Hearing on planned apartment building held
Talks to resume in April on proposed six-story apartment building at Third and Walnut
LANSDALE >> After years of discussion and one major revision, talks on a planned apartment building at the corner of Third and Walnut streets in Lansdale will continue for at least another month.
Borough council heard nearly three hours of testimony on the planned project Wednesday night, before voting to continue talks until April.
“We’ve absorbed a lot of information. I’m not trying to be obstinate — we want to understand a few things, I think, in a little more detail, and have some time to absorb it,” said council President Denton Burnell.
Talks have been underway since late 2015 on plans for a sixstory apartment building to be built on the corner of Third and Walnut, and a smaller version of the plan had secured conditional use approval from the borough in late 2017. Since then, developer Ross Ziegler has secured ownership of two more properties just next to the proposed parcel, and has come back with an expanded version that now includes 204 apartment units.
Ziegler and a team of consul-
tants presented the latest version of those plans to council Wednesday night, testifying for nearly three hours about the conditional use permission they seek, the new automated parking system they plan to deploy inside the building, and whether the project meets the conditions hammered out during months of talks with the borough planning commission.
“This is the second step in a multiple-step process, the first step being the zoning hearing board, where we received our zoning relief for the parking, and some other issues” said engineer Jason Smeland.
“The second step, of course, is this conditional use hearing. If you were inclined to grant us approval, we would move on to the next phase, which is the land development component, and that’s when we start getting into the real nuts and bolts, potentially,” he said.
Smeland, architect Mike Rosen, attorney Stephen Imms, and Ziegler outlined the changes to the plan since a prior, smaller version secured a similar conditional use approval in late 2017. Over the year since, the team said, the developer has added two parcels east of the building, bringing the total apartment count up to 204, and agreed to provide a total of 305 parking spaces inside at a ratio of 1.5-to-one per apartment.
“I personally believe, in my professional experience, this building is way over-parked. The type of residents who choose to live in transit-oriented developments, show a propensity to have less than one car per household,” Rosen said.
“The national average is .7 cars per resident, and we are providing 1.5, so we believe we have a large number of parking spots that would never be utilized, and we’re actually studying alternative type of solutions for those spots,” he said.
Of that total, all but roughly 40 will be contained within the automated parking system, and Rosen described how residents will be able to use key fobs to drive into one of two or three car ports, leave their belongings inside, then tell the automated system how long it will be until they need the car, and the system will store it appropriately. Councilman Leon Angelichio asked if the nonautomated spaces would include spaces sized for handicapped vehicles, and Rosen said they would, but users will likely prefer the automated system.
“Technically, I don’t believe we actually need to provide those spaces, because the elevators are a perfectly logical way for them to park their car, but we do have it because the code calls for it,” Rosen said.
Imms argued that the building height of 77 feet was well below the maximum allowed in the borough’s downtown business overlay district, which was adopted in 2016 with this and similar projects in mind.
“What the ordinance is asking is, ‘Is it a use that’s approved?’ Well, you’ve already determined that it is an approved use, by zoning it that way,” Imms said.
Imms read a portion of borough code asking Rosen whether the building was “similar in size and height” to those nearby, and Rosen answered that it was much larger, but designed to fit the character of the area.
“It is obviously significantly bigger and taller than all the other buildings around, but we did make a great effort, at the 34-foot height, which is the height of the surrounding buildings, to match the materials and step the building back,” Rosen said.
As he spoke, Rosen showed renderings of the planned building, with the lower three floors clad in brick and styled to look similar to townhouses found elsewhere in town, while the upper three floors are outlined in tan stucco.
“When you look down the street, at street level, that’s really what you notice, is that three-story townhome look on the ground level,” he said.
Mayor Garry Herbert called attention to that answer, saying “everything else around it is dwarfed” by the height of the proposed building, and Rosen agreed but said that does comply with current codes.
“It doesn’t need to comply to similar heights around it. It needs to comply to the permitted use. Is it the same as the buildings around it? It is not — it is taller than the buildings around it,” Rosen said.
Resident Bette Conway questioned several aspects of the plan, including whether the engineer had done boring below the site to determine how low the water table is, and what sort of stormwater management features would be added on the site.
“We are aware of the conditions, and the water table, and that really factored into the design, as to why we’re only going down one floor,” Smeland said.
“In regard to stormwater management, come out to the land development applications, and if you have trouble sleeping, you can listen to me go on about stormwater management
— which you might actually be interested in,” he said.
Questions from council focused largely on the proposed automated parking system that would be contained within the ground floor and one basement floor of the building, and would use a series of moving platforms to store cars similarly to a vending machine in much less space than a traditional garage. Smeland and Rosen testified in detail on the proposed parking system, and the other conditions the project has been made to meet, in response to numerous questions from council members.
“When I first heard about the automated parking system, I was fascinated and scared to death. I’ve done a lot of investigation into it since,” said councilman Jack Hansen.
“I think it’s a fabulous system, and I salute Mr. Ziegler for coming up with this idea in Lansdale,” he said. Hansen added that he was glad the garage would cut down on pollution and provide a more secure area for cars than parking on streets, but asked what would happen during a power failure; Rosen said emergency backup generators would allow all residents to move their cars within two hours.
Resident Vira Katolik of Third Street said she lives on the block where the building will be constructed and has been in town for over a decade, and said she thinks the automated parking system will help attract residents to a town that she has seen add several downtown businesses in recent years.
“I’ve had time to think about where I want to move. I like Doylestown, I like Ambler, I like Philly, and mostly, I’m probably going to stay in Lansdale,” she said.
“This really puts Lansdale on the map. It truly does, and I think a lot of good will happen in Lansdale because of this project,” she said.
Kevin Dunigan, chairman of the borough’s planning commission, said the project was exactly the type of building envisioned in the borough’s comprehensive plan from a decade ago, and an updated version that’s nearly complete.
“A vibrant Main Street consists of feet on the street, and feet on the street have to live here,” he said.
“The parking system that has been presented here tonight, is a final product
of, quite possibly, two years worth of heavy lifting that the planning commission has done. We have gone through every word of our code, and this building complies with it,” Dunigan said.
Resident Bruce Schwartz said he’s seen similar buildings in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and questioned whether they were a better fit for a planned community than in a block of a built-out downtown.
“I know these buildings, and they’re beautiful — when they’re surrounded by four-lane highways and other buildings that are planned to be of similar height,” he said.
“Once you put this building in, then what you have is a downtown that ultimately is going to be all these buildings, or you’re going to have a downtown that has a sore thumb sticking out there forever. I don’t really think there’s an in-between here,” Schwartz said.
Resident Meghan Kochersperger said she and her husband moved to town about five years ago and were looking for an apartment, close to the borough train station, with amenities, exactly like the new project would provide.
“This kind of development is exactly what I wish had been here five years ago, when we were looking for places to move to,” she said.
After nearly three hours of testimony, council asked that a final decision be continued until next month. After disagreements on which dates in April the consultants will be available, Ziegler’s team requested the hearing resume on April 24, a week after council’s regularly scheduled meeting on April 17, and Burnell said staff will look into whether the April 17 meeting can be rescheduled to one week later.
“We need that time to absorb all of this information, get comfortable with it, get some feedback from the professionals, get the questions on the code answered, and then have some time to come back and say ‘We’re comfortable: here are the conditions, and we can proceed.’ We need time to do that,” Burnell said.
Lansdale’s borough council next meets at 9 p.m. on April 3, with various council committees starting at 7 p.m.