. But we also said we felt too tall. So we took the probe and it sort of passed but then it didn't end and we said, well, we felt too tall. And so then we said, we still need to talk about the street. So the developer called in their company. So the architect came in and said, this is what we were talking about. And in the early 80s, sort of single story entry, going into the two-story, it's that huge. And then in the background came two and a half stories. We felt like two and a half stories in the background were okay with these things. But this was made up to where there was the alley and it wasn't too intrusive. We're here one night right next to these homes having a one-story where there's much more than half of it. We had a bookie in their house and it was just sort of a better entry. And it's a scale that around seemed sort of the density setting but we felt like it worked. But then they showed us the last one and half at the end, which we were like, and we all looked like the majority of the scale held the book. We said, hmm, yeah. So this goes down to six units. The density decreased. But the committee, people liked the scale of these huge masses in the front, looking onto these homes. And we felt like that was just too much of a privacy, sort of a privacy issue. All of a sudden we looked at all their privacy. And this week's base in the middle was when we were in the tiny homes in the back. So we were pretty happy with the eight units and first we were going to wait. And then we talked about four units and then we could watch the city about some kind of four-months before some of these units. We're going to be again at some time. Okay. So it's one, two, three, four. And either five, six, seven, eight. Okay, in a minute, it's the smarter part that you can barely see from here. It's still part of this. So we can pop up to three stories or two and a half stories. So we sort of both, we got the eight. We got the density, which, you know, we're not so against the density as much as scale and mass. And so if the scale and mass didn't work, you could actually have more density. That was our area. Right. So the intensity from the street decreased and on the side it was less intense. Because the setbacks were larger. There were larger on the side. So do you see one of those more generous to the game? We're going to be up with a higher density. A similar scenario. This is what we started out with. We had the same design on the table one. Okay. So eight. The first thing that the committee spoke to that they wanted to see changed was the orientation of the front two buildings. So they're currently facing the interior drive. We want them to face towards the street. One of the comments the developer made was about making sort of this private community. And of course that is the antithesis of what we try to do. We want assimilation. We want integration. So again, orienting these front two towards the street. Also the scale on this, we have two and a half story buildings facing the street with the tall gable. So we're looking at a 35 foot tall home peak adjacent to single family homes on the street, even though there's a two story on the street. The group, the neighborhood group felt it was out of scale and a little too tall and a little too close to the street to really be in context with the neighborhood. So what we were asking for the developer to do was to align the building mass with the neighboring buildings, which is exactly what Alan just presented. The density wasn't an issue. Again, it was the intensity. So it wasn't the number of units. It was the massing and scale of the unit. So the same thing there. We were okay with the setback. We felt it was in line. Not any street has exactly a straight line across. So we felt that the setback was appropriate. The next one was the apartment court, which groups buildings together in a different way than the previous team, where there's almost eight separate homes on land. This one creates a kind of apartment courtyard within four residences in the past. So this was our least favorite. We didn't feel like this solved the problem at all of the massing and the intensity. It didn't even really orient the buildings towards the street. It just provided this sort of interior court. So we didn't spend a lot of time on this one because we would have preferred the first one over this one. So we kind of skipped over that because we felt like this made it look more like multi-family and it didn't address the orientation and so forth. The example is a similar building that is in Montevista and it's on a street corner on San Pedro and Woodlawn, I think. We just have McCulloch. So here we are dealing with a mid-block which does make a difference as versus when you're on a corner. So they ran me the developer out of town on this one. The third example, which again is similar to your third example, but we came up with a different result in the sense that our group preferred this one and the spacing between these is almost consistent with the carriage house arrangement in our historic neighborhoods and the fact that by having the larger open space in the middle it aligned better with what were backyards on the neighboring lots and so it actually felt that it actually was more consistent with what was on either side and that it provided, you know, maybe options for more affordable housing by having these carriage-style homes in the back. It corrected for the orientation, providing for the pay porches to the front. It kept the ingress egress off the main street where the other one would have all the middle one, the second one would have been all from the alley and we did talk a lot about whether the orientation of these, the backs, half of the home because these are each two. So two and two with a front that was a one-story and a back that was the two and a half. We talked about should we orient that towards the front and the guidance we had from our architect was that that can actually increase the mass or the perception of mass whereas having this roof actually wouldn't cause that increase and so we preferred, we decided to stick with this. We obviously would have preferred to see just two stories instead of two and a half but our main concern was the orientation to the street, the space in the middle which provided more open space, more aligned with the neighboring properties and having these two units in the back which might provide for more affordable housing. And what I feel sold the group as me pretending to be the developer was the concessions made from the previous themes. We went from eight units in those down to six in this. We created more open-yard space. I tried to explain it in a way that by putting the homes up front as one larger mass it relates to the neighboring homes and preserves open space of yards. So one could argue that these taller homes are looking into the home next door but really they're not. They're going to look at the roof next door versus it being here you really will sense that loss of privacy by the home looking into your backyard or you may have a pool or a playground set or something. So there were concessions made that not all developers may make with you as neighbors going down to six units is a loss of profitability but overall it felt, our group felt that this really fit the context and the scale of the neighborhood better. And just as an aside what I think is interesting for us all to keep in mind and it was Alan's comment the developer may have all these three drawings provided by the architect. It's not bringing all three. He's only bringing the one with the eight. So it's the pushback of the neighborhood that all of a sudden said oh what about this option and clearly this performer is also going to work for them or they're not going to even introduce it. So that's something for us to keep in our minds when we're reviewing. Let me pause you right there. I think we've done something that a couple of people have said to me today. We need to understand that in many cases a developer doesn't need to talk to the neighborhood. That may have their zoning in place already. We have very few historic districts. The vast majority of neighborhoods inside and in San Antonio all 150 of them have no perfection whatsoever. There are a couple of NCDs but generally if you've got your zoning in place there's no reason for the developer to talk to you. And the idea that the carrot works better than the stick. The developer is there because the council persons that go talk to the neighborhood use that as an opportunity. And I heard a couple of people right at the start well this is just horrible and there's no way we're going to support this or whatever. If you have that attitude right when the developer walks in the developer just will dig their heels in and leave the meeting and they're like okay well fine I'll just go call my lawyer so you can talk to the lawyer. So I think that Cosima's point was really good. Like what's happened here is as you guys have probably seen in negotiations with developers you do want to play ball is that if you make a good faith effort to work with them you will see that second scheme and you may even see that third scheme. But if you just get your hackles up and say you know when developers read what we want you out of our city probably all you'll ever see is that person. Our side is the corner neighborhood side and this is what the developer came here presenting to us some there was some terms of art that were used to describe this by our neighborhood that where they were being and we talked about those terms of art like the setback is still appropriate because it's zero and the neighborhood where there are setbacks of 23 and the scale or the massing are out of scale with it because it's four stories and combined with the small setback creates a very different experience from the street than is exists in our neighborhood. And one of our committee members was noting immediately that it did look like a wall like a wall on the street that yesterday in the front line it looked like it was falling on top of them and that's six units. So we talked about the setback we were not in agreement with the setback we were not in agreement with the intensity of the buildings the height of the buildings the massing and so he came back with these and these are five units they're town homes he adjusted the developer adjusted the setback and one of the committee members had asked is it possible that at wall side that you put the porches and have it more open it's three stories and five units the parking is in the back so there's garages on the back we were talking about what about our neighbors here would they want to look into these garages and the developers that we could do some kind of landscaping there and so we were we liked the design and the fact that it's on a corner street the density like many of the groups the density wasn't the issue it was the intensity and the massing and the setbacks getting too close to the street he showed us some other designs as well that were went down in density but smaller homes but didn't quite fit they were smaller but they looked out of scale to the other houses and then we looked at one that had three units the developer also said you know what I made a mistake there is a it's not a vacant lot it's zone for multifamily the lot of zone for multifamily I made a mistake there's a house on this corner over here so would you let me demolish it we said no this is a historic neighborhood no we're not going to let you demolish it so he came up with this design where they remodeled the old house and then built these town houses but they went down to three units and all on our table where I was saying we're going to build six units but you know it was a nice exercise for us to see would we in a historic neighborhood defend the demolition of an old home and one of the things that all of us were consensus of we would not allow that house to be demolished it's in a historic neighborhood part of the history of neighborhood and so the developer said yeah we can renovate it and make three units but we were very happy with this we felt it was appropriate since it was a corner we felt that the massy and intensity of the building were way better aligned to what was already there in the neighborhood those houses we were happy that they included a lot of the elements that we were concerned about with the setbacks the porch, the design of the windows one of our committee members said you know we may consider the design of windows if they're more in scale to the windows that are in the other houses and also the fact that the developer was adding trees we said are those would you add those trees or would the owners have to put them he says no we can add them the landscaping in the back and we appreciate the fact that it went down to five units instead of six and we did talk about affordability we asked how much would something like this go for you know and he told us about 350,000 somewhere around there hi hi so we were concerned about that because many in our committee are advocates for affordable housing so these were things that we were discussing in our group this morning so it had a two-story a predominant roof line and two stories and the third row was above that and the last two were kind of three hybrid that they thought that was a bit of a big thing and the idea of it being a multiplex or an apartment building was okay again on the corner and it was actually preferred over over the almost faux appearance of smaller homes very very close to each other which is not characteristic of this neighborhood the characteristic of the neighborhood is detached homes with a significant space between them so when they became like this it was a different animal that they preferred the multiplex we had there is some more situation to bring in the presenters this was a big note okay in terms of there was like a self so it doesn't work for the neighborhood for so many reasons and a lot of them when you're trying to get into those garages that turning radius is no good so all of a sudden you have cars on the street parking willow is narrow what does that do about safety and accessibility in terms of traffic we had a lot of suggestions for how that could be made better for the surrounding so this is our big note so you can go away now the developer came back and said ah and interestingly because like I said our table go deep and I have to tell you that we had consensus at the table but it also had no not in our historic neighborhood this isn't historic and what we were talking about what Jim was talking about in terms of gaining consensus and being reasonable and working with people we're gonna get more flies with honey if we beat them with that stick they're just gonna crush us so how this is a very effective practice that we've done today I love what we did so looking at two and a half to three stories the question was what's our overall height wonderful drive through the neighborhood really quick don't assume that whatever they're gonna give you is accurate to scale so looking at this this is my neighborhood I know exactly what that house is this actually faces Galipa now we're dealing with an existing structure right here in the construction place in Willow one of our issues is the fact that we have to make sure it's consistent with the sidewalks we like this we have compromises here but they also met halfway because they're giving a nice interest into this development now with this existing structure we also are concerned about the accessibility making sure that there's a drive through access whether you have access to Carson or onto Willow for safety issues so looking at this we're looking at the scale and we're finding out through the map that the whole structure in the front and the perimeter of this project is one house it's a two-story development we don't want this one to over extend itself and be the most prominent structure in this portion of the neighborhood we want to leave the aesthetics of an existing structure the most focal point for that part of the neighborhood is this is going to be new development all of you know about rezoning you go to HDRC and rezoning they give you a 200 foot radius for the proposed new zoning that also will apply for the height and density for this development we have to respect 200 feet they should respect the height and intensity like you guys it was about the intensity of the structure looking at this structure here we can see that there's a rounded porch the design was fine but let's go ahead and go into the details let's copy and replicate just a little detail of a rounded porch in this corner it will mirror itself because this is going to be an entire area of Willow Street that's going to be facing and complementing this existing structure you won't know that the existing structure is actually the antique one but the new structure is going to mirror itself with it so we want to compromise we talked about metal roofing we talked about maybe maybe taking the pitch up a bit we talked about overhang and how not always about rain but about sun and the longevity of the buildings we talked about these trees although we thought they're nice someone at our table brought up that condo association is going to be having a headache the roof issues in about 20 years so how do we incorporate green areas it's not always about the trees finding where the appropriate placement of the tree is but in very narrow yards it's not always the best solution so allowing for green asking for green and making those kinds of compromises now let me get into historical real good we're also having to deal with what's happening with downtown government hill is adjacent to the area of the pearl we have all of these scooters coming through our neighborhood we have a lot of walkability we have a lot of lights on us new development should also consider mobility as homeowners we're responsible for our sidewalks which means the new developer is responsible for his new sidewalks so make sure when they're developing they add that infrastructure around the perimeter of their new infrastructure with proper sidewalks newer sidewalks and even a panalia for them to park those scooters because most likely through the tenants and homeowners we're going to be using those to access downtown living or the neighborhood so it doesn't have to scout all along the front in an area located within the new construction complex we also question along with 21st century new buildings thinking about where we're at where are we putting our garbage what will be the solution for this will there be a dumpster will there be everyone with 15 cans of garbage houses that's what we're looking at these days so how does again this is a little detail that an amenity that you asked for because as Jim pointed out these aren't cheap and they've already made a compromise coming from 6 down to 5 they're probably again not going to make that further compromise so what are the little amenities that aren't expensive that are thought about and addressed is true of everything going into our older neighborhoods it's like the thoughtfulness not just leaving the neighborhood to deal with the the backlash these consequences and the developer is all gone with the compromise we decide that we look at this development right here and we have a lot of similarities what we see at Ford Sam this is called Government Hill Ford Sam and the housing for the military services so this had that kind of that same feel what you see on Ford Sam and you have a luxury of going in here and you can see some of the there to some of the housing so it's complimentary to the area around you you're not going to have this inside of a modern neighborhood in the Stone Oak area because it's not going to fit inside of the neighborhood or in the Jefferson area it's going to have different details to it what print but details mean everything same thing with the mailboxes we know right now having issue with mailboxes is being broken into are they not individual mailboxes or are we going to have a special compartment outside in the front those are the details that not only will be important for the new owners and tenants but for the neighborhood itself because we're going to grow we're going to develop but let's think about the details why didn't we come up with a solution before is being built so let's help the developer help the architect and engineer can you come up with the ideas that we're dealing with right now because I don't have my house and I've got a scooter in my driveway and I have to go out and pick it up so I can get it out of my house so let's make sure we have all of these nice compromises but we're working together as you said we have all these different designs so if you have an opportunity to speak to the designers, the developers I think that's the best we can approach them we can't be the voice of the none approaches it just for us didn't really barely spoke about them but I wanted to address that we did look at them the winner for us was number two great I love the thing that you identified that the two-story house in the neighborhood was right across the street so how did you define this solution being taller than that it's not straight as a Victorian it has some higher pitches this one has lower pitches but it's two and a half seconds it's also the elevation because it's called government hill because we do have a building part so we're going to have to look at the elevation when we work with the designers and the architects to see where it fits in that particular case I drew it on that solution number two it's exactly the ridges of the same height but it is greater intensity it has more mass because that Victorian has a steeper frequency so use your equipment if you're having me get on there and look at the diagram going you can see a map take a satellite route and you can see what's around there really really easy before you say it and approve anything so you know what I'm looking at it right now so you have to be an advocate for yourself too and it's really easy this is one of the still San Pedro San Pedro is designated as transportation corridor so this is a much closer plan we put in a much more intense plan that we want to have on the other side and we were a response to this one was that it seems really close to the street the height of the building was pretty intense but there was a conversation about parking and the developer's response to that was to put parking kind of protected and hidden so it wasn't a bunch of cars you were hiding the retail the cars from the retail or the mixed development on the first floor within the structure and our group responded really well to that there was a conversation about acknowledgement of the heights from the setback of the building but there were concerns about parking we kind of differed in opinion about parking along San Pedro Creek so we we never we never really came to the consensus there it was really about protecting pedestrians and what are the ways in which we can protect pedestrians and our developer commented that actually cars are a good protection but we did come back and had conversations about sustainability and not just sustainability as it relates to pedestrians and supporting public transportation but also as it relates to material use because often the developments that are coming up they're it while they are able to pass building codes they are necessarily taking that a step further in terms of how buildings are going to age we did talk about affordability what are you know we can't really legally we don't have that power to ask those questions but I personally think it's still important to ask those questions when a developer says we don't need to consider that well my response has been have you thought about whether or not I should as a human and not just because you're told in the code I think it's also worth pointing out on the issue of affordability because I heard the moment every day you know we just put into place a housing policy framework this last summer that I went on and over the course of the next 10 years or so there's about a billion dollar affordable housing plan and we're going to have more and more money theoretically every year and so I think it's incumbent upon all of us as neighborhood members to understand the incentives that are available for affordable housing because many of the developers that are coming in and say well I just don't want to deal with the hassle of your honors and you may not need to deal with some of these school centers that are out there and you can say look these are here and we support your development if you'll go do bags then they go maybe it's worth the headache after all but it's also in the report to address compassion right that was the first report I think that included that word so it's part to have a document that uses that word and being able to reference about empathy within a developer's heart yeah so this is our second option so this option takes the intensity of the building scale really close to match it up with one of these two buildings that's in the neighborhood it takes the sort of mixed use character down one notch in terms of doing just a one story commercial functioning building that matches up with the neighborhood building and it's about that so it takes the sort of all this function out of the mix so the group liked the lower height but did not like how far back that height extended into the neighborhood and the fact that parking went all the way well went around with the property was problematic to see all of that parking our group did not like that I didn't mention this in the last in the last game but the direction of the parking on the statue in San Pedro it was drawing people into the neighborhood to come back out to park and so there was I see an additional plan that more carefully thought through the way traffic was going to moving to park along this street and so that that was the request on that because what you were having to do is drive through the neighborhood to park and just really thinking through the context and that's your relation to the choreography of cars what about the setbacks on this scheme there's like zero on all of the schemes we wanted it to push back for not only for pedestrians but also for a designated scooter parking area developer agreed to that but also landscaping we had questions about the material of the sidewalk and what that permeability is I think that's an important question that needs to be asked as it relates to drainage right and then this was the third option so the third option is that taking the intensity down even further and doing something that's much lower filled in the front whose stories have been taking the back property line winding down the townhouses and against your lower townhouses three stories so far from all that we started talking about affordability of this scheme and with the reduced units and the higher quality or the more square footage the chances of it being affordable were being lowered we did not want to compromise that and a part of that conversation it came up the proximity to infrastructure and utilities when you develop high density in the downtown area there is an incentive for the city to do that but it's an incentive for us too because of the way our tax dollars are spent and so the more units we put in an area access to police firefighters water gas all of that the better the better it is for us as a city you're not extending lines so we did not like this as it related to the density and this is the least the least favorite of the options even though the hype seemed more reasonable so and part of that was it was clear that the table the townhouses finding the backside of the site wasn't a good solution really for the neighborhood partly because of the sort of pushing a little higher buildings closer to the neighborhood and because of the parking the way access to the site was working what was the density of the households of this design versus the design of the city so we actually didn't have density numbers on these okay it was significantly so we decided as a committee the consensus was that we wanted to actually go with option one but ask for revision of it and a part of the conversation was we want to make sure that we understand what the timeline is and when we were going to meet with the next so when are you going to be able to propose a revised option one a with the request of setback the pedestrian circulation the vehicular circulation the added green space specificity on the material of the surface as well as drainage okay and one thing that was we thought this height was really aggressive but we really talked about San Pedro Creek and so understanding understanding what what other developments of this height are along that street so in the next presentation that the developer gives give more contextual information as it relates to developments of this nature of the developers what other projects they've done that are similar to this and the context of those we also want to get the opinion make sure that the developer is talking to the adjacent neighbors not just everyone who showed up at the meeting so that was another thing what else sustainability asking what your target strategies are using that line of judgment and saying what are your strategies but what is your target from an environmental standpoint one thing what about asking whether or not they have checked with VIA and COSA about the easements, the street easements right away easements so if you guys didn't hear talking to the city and asking what their plans are for easements and right-of-ways parallel parking or landscaping and then also making sure that if you have conversations with VIA about the public transportation that has access especially if you're doing an excuse, you're going to need that next slide about the sale so just so you don't know what's happening as far as that's concerned but we saw this with the automatic consent that I have with twin cats hi there's scale there's not even any scale setbacks what else so we're concerned that this is on a street either commercial but actually there's no respect for the single family homes and that is our major interest and we also said why not more balconies there's just like two balconies parking space also concerned oh and then parking here closer to the intersection we said so there was less intensity it was lower and then the parking space I guess there was parking back here right there was parking back here there's still a boxing look about this whole building so we wanted more some kind of design some kind of design at the top yeah so the developer actually had to look at buildings in the neighborhood rather than downtown and came up with this one to block away and the group liked how it had some design at the top so it changed the effect of the boxing massing you see in this rendering and so one of the things we were also concerned about is some green space and we wanted the setback to be more in line with the other buildings but we also wanted some green you know that to provide some shade to provide shade to be over affordability was an issue for us as well and so the developer told us that 20% would be at 50% 50 to 60% AMR I think now we have some greenery there's some setbacks that got worked on there's some design here at the top and it seems to be okay the parking got moved to the back and then oh it was moved to the back so then the parking got taken away put more greenery we wanted a community garden on the roof and the developer said sure so what we were saying is that we got some greenery we got a garden at the top because we said we were going to he said yes it was pushed back setbacks so we really got what we wanted and they were very very cooperative this one became the affordability problem now we're bringing townhouses I wish like table 5 the affordability came into question with this one even though it was lovely and it's really great to look at there was density it was less units but they wanted like these are homes townhouses you can buy for like 300 million there's storefront this is storefront parking so residents others having that parking went away I don't know what happened maybe on top of the roof but no so then we mentioned the townhouses and he said well I need to make money or something like that that's what he said that's what I really said that kind of begs the question and it's happening in Beacon Hill I know it's happening in other neighborhoods but the zoning change is only in a fairytale or in Star Wars they'd ever be talking to a neighborhood but be even when they need a zoning change we've had it happen where we've negotiated all these details they get to zone we present it to zoning zone he says okay everyone's in agreement and then they don't do it because there's no legal imperative for them to do it either they'll say well you know things have changed we can't afford to we redid the numbers or whatever it is that you can do customer are they deed restrictions what have we done in Beacon Hill so deed restrictions unfortunately if you're a neighborhood like Beacon Hill there's not a lot of money we don't charge dues so I don't know how we find an attorney to enforce that but it is something that you can do to make sure that what you've agreed upon is something they have to follow through and also they pay attention about the balconies so they watch for the hidden things they build all these balconies on a townhouse the only thing that was mentioned in our design that I wanted to add was the group was very careful to look at the neighboring commercial building and say you know it has more of a setback from the street than what you're proposing so they really use that as a guide to say that's why there should be more of a setback on this kind of paper we said earlier we are going to have the third workshop toward the end of March and we'll move on to the next step