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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2000-03-01 Transcription March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 1 March 1, 2000 Special Council Work Session 6:00 PM Council: Lehman, O'Donnell, Vanderhoef, Kanner (6:30), Pfab (6: 10) Staff: Karr, Franklin, Davidson, Nasby, Miklo, Yapp, Boothroy Tapes: 00-31 Both sides, 00-32 Side 1 Peninsula Developer Presentation Karin Franklin/What we're talking about tonight is creating a special place, it can act as a model for development in Iowa City. We started this back in 1998 and I know a number of you that are here tonight were a part of that. With a Charrette that ended up in this plan and this is the context in which the developers are going to be making their presentation tonight. I'd like to just go through kind of what the process is tonight, it's a little bit different than what we usually do when we either hire somebody for construction or as a consultant. Usually there is not a public process as part of this. But we are doing this tonight to allow a little bit more public involvement in this project for Iowa City. The presentations, there will be presentations by the developers who have made some models. One of the developers has declined to participate in this presentation. But there will be two that will be presenting at as soon as I finish the introductory remarks and then again at 7:00. What we would like you to do tonight, this is not a public heating, it is not a public discussion, it is for you to see what the developers ideas are for development of the Peninsula. There were sheets that were available as you came in where you can make comments. That will be passed onto the selection panel. The selection panel is sitting over here to my tight. Bob Miklo whose the Senior Planner for Iowa City, Jeff Davidson whose the Assistant Planning Director, Lea Supple whose the Chair of the Planning and Zoning Commission, Gretchen Schmuck who is representing the Housing and Community Development Commission, Steven Nasby who is the Community Development Coordinator and myself. We will be making a recommendation to the City Council of a preferred developer. That will come after tonight' s presentations as well as interviews that we will be doing tomorrow. That preferred developer will be recommended probably at the March 20 and 21st meetings of the City Council. At that point then if the Council chooses to go with that preferred developer we will then be undertaking a process of putting together development agreements, plat approvals and the things that are necessary to actually make this happen. We hope that that will go along smoothly and expeditiously, it is conceivable the construction of the Peninsula project could begin this Fall. As we started this process back in 1998 with the Charrette and looking at what we wanted as a community to build on this This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 2 piece of ground and put the plan together, we then went out with a request for proposals from various developers. We got only one response last Spring and we decided with the importance of this project that it was critical to go back out and get other proposals. When we got our responses in December we got two additional proposals. Unfortunately as I indicated earlier one of our proposers has declined to participate either in the public presentation or the interview. But we will proceed with the others. One of the issues that I think has kind of come together rather nicely you've probably seen the construction of Foster Road that has been going on this past year. That was part of the pieces of infrastructure that was absolutely necessary for this project to occur and that construction should be completed this Summer, the weather willing. And so then we hope to be able to begin construction of the project this Fall or next Spring. The first presenter tonight is Terry Stamper and his development team and I'm going to let Terry introduce his team, Terry Stamper is from Terry Stamper Associates in Birmingham Michigan. Terry and his team will have 45 minutes to complete their presentation. We'll take a short break and then we will bring in the other developer Michael Lander of the Lander group at approximately 7:00. Terry. Terry Stareper/Thank you Karin. Good evening, I'm really grateful for the opportunity to appear before you tonight and to see as many people. I've been doing this for about 15 years and it's interesting and as time goes on there are more and more people showing up. It is used to be people that just showed up to scream and yell but now it's people that actually are interested in doing something good. I want to introduce my team briefly, Peter Katz, Peter is a sales and marketing expert and actually wrote the book on urbanism. If you've seen his book it was the first book on traditional neighborhood design and it was kind of like the beginning of everything. Peter's traveled the world looking at developments and probably has seen more than anybody I've talked to certainly and so I, it was very important for me to have him on the team. Oh am I hitting this, I'm sorry. It was very important for me to have him on the team to keep me straight. The next person is Jeffrey Ferrell from Ferrell Rutherford, Jeffrey's going to be our Architect and planner in the revision of the Dover Kohl Plan refinements to it. Jeffrey's expertise amongst other things is coding, and we're going to speak to a little bit about that tonight. Jim Tischler is our Consultant, Development Consultant, he has a background in community development and he's going to be speaking tonight. And Jim Tischler from Tischler Conservation Design Form, maybe some of you are familiar with him he's been working with the City on the park at the Peninsula. Their expertise and the way we're going to use them is in environmental concerns. So that' s the team, there will be four of us speaking tonight, I'm sorry if I don't have much energy I just came down with the flu this afternoon so any of you shook my hand earlier your in trouble. Before we get started I just wanted to say a couple of things, one is where I come from, I'm not from Iowa City obviously and for me to be successful here I have to learn an This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 3 awful lot about you and your city and you have to learn something about me. I've been developing about 15 years. I do it because of a number of reasons but probably first and foremost is there's something about this process of development, all, the, we live in the built environment, things that people build, they've been building for thousands of years. And whether they're outdoor spaces or indoor spaces, they all start with an idea, just a fluctuation in consciousness in somebody's head. And the fact, the mere fact that you can, this thought, this weightless, odo~ess, colorless fluctuation and to feel the consciousness can be a building that you can live in, work in, love in, grow your lives in, it just fascinates me, it's always been just amazing that that's how the process works, everything you've ever seen built started out in somebody's head as an idea. But what do you build? What I've found is that as a child I remember I was diagnosed with Asthma as a 10 year old and I had to go get shots, you know you go get all those tests and then you get all these shots. And I hated it, it was like torture, but the doctors office was in this wonderful in Detroit, called the Fisher Building, it was (can't hear) building. And no matter how scared I was or how much I dreaded what I was going to have to go through just walking in that building somehow changed things, I don't know it made me braver, it made me something, I could walk into the lobby of that building and I'd be different. And I could never figure out what the thing was but there was something about the building and you know as I grew up and traveled a bit I found that there were places that I really loved, places where I wanted to be and when I was there I felt different, I felt good, some places would make me feel really comfortable, you know quiet inside and peaceful and some places would make me excited and inspired and other places were creepy, I mean you've been in buildings that you can't stand, you go in and five minutes later you have to leave you don't know why. But the built environment has that kind of affect on us, it actually physically affects us. It can change our consciousness, it can change our blood pressure, it changes our emotions and once I realized that as a developer I realized that I have an obligation to consider that. How can I built a something when I know what just anything when I know what kind of affect it can have on human beings. So that's how I come to the new urbanization and traditional neighborhood design, because it was the first thing that I saw in the realm of development that actually considered human beings as the top of the food chain. The automobiles happened to be a little further down, we still accommodate them I mean we all know we love our cars and we're going to live in them but it was, it's a different way to 16ok at it. So what are we going to do in the neighborhood, the Peninsula neighborhood? If we're the developers, first of all it's been my experience to work with cities for the last 10 years in public/private parmerships and I'll show you a few slides. These parmerships always come from cities like yourselves who have a dream or have a need and don't know quite how to do it. And I've been very successful of going in and doing it. This was a small downtown in Michigan called Dearborn and this was the site it was all parking lots and you can see their downtown in the background. And what we did was we necked the street down to This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 4 three lanes, put parking and built townhouses and it was a very successful project. The project on the top was another downtown in Wyndot, this projects generate huge amounts of income available for expenditure after taxes for the communities and they're were all communities that were not doing to well, their not like, I'm not comparing them to Iowa City Iowa City's doing quite nice. But the idea was, the response, the impedious for the projects come from the city now, they're very interesting now, the cities are saying what they want. It used to be that developers came and brought a project and now cities are actually being the developers. This is one of the most recent projects, this is about 200 acres in Monroe Michigan and it's a traditional neighborhood of about 1,500 units when it's finished, this was the first 500 and 17 in the conceptual site plan. It's on a brown field site, it was a paper factory for about 50 years and it's about a $6 million dollar cleanup, so but it's right in the city, it's part of the fabric, we're recreating the neighborhood, which one of these buttons point? Man/Aim it at this. Stamper/Oh I'm sorry. There, this neighborhood here, old neighborhood, what we did was we photographed it, we measured it, we tested it, and we designed a neighborhood to match it. Now what we're trying to bring to this, what we're finding also is that the more comprehensive you are with these developments the better off you are. The more you think through, I mean the whole nature of traditional neighborhood development is you must think through everything, you think about the house across the street, the house next door, the terminated vista, how the sidewalks work, how the streets work, you have to really think through the whole thing and so we were taking a little farther. We're talking to a conservation design form because we believe that the environment is the most important thing and that how you deal with storm water and the likes is very important and so we will have, we're working on a state of the art storm water system for this development. We're talking to a company called Dark Fiber, and Dark Fiber specializes in fiber optics, we believe this community should be wired. And with 300 plus houses there it becomes the basis of an intra net for the city, very interesting possibility. We're talking to one of the biggest power companies in the Midwest about, this neighborhood now a days you could generate it's own electricity. Very interesting. What are the social aspects of this community? What happens to the neighbors? What happens to the University? All these things have to be thought through and included in this project. Peter has an idea he calls the intelligent community, which is very interesting and what the idea is is the best practices, the best environmental practices, the best green building practices, the best social design, all these things have to be part of this development. So what we've done tonight is we've put together our presentation is basically that one of the questions on the Request for Proposal was take three blocks of the Dover Colt plan and show how you would work with it. And so we're going to show you first of all how if from the city's standpoint you want to This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 5 know OK so we want a traditional neighborhood but how are we going to be sure we're going to get one? What's our guarantee we're going to get a traditional neighborhood? We're going to show you how you guarantee that through codes and agreements. We're going to show you how those codes then create the plan and we'll show you the plan. So I'm going to stop and I'm going to let Peter start talking, Peter's going to start talking to you about the codes. Peter Katz/I guess I'm in an unusual position among the teams and that I've had the amazing opportunity over the past few years to observe many many of these new traditional neighborhoods around the country and around the world, and had the chance to see the ones that have been very successful and indeed published them in my last book. And some of the communities that haven't really quite come up the expectations of the developers and the communities that have backed them. And it's interesting to study the reasons why some have succeeded and others have had greater difficulty. Very often the difficulty can actually be pointed back to the municipality. Many of the rules on the books in communities around the country really swarp the kinds of places we're talking about, fire department regulations for instance to cause streets to be way too wide. Or sanitation requirements that you know garbage trucks, you know garbage companies go out and buy these huge pieces of equipment and then they want a gigantic alley behind the houses. Those are just some examples when government gets in the way. What's exciting to me here is that the City of Iowa City is so enthusiastic about this approach and is really doing it right. They really contacted you know what I believe are the best consultants and it's one of the reasons why I've watched the project very closely, I originally came here several years ago not out of interest as a developer but because I wanted to include this project in my next book and wanted the chance to talk to the group within the city who was behind it and find out what was really going on here in Iowa City and watching the process and learning about the struggles you all have had in finding a team to carry it forward is what really caught my attention and as Terry said I do come from a marketing background, I frequently write marketing plans for developers and even communities when they get in the development role to really specify how the marketing of a project should take place. And the marketing too can have a great affect, very often if the builders are the primary marketers sometimes one doesn't have as much control over certain design and community issues as you'd like. But one of the things, one of the central questions that really needs to be focused on here, this is sort of a brave adventure, not a lot of these traditional communities have been built so there's a lot of very new ideas and new knowledge. But the real question that we're going to try to address tonight is how does one build a traditional neighborhood? And one of the big clues, it's not all of it, but one of the big clues is something about how you regulate legally that process of build out and there are these things called Regulating Plans and Codes that are actually somewhat different from the zoning system that you've had in place for the last 40 or 50 years. And we're going to talk a lot about them, they sound sort of This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 6 technical, we're going try to make it easy and interesting but it really is very important for the build out of this or any other new traditional community that one is considering. So let me try to run through this fairly quickly. In most of the United States zoning is the mechanism that's in place to create your communities. And zoning generally involves two principle things. Density, how many units per acre and use? What is your land use? Is it commercial? Is it residential? And so on and what's interesting is in this half mile square area in a new community in California called Pliavista there are only two zoning designations. But the newer (can't hear) of this plan for the same place shows probably 20 different building types, 10 different street types, 3 or 4 different open space types, several public buildings that are custom designed, it's much more specific. Then when it comes to cities zoning is extremely problematic most cities weren't created through zoning but that's how we control them. So in New York City in Greenwich Village the R-6 zoning designation is the one that's throughout the Village well that R-6 can either give you these fairly low skilled brown stones or these 10 story towers and if you live in a community when the rules can give you such extremes, one or the other, if you live in those brown stones and someone comes along with a bulldozer and they could build those towers your going to plenty nervous. IfI were living in that community I'd be a nimbi and I'd fight any form of development. So even in communities that have height limits, that have setbacks, this is really what zoning gives you, it gives you a big blob. OK it may specify a maximum height and a setback and even a curb cut but this is not a lot of information, you actually get buildings that look like this sometimes, a block long concrete block blob and their horrible. So what citizens say, I don't know if, I hope I'm not blocking the view of the Committee over here. So what citizens say is we need something more and very often they ask for guidelines. So the six pages of zoning in the county handbook or the city handbook will then be accompanied by another 30 pages of guidelines which specify that the building must be articulated that there are different, you know every 30 feet you have to tuck in and have a balcony or an entrance. And all these things are very good ideas or seemingly good ideas you know that this complex facade is what we think we remembered from our trip to Europe last summer but in fact when you go to Europe and you look at the buildings you see that in deed they all line up. Actually, each property owners the only thing in their economic best interest which is built out to the property line but what makes this interesting is the different colors, they're all the same basic building type, their different heights, it's the activities of the streets and the fact that it's a fairly small scale, it's broken down to a small scale with property owners. And it's a wonderful and in fact all those ins and out's you know new urbanist on the (can't hear) says your spending a lot of money to make a very expensive building that' s going to leak because every time you change, turn a corner, you have to have a corner be, you change your materials, it's place to leak where expansion contraction will hurt the building. But this is what we think is going to make a better place. The guidelines have been the principle mechanism that we've used to create a many of This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 7 the better places. And I don't mean to put them down, they're actually quite useful and there's been a lot of creativity that's gone into the form of those documents. In fact the pattem books that some urbanists use are a very very creative form of guidelines. But we think that there's an even better approach, there's something called Regulating Plans and Codes that give you the authentic urbanism that really feels like towns, as cities such as Iowa City. Here's how it works, you basically break down the block, or in fact the entire city into some smaller sub units and each one of these sub units has a different building type. This was first sort of stumbled on at Seaside, a fairly famous new urbanist community in Florida but in fact was used widely throughout the 1920's in places like Coral Gables, Country Club Plaza, Highland Park in Dallas and it's the closest way we know to get to this rich authentic urbanism you find in a place like Old Town Alexander or indeed in terms of old Iowa City neighborhoods. Here's how it works, very simple, and this is a typical city block, this might be a busy main street here, this might be a quiet side street, a nice grand residential boulevard here. On this street the building type you want is a fairly and actually the first (can't hear) you lay out the place with the streets and blocks much as has has been done here in Iowa City but then you code it. And by the way this is a code that Jeff Ferrell who 's part of our team actually when did when he was at the office of Dwany, and Plader and Ziber for the new town of Wellington Florida. Well each one of these rows is describing a building type and it's still a fairly complex diagram, it's a section and a plan, and but would it show you a picture of that building type? You say oh yea I know I've seen that building type, we have some of those downtown. You know it can be two stories or three stories, it can be this wide or this wide, but it's the same basic type, it's got retail on the bottom, it's got something else above. As you move around the block now, now we're here, a different building type, OK still a similar scale to the ones next to it so it creates a kind of a defined street space. And interestingly the use is actually the subset of type, so it doesn't really matter whether it's housing or office above the store front. The important thing from the standpoint of citizens is what kind of building are we going to have? How is the space going to be shaped? And use's actually change over time, some of the buildings here in Iowa City that might have started as a Laundromat today are a travel agency or the old McDonald's that got converted to an embroidery shop, I don't know. But that is healthy for use to change over time. What you want is good solid durable buildings that are worth saving, that are worth retrofitting. You don't want to send the whole building back to the landfill every time the use changes and that's the thesis that Stewart Brand talks about in his book. Let's go around the block, let's continue, on the same block you'll have a large single family home like the kind you see built out in new suburban areas. On the back street there you might have a row house, and the theory is you always want to match what's across the street. You don't want to introduce some new element, and particularly an in fill situation it's useful to be able to sort of micro adjust within the block so your never overwhelming what's across the street. And then finally as you come around a cottage. Now This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 8 what's interesting about this particularly from the standpoint of affordable housing, as you think about all the different options that are delivered within a single block you've got a large house, you've got a small cottage. You've got a row house, we're kind of moving down from the sort of level of prestige if you will, you've got, let's say that's an apartment building. And finally you've got folks who live over the store, many, many different options all delivered by design rather than law. And by the way see these guys here, they've got granny flats, at the center of the block, so you've got six different options, all generated here which is one of the reasons why coding can actually deliver a lot of variety within a place. And interestingly because the uses are changing, the housing types are changing, the back yard rather than the front yard, these people don't object to being around one other. If your facing, if a big house is facing a little house across the street, it doesn't feel quite right but if it's a back yard and you don't like your neighbor you can always build a bigger fence. Now the reason why I show this is that the typical way we deal with affordability issues now is we built one great big block. This is what zoning and guidelines will often deliver, is they'll say well here's your use and here's your density just go build it. Which means your facing the same thing on all four sides and your affordability housing here is mandated by law, you say well you've got to give us 15 percent of affordable housing which of course is paid for by the other 85 percent who resent the fact that their paying for that and this sets up a system that needs to be kept in place and monitored by the city or some other agency forever. What is gives you what coding does is delivers affordability by design. Now the question is if this is such a great system why don't you see it all over the country? Well the fact is, now a days planning' s going through some real changes, and the ideas that are being reflected and your original plan here in Iowa City and the approach that our team represents is really a new approach. I can count on my hands the number of rirrns who actually know how to do topologically coding in the United States, it's sort of like a lost art. By and large most folks are still working in the old way and the route to economy in the system is usually that kind of top down commanding control to build a huge project, take one set of plans, cookie cutter them, you know flip them, flop them, and every time you ask the developer to put a different facade on the building, they complain, it's more money they've got to spend. The beauty of this system is your actually creating a very tight framework, within which a lot of different architects and builders, different players can each build out the community. And in fact that's the way many of the great cities of America were built, by a lot of different individuals working within a tight framework. The other thing that's important about this is that this involves very little discretionary design review. All the meetings at City hall you have to have to negotiate with this one big developer, and that's often the reasons why cities like the big players is because they know they don't need a lot of staff, they can have one or two planners deal with seven blocks. But here you get a horrible house in one place but fight next to it might be a beautiful place and they cancel each other out and so this allows for a lot of diversity, it's a very democratic This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 9 approach to design. Now I've just given a general grounding in the issue of codes but I now want to turn it over to JeffFerrell who is somebody I've known for years, and Jeff is, I like to call him the supreme codemeister of the United States because he really has been involved in this, he's worked with Dwane, Ziberk and I believe several other really notable firms around the country really helping them on this area with his designer and his codester. There you go. Jeff Ferrell/ Boy what an introduction, let's see ifI can stand over here and stay out of most people's way. First to start off, I'll tell you why I am the personal (can't hear) very excited about working on this project and it's several things. One is the way that you have done it, and I'll tell you when I saw the crowd here, I'm making an assumption that most of you were at the Charrette and in a big way this is your plan, the city did this plan. That's very important to those of us who work in this kind of planning, it's a big reversal what your, the people on your planning department here are doing is a big kind of a, they're kind of at the cutting edge of a sea change in the way that we are building our cities these days. For too long, too much of my lifetime and a bit before, planning departments only reacted, they only set up some abstract rules and then they'd wait to see what came in and then you have this tussle. This is planning, you actually, we're coming into this as a development team, you have a plan, what we're doing is talking about fulfilling it and maybe taking it a little bit further but your not coming in with a big, and your not handing us a blank piece of land and saying what would you like to do. The City and the citizens have already given us a clear message, what you'd like to do. And also I can't help but mention this obviously, the site is extraordinary. I'll tell you where we started, this is I think you've all seen this, had a hand in it, the different building types that were given in the booklet as things that could go here and the kind of thing that should go here. We started with this and when we played we took a little area of the plan and we started playing around with it, and we looked at different building types and this is a quick study for us so this was done fairly quickly, we did talk and debate about how to disperse the different types from the Zimmerman study about where the market was and where it should step. And we got some variety in here, we've got large houses along what would be a ravine where there's a bigger view, right next to them medium houses, cottages, and then this is a duplex, a kind of a double cottage. A row house, not unlike the one that I bought not too long ago in DC. Excess a unit here the granny flat or the student apartment, or the home office. An apartment house, what would have to be a really wonderful building on that square. Now the question is, well, these are some very quick studies that we went through and based on the original types the drawings and the plan we went to some sources and grabbed very quickly a lot of different buildings that could fit because we're using a code with several different components which I'm going to talk about, we can use a lot of different architects, different builders, and pull from a lot of different sources and one thing Terry introduced me as the architect. That's to take that further, I'm not the architect for the purposes of the development team and the application This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 10 yes but we're going to use a lot of different designers here and that's how you get true variety. And here's some kind of large houses we grabbed and please give us the, this is a quick study, we're going to study what you have here in Iowa more closely but here are the kinds of houses that may need a little adaptation to fit the feel of your region but some idea of the variety that you get here. The medium size houses, here's the Dover Kohl bungalow drawing. And you see fight along side the big houses making it kind of an edge and they're not that different, they integrate quite seemlessly, you could walk down these streets and not realize you passed from a house that cost there' s a $10,000 or $20,000 gap between these two houses, they'll all be quite comfortable. Here's some quick grabs. Now let's look at the small house or cottage here. And again they're right in the middle of things, pretty seem less integration here and this particular drawing is from the T & D plan book, there are three of these, there are a number of plans you can get mail order. We would of course only these after we did a little work with the architect to adapt the aesthetic of it. But these things all exist, they're all readily grabable, a row houses, building type I'm particularly fond of. Some plans here, I think this is a (can't hear)design award winner. Something that Terry Stamper did. Very nice, something at the Ketlins. And then the apartment house, and we'll, we're going to start and end with Dover Kohl's sketch because we didn't find anything that some good elements here in a building that needs a little sprucing up. Brick building at the Ketlins but I want to emphasize that this building, this particular spot especially is really got to be a singular building with extra, an extra layer of care put onto it because this square is a little too precious, it's really the heart of that neighborhood. OK I'll try and talk a little bit about how do you get all that variety, how do you get that stuff. We'll put it under the umbrella name of the code which has various components to it, the Peninsula code. The first component is is a plan drawing laid on top of the site, called the regulating plan. There's information on each of these, if your to buy this, a particular lot you'll find there are things like a build two line so you can define exactly how the houses line up which you can vary willfully to make design efforts. Each lot will tell you where, let's see ifI can decide to use the pointer or my shadow. What the type of house is, the address on the lot, if it is, for instance a Peninsula house of a certain lot, the point is the site plan itself gives you some of the roles that govern the house, you may want to specify this is a house on a special comer, it really needs to be two stories, perhaps it needs a copula, that sort of thing can be very specifically put on the plan itself. Now the building placement standards are standards that govern really the building envelope and the things you put on it. Components height, siding, elements, things like how much porch it has, if it has a copula, if it has a double porch, the height of the floors, now these control the big elements, this sort of, this gives you the big mass of the building. And we skipped, I'm speechless because such on the architectural codes. Well the building placement standards, you can almost call them building envelope standards or building massing standards. Those are paired with architectural codes which would be my tongue in my cheek a little bit, we can This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 11 almost call them like a dress code. It deals with the materials, here's one for windows and doors. OK we go from materials, configurations, you know what things are made of, how they're shaped, and then things like techniques. And then we found some pretty good examples, these are some of Peter' s photos of some really nice elements of architecture, these are photographs here in Iowa City. And it's really nice stuff, there's a little bit of an exercise you go through in study these things and try and discern what is it that makes them particular to Iowa City and what is it that makes this architecture good. What do you need to preserve and protect? Here' s another examples, porches and verandah's, a very big element if your walking down the street or driving the street, and I also I think this, there's something a very powerful part of what makes a Midwestern prairie style architecture different special as far as the rest of the country is concerned. Kind of Victorian aesthetic, something very different thrown in there and then my favorite, these are very gracious, strong buildings. And then that's the end of my quick speech and I'll hand it over to Jim Tischler. Thank you. Jim Tischler/Thanks Jeff. Good evening. And before I start let me apologize briefly for the sound of my voice, I like Terry am also recovering from an illness or I'm recovering and he's starting so I traded you there. I'm a development consultant for this project on the project team. And one of the things we decided to do before coming to this, before you tonight is to more or less ask ourselves and to tell you why we want to be involved in this project. My reason as to why I want to be involved in this project has to do with something that you didn't hear from Terry and his introduction of me which is because being a development consultant I also act as a trained certified municipal planner. So like what you heard from Terry and from Peter, from a municipal side and with the Connty's I work with I'm tired of looking at the blob zoning projects that come in which only have a facade or are massive on such a scale that they don't fit within the context of the block or the neighborhood or the community. But because of the restrictions of zoning they, we have to facilitate them. So this project is a message, it's a message to the state, it's a message to your community, it's a message to other communities both in the Midwest and nationally nationwide that true urban planning can be done. And that true urban planning can be of benefit and lasting impact on a community. That's why I'm very much involved in this project. Now, my segment here is to try to tell you how we get from the regulating plan and the codes to a built project on this site. Before I do that let's quickly talk about some first principles for the Peninsula neighborhood. What does Iowa City desire? Well you desire traditional neighborhood, that is diverse in use, that supports a full range of activities and growth. That has strong bonds of community life, and we share this desire. Now where do these statements come from? They came from your plan, they came from the Dover Kohl plan and the community's plan for this project. We share this desire and through our regulating plan and codes it's our intent to implement this desire through execution of the project. In terms of project implementation, how do you achieve This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 12 a predictable outcome? How does the community, how does the City get what they want in those objectives? Well simply put, you can set the performance standards for this project in the implementation tools that you use with the developer for execution of the project namely a development agreement and agreements which execute and regulate the regulating, or the excuse me the regulating plan and the codes. Let' s talk briefly about the development agreement, in the RFP a discussion, a brief discussion is held, or was made that the City would execute a development agreement with the party selected. Our proposal for a development agreement beyond the normal tasks that are being involved includes the following. (Can't hear) of all project, task and phasing schedule, from the point of execution to the point of implementation through to the end. How, when, and what fashion will we deliver the regulating plan and codes that Peter and Jeffrey have discussed? The specifics of land transfer and the development process, keeping in mind this is an agreement between the development team and the City. The City currently owns the property, the terms, conditions of the transfer property in what form, in what portions, this will go into the development agreement. A clarification of the City's role in this project, the developer certainly has roles but the City also has roles. They have been mentioned in your Request for Proposals, they need to be spelled out in the agreement so that both the developer and the City know what to expect from each other in order to implement this project. A definition of what quality performance standards the City wishes and the developer wishes in order to get what the City and we desire in this project. And also the ability to attain flexibility, now the flexibility that we as developers can respond to market demands but also to bring in new building types, excuse me, I apologize, new building types, variation on existing building types, which give the neighborhood, give the Peninsula the unique character and diversity of that I think you seek. Moving onto development planning and permitting. Once we have the terms and conditions of the actual development process, how do you implement what' s in that agreement? The RFP that was distributed and in case that the City upon selection of the preferred developer will proceed to rezone the project, or excuse me the Parcel 4 and overlay plan development for residential purposes. We have reviewed your zoning code and we wish to here now propose a mechanism to get from the regulating planning codes to your existing zoning codes without a significant rewrite of your zoning codes. Your zoning, or you PDR, Plan Development Residentials District permits mixed use plan developments, pardon me, mixed use in the term of mixed residential, residential commercial combinations. It provides the ability to submit flexible standards and also includes an appropriate review and approval process for those activities. The preliminary plan which is found in your zoning regulations under the section in essence that is our regulating plan, we will submit that regulating plan as part of the package for preliminary review. Also with that regulating plan as part of the preliminary package we intend to submit a Plan Development Agreement distinct from the project development agreement because the Plan Development Agreement will include the following: This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 13 provisions on what specific uses will be on the property, procedures for review and approval of those uses, the land uses and combinations, again I mention the regulating plan, the dimensional and design standards, those will be the code that you heard from Jeffrey, and a conveyance, pardon me, from the developer to the City. Now what is a conveyance? What we mean by a conveyance is that the codes that we, the Peninsula code that we establish will be conveyed to the City by the developer, the City will be requested to receive the codes as the regulatory instrument for execution and implementation of the project. It's called a conveyance in order to meet the legal standard necessary for a municipality to receive such regulation and incorporate it as their own regulation. That's the end of my presentation. Thank you for your time and I'll turn the floor back to Terry. Stamper/Thanks Jim. Thank you. I just wanted to say a few more things and then we'll end if we've got a couple minutes. Franklin/Yes. Stamper/OK. The, something I meant to speak of before and I didn't and that is that I mean the purposes of this, this project comes from the City like a lot of people have said. It's your desire and really your going to use this project as a model for future projects, your on the right track, you've shown great courage in doing this and great foresight. And so from our side what we want to do is that we want to, as part of this process we want to create the capacity within the City in your own architects, and builders, and bankers, and planners, and title companies, everybody that fit, that would be involved in any kind of development here. We want to create the capacity in the local community so that you can do more of them. If this tums out like it should and you like it then when we're done you will yourself within your own community the capacity to do more. I mean that' s really our goal is to replace ourselves, to recreate ourselves here in you. And so with that I want to thank you again for the opportunity, we look forward to seeing you again. Thank you. Franklin/Thank you very much. Now you all have sheets that we invite you to make comments, put questions down, those will go to the selection panel and we will consider those as we do our private interviews tomorrow. We'll take a little bit of a break. (END OF 00-31 SIDE 1) Franklin/Thank you very much. Now you all have sheets that we invite you to make comments, put questions down, those will go to the selection panel and we will consider those as we do our private interviews tomorrow. We'll take a little bit of a break now and then the next developer will be in at 7:00, thanks very much to the team. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 14 Break Franklin/In the interest of being fair about the amount of time that people have and the mayor hasn't had dinner yet so we'd like to proceed. Our next development team is the Lander group from Minneapolis Minnesota and Michael Lander is the team representative so Michael if you'd like to start our and introduce your team. Michael Lander/Good evening. Thank you for having us and it's a pleasure to see all of you out and have so much interest in this very exciting development opportunity. I have with me two of our other team members, I have Larry Thompson from Sienna and Scott Hochstrasser from Iowa City and I'll explain a little bit more as I come back to the mic. about their different roles in the project and more about the Lander Group and Scott is going to kick things off for us so. Scott Hochstrasser/Thank you Michael. Can everybody hear me if I don't hear the microphone? Man/No. Hochstrasser/If I don't stand right up in front of it because I would like to walk to some of the drawings that we have here in my presentation. OK fine. I usually speak pretty loud so I'll do that. My name is Scott Hochstrasser and many of you don't recognize me as being from Iowa City because I'm new to your community. I've lived here for about 18 months. I moved here from the west coast and I moved here because my wife took a teaching position at the University. I have 20 years of experience in the land use planning business, 10 years in the public sector in Rin County California, and 10 years, the most recent 10 years as a practicing private consultant. As I mentioned I came here about 18 months ago with my family and my wife and I am interested always in planning and what's happening in my community so I began a self study looking around at well what' s happening in Iowa. First of all what's happening in Johnson County? What's happening in regionally, and what's happening in Iowa City? And in my review that, in my interest as a planner I discovered that there's a whole heck of a lot going on and you people are really to be commended for your planning efforts and I think it's absolutely amazing and I think it's wonderful what your doing and I'm interested and I want to be a part of that. I want to be a part of that because I'm a member of the community. As we know from a Federal level there's smart growth planning, transportation, and land use planning that's being done for a state level. The State of Iowa is looking at protection of rivers and water quality issues and rehabilitating some of the river fronts. And a walk to destroying, just to give you an example what we know is happening already in your community and more locally in this area. The City of Coralville has two grants at this point from Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps to study their river This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 15 front on this side of Iowa City River. You all have been doing some planning here on the Peninsula side, there's a regional planning effort, there was a first conference ever for regional planning being discussed at Cedar Rapids a week or so ago and so there are many many interesting and fascinating things happening from a planning perspective. In my review, my self study as I put it, I discovered that there are a lot of activities and certainly some planning opportunities and I became very interested in that and working with colleagues Michael Lander who I know from projects working with him in the west coast and I gave Michael a call I said here's an opportunity, a great opportunity to do something really wonderful in a very wonderful community. And so Michael and I started noodling things around, we put together some thoughts and ideas, we looked at this area not just as the Peninsula property that's owned by the City but we're sort of long range and big picture planners and so we've looked at the whole area, what's going to happen to this whole area in terms ofwhat's planned on the Coralville side and what's planned in Iowa City. We read your comprehensive plan, we've read some of the draft of what your Noah District Plan is doing and we understand your neighborhood planning concepts. We understand that you now own as a City a piece of land here, you control that and you have an opportunity here to do a very and interesting wonderful development. As I mentioned, we're whole picture people, so we sort of looked at not just at the City property here but of course that's what we focused on and that's what Michael's going to talk about. But we looked at what planning opportunities are in this whole area, in the whole north district area. And we think that this new urbanist concept, that the neotraditional neighborhood concept and the policies and the ideas and thoughts that are being promoted by the City are wonderful ideas and they can be implemented here. And more specifically they can be implemented on the City property as a model for what you want for the future and what your vision for the 21st Century is for the noah district and to talk specifically about that Michael's going to give you the details of our proposal and thank you very much again for being here tonight. Lander/I'm going to come back and try to do this stationary because I have some notes I'd like to read and operate the slide projector as well. Got a lot of ground to cover in a short time tonight, there's been a lot of work that has gone before us and 45 minutes is a fairly modest amount of time to elaborate on that, but we'll do our best, hopefully not talk too quickly. I want to talk a little bit about the team members and their background, how this team came together. I want to talk about our initial thoughts about the Peninsula development and understanding that we're fairly new to this whole process, many of you have been engaged in this for some time and one of the frustrations we have with RFP processes is it doesn't really allow us to really dig in and understand these things and the intimate way that you do so if we're selected we have a lot of homework to do and a lot of understanding to develop about this particular piece of property. But we're going to talk about our initial thoughts based on our experience in planning and of design and development. We'll talk a little bit about our experience in This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 16 public/private ventures, we see this as a joint venture really between the City and our development team and how we view that and how we seek win/win relationships there. I'm going to show you some of the past work that we've done, we in many times prefer to have you look at that, it's pretty easy to do pretty pictures but really what if people down the path so we would like to show you that we have a solid track record, a very solid high quality design in the Lander Group' s case almost entirely in existing traditional neighborhoods and urban fabric because up to this point we really haven't found an opportunity in the new neighborhood that peaked our interest for development. And we find ourselves in a really ideal position because I wear two hats, I'm a the President of the Lander Group which is a development company which is really my primary work, but I'm also a founder and principle of Town Planning Collaborative which is a new Urbanism Planning firm in Minneapolis and we are very active in the kind of community based planning that you have already done and we do a lot about half of our work for public sector clients and then as a developer I, it's an ideal position to be the one that is installing the community vision. Because you have set forth what you want to have happen here and it's our role to help you install that. In so often in development it's a very adversary relationship when that has not happened and we present ideas and people get very anxious by not having had the background and being involved in the plan so we think it's a great opportunity that you've done that. Let's talk a little bit about how I got here in front of you in Iowa City and at some point I might have the lights up because I'm going to have to do some slides and some boards at the same time but I was born and raised in Grand Fork, Noah Dakota which is also a University town. I had an impression that Iowa City might be more like Grand Forks but while there are some similarities it's a very different community as well. And I grew up on a tree line street in a traditional neighborhood and so that was my roots. I spent 15 years in Northern California where I hooked up with Scott, it's really a pleasure to rehook up with him back in the Midwest and I've been interested in community planning since really the mid 70's when I started doing development and I was in Soscelito California just loved this sort of Italian hillside town of Soscelito, if any of you have been there and had an interest in gee it would be great to develop things like that and I was a young person at that time and looked into what was involved in land development and found out pretty quickly that no in fact you had to build what we, build what we've come now to consider urban sprawl that the all the govemment regulations, and the development industry was all organized around that type of building development so I set about making a career for last 25 years in doing building in existing traditional neighborhoods or existing urban fabric rather than building on in the green fields. And I, because I didn't have the stomach to challenge all those rules particularly in northern California. However, I did follow the work of Andreas Duwaney and some others that were practicing out in less regulated places and challenging those conventions and got very excited to begin to see a movement coming about in 1992 joined with about 250 others to become charter members of the Congress of new Urbanism. And was This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 17 very excited to think that in my lifetime actually we could and would make a change in the development pattern so this is really kind of the culmination of a 25 year journey for me to have an opportunity to actually build in a new neighborhood and I'm extremely excited about that. I've been working the last 10 years in Minneapolis, return to the Midwest from overregulated California, that's my tree line street I grew up on and I currently live in south Minneapolis in a beautiful turn of the Centmy traditional neighborhood, in a two-story duplex that' s alley loaded, and I walk to shops and services, and transits, and our office which I'll show you a picture of later is over a coffee shop. So addition to talking the talk I walk the walk because I live these principles, I believe in them, and I think it's really our future. We think of new urbanism or traditional planning is really a couple of things and of course there's really a lot of different definitions of what it all is about. But it is about both a set of design ideas that are certainly the basis for the peninsula plan but it's also about the process that you all went through in engaging a broad group of stakeholders in development decisions. It' s no longer sort of a zoning book and a private developer plan that's presented and the community is sort of left reacting to the plan and so again I think we are very excited to be that all the work has gone before us and hopefully you'll like the way we've tried to evolve the plan and make it a market based plan. As Scott mentioned one of the first things we do when we begin to look at these things is look outside of the site plan that's given us. We, I've had trouble since I was five years old staying inside the lines and this planning work is no different so as Scott mentioned we began to look at what's around this site and this setting. And what kind of connections should we be making7 And prepare a drawing just for conceptual purposes to reflect that kind of thinking because these ideas are not really an architectural style it's a set of planning ideas that really ought to be applied broadly we think and we're hoping that there will be some interest in exploring the expansion of these principles to the larger Peninsula area. That's discerning. Just not to go back over these, you've probably seen these in previous presentations, it's from a slide presentation we do. But the things that clearly come into, it all really comes into play here, one of the things we're probably going to talk probably the most about are is the prominent public realm we really think that is really the foundation of a good neighborhood, the clarity of mix of uses, the different housing types, the network of streets and the connections are very important as well and the clear center and edge. And all of these principles show up in the great plan that Dover Kohl has already done. This is a slide that we help illustrate those ideas as well. On the top you see a traditional neighborhood and on the bottom the more traditional suburban pattern that we're pursuing across the county and again it's on the wall here to suggest that it's really about the arrangement of parts more than it is the individual buildings, clearly they play a role in defining the public realm and the fabric of the neighborhood, but it's really organizing the pieces because the top and bottom half of this slide have all the same stuff in them. All the different kinds of housing that we build, shopping centers, office parks and so forth but you can see This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 18 in the top organizing the more coherent way. And we see the neighborhood as the building block of a town or city so again we don't like to think of this Peninsula as really just as a subdivision or an isolated neighborhood but really rather a piece of a larger puzzle. So that that neighborhood building block then can become a rational pattern for other forms of movement. One of the beautiful aspects of the revival of town planning is a development pattern that facilitates multi-modal movement not just the automobile but walking and biking and then a development pattern that facilitates transit. And so we'd like to develop those ideas as we think about the Peninsula in a smaller sort of fashion. We're going to run through very quickly just a few of the projects that Town Planning has worked on and then a few that the Lander Group has done just to give you a little flavor of the kind of work we've been doing in the past since we have a limited amount of specific things about this project for you to judge or look at. My role in Town Planning is both as a designer and planner but more particular to bring real estate experience and real estate expertise to our planning assignments, because there is the visioning part and there is the installing parts. And as I'll talk about we see a lot of sort of falling down when we get to the installing part and hopefully that is back up here. This is about a 125 acre area in a first ring suburb of Minneapolis, we were hired by the City just as Dover Kohl was here to work with the City who had determined they didn't have any center, they had no downtown, they wanted to create a downtown in this area, we created a master plan, and a Charrette based process, much like you did here that added about a 1,000 housing units about 250,000 square feet of retail and about a million square feet of office to an area that had previously been disconnected and considered to be built out and the first piece of that project which is about 600 housing units and about 100,000 square feet of retail is under construction now by another developer. We then moved on to advise the city in the implementation process, how to go about finding developers, how to interface with them, how to make it an easy process and so it's, it's one of the roles we play as well in our work and this is in the uptown area of Minneapolis actually where I live. And kind of talks about the sort of seem less involvement of a character like me, I served as the volunteer chair of a task force to look at development issues then town planning professional led a Charrette to develop a master plan for the area and then the Lander Group was selected as one of the developers to actually install a piece of it. So I went from volunteer to planner to developer and I enjoy all of those roles and thinking the more progressive public/private relationships is really a seem less relationship between public and private interest so. Just some images from, on that work. Onto my development projects I return to Minneapolis in 1990 and again I've done a series of small in fill projects really all what we developers call multifamily or non single family, primarily for sale housing or into to all of the non family households, the young professionals, or empty nesters. This was a fire station that the City owned and put out for proposals, we did four sort of (can't hear) style condominiums. I'm just going to run through these all very quickly in the interest in time, just to give you a little flavor of the kind of care and the This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 19 concern that we put into the projects that we do. This was a four-plex rental property that had a carriage house in the back and we gutted the four-plex, made two side by side townhouses, renovated the carriage house and built a new carriage so we had four owner occupied homes on a 11,000 square foot lot, most of the work we've been doing has been in this sort of 15 to 25 units to the acre development so it's been more urban than we're looking at in the Peninsula. This really taught us about how to officially use land and where this is all housed in a beautiful neighborhood setting, a beautiful interiors we. You'll see in some of the work that we're proposing for the Peninsula a lot of them are traditional exteriors but more contemporary and modern interiors that we find infinity in the marketplace for the traditional neighborhood and for some of the traditional exterior design but people live differently than they did before, looking for family rooms and master suites and different housing configurations that are typically inside the beautiful old houses and the old neighborhoods here and that' s essentially the basis for our work in Minneapolis. This is a new carriage house we built, with a contemporary interior. This is a little six unit in fill project on a very busy street in Minneapolis and that's on a 10,000 square foot lot so that's about 25 units to the acre but again for sort of production building, these are not custom homes, these are built and then sold. We try to infuse a high level of detail and depending on the market place, this was a younger market a little more contemporary kind of treatment. We've done some mixed two's, this is actually our office building, we office over the coffee shop, so we are the planners over the coffee shop is kind of our reputation in the neighborhood there. This is in St. Paul on beautiful Summit Avenue if any of you have been there, sort of Mansion row magnificent magnificent homes. This was actually a new construction project, the fourth generation on this site, it's six units of condominiums, two on the floor over under ground parking. We folded this into the old neighborhood and was paid a complement it was sort of silly in some respect but someone said when did you start the renovation but I guess we achieved our goal of fitting in the neighborhood when they said that so, just some shots of the interiors there. And the current project we're working on again both down planning with both hats and Lander Group, it's downtown St. Paul on a sort of an abandoned warehouse district, most of the buildings in the foreground there have been torn down since this slide was taken. It's all surface parking, we did a master plan for a 1,000 new housing units, about 300,000 square feet of office and 200,000 square feet of retail and we're as town planning is the Lander Group now we're a codeveloper of the first increment of building there which is 200 units of rental housing and 60 units of for sale condominium and the first park piece that' s sort of the center piece of the neighborhood so again working in both the planning and development roles in that community as well. OK. When Scott called me we had actually responded to the RFP for the planning work that Dover Kohl ended up doing, never mind losing to such a qualified firm but then got a package of information from Bob Miklo this summer seeking developer's, asking us if we knew of any developers that might be interested in the project and we've been very busy it's a boom This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 20 economy in the twin cities and I had just lost an RFP that we had poured tons of energy into and was sort of burned out on the idea and so it sort of sat on the side of my desk and was undecided about responding. And then I got a call from Scott which kind of reignited my interest to have a local partner in the project and decided to get involved, and of course once I did I got very excited about the opportunity here to get involved. And we know from consulting work at TPC and we've been around the country to see most of this new urbanism neotraditional neighborhoods that have been done that the projects that have combined really solid planning and real estate development expertise have been very very successful have sort of outrun the marketplace, it's out performed the marketplace. And yet we've seen a number of projects including one here in Iowa in Ames that had been driven by ideology only. Great planning ideas, Duwaney's plans, both of them executed without development expertise or develop in discipline and have failed, because they don't understand, they didn't understand all the you know to go from the principles into the ground, that there are marketplaces you have to meet, buyers you have to satisfy, and that really is the role that I'm most excited about is to bridge that gap and to take these ideas into the ground in a successful fashion. Too often there isn't enough attention paid to the local marketplace and again we're just beginning to understand this one but we have some ideas we'd like to share with you tonight about that. One of the, after I got the call from Scott I called Sienna, my friend Rod Hardy there, we'd been in dialogue for the last five or six years about these planning ideas, Sienna is a niche land developer in the Twin Cities and actually around the country although they've developed about 8,000 lots over the last 20 years about 400 or 500 a year. And so they're very savvy experienced people in all of the disciplines related to land development and working with builders on successful projects. Most of the work has been fairly conventional although like many others if you watch the progression over the last few years we see some of these ideas emerging and Rod and I have been looking for an opportunity to work together on a project and are very excited to be moving forward with this proposal for the Peninsula. With such an distinguished experience with Sienna because we think that the planning expertise of a town planning, the development, land development expertise of Sienna and this sort of product development and builder relationship and builder experience that we possess at the Lander Group is going to be a very powerful combination to properly execute this project and so we think that we've got the kind of expertise that could make a very successful run at this. And so the Lander Group will lead this team and we will work closely with Scott here locally and Sienna and the local building and development community. And I'd like to get the lights up now and walk through a few of our very preliminary ideas about the site itself and share those with you. Again those are all subject to change, they are not as a result of a dialogue with of any of you or with the City and we believe in that so this is our work sort of sitting at our desk in our office which always is somewhat limited if you believe in the collaborative process. I'm going to scoot this up. The first drawing that we virtually always do in the office This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 21 when we're working on new plans, really of pretty much any scale is to identify and establish the public realm. We really believe that' s the (can't hear) and the back bone of the neighborhood and it's actually the piece, one of the pieces that' s missing in most new development and so on the Peninsula this drawing helps illustrate how we see the public realm, in this case it's clearly well detailed, narrow streets, abundant mature boulevard street trees, and the public parks and squares and certainly open space at the edge of the project. And we think that this is critical and then also the buildings themselves as they play the role as the walls of the outdoor rooms and so those aren't showing up on this drawing but we think this is very important and I'm going to talk in a minute about some of the challenges associated with delivering that. Because the private development business that we participate in now has become very private, very little interest in the public realm, driving through some of your newer neighborhoods saw a magnificent huge homes with brick, and stained glass and probably Cherry cabinets inside and finished basements and elaborate wiring and not a shrub in site. No sidewalk, no street tree, no development of the public space, no understanding that their face of their building was actually playing a civic role in their neighborhood because that whole way of thinking about things has been lost and we think that that' s a really critical piece to restore. That that's the end that we're looking for and there's a variety of means to get there, we want to talk about some of those with you as well. But one of the challenges is that that really reflects the current marketplace and developing the public realm is expensive or at least it adds cost to develop that properly. And we believe there' s a tremendous return on that investment but it's a challenge for a private developer because our opportunity to make money is really on that first sale and that's our only shot at it. The value that will accrue typically over time accrues to the homeowner and the city and so we have to work collectively with the city to figure out creative financing mechanisms to develop a very high quality public realm without our losing our shirt as developers because to spend that money and get it on the first sale is difficult. Clearly as the project progresses that becomes more legible and that value attaches, if the project is big enough then there begins to be returns to the private developers. A very risky part of the proposition up front it's one of the reasons you don't see it out there unless you really are invested in that idea and you work creatively to fund it you just abandon it because the marketplace in general is not crying for it. All those big houses there sold very successfully and many of those people have actually made a decision and I know that from dealing with them, I deal with buyers all day. Now I work primarily in the City where people have placed a value on that, I've kind of begged out of the environment where people haven't valued the public realm. Because certainly on Summit Avenue it's well established and people pay a lot of money because of the well established public realm but I'm coming a 100 years after it was developed. But the many of the private buyers are going gee you know I'd rather have another bell or whistle in my house or another 100 square feet rather than street tree. Sienna talks about his knock down drag out discussions with builders about This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 22 $500.00 bucks for landscaping. So those are the kinds of issues we deal with in trying to install these ideas and yet we're prepared for that and experienced in the kind of arguments and some of the mechanisms we use to overcome that. So moving onto the plan, we had the benefit also in additional to the great planning work. Some fairly significant market studies were done by Maxfield Research, Zimmerman Vogt who have a special eye for some of these new ideas and we study those plans and they're really the backbone of the basis for housing mix for we're calling this first phase of the project. We're going to use this drawing, if you can see it, that this first stage that you see on our small board here is essentially the area above the park on this drawing, it's this piece, this is actually not part of the city property at this time. But it's this section right in here on Foster Road down to the square. OK so we're setting up as a Phase 1 with this as Phase 2 or Phase 2 and 3 just to orient you there. We looked at the Dover Kohl plan and overall felt that it was outstanding and yet began to tweak a little bit from our perspective about entering the marketplace with some new ideas and I wanted to go over a couple of the moves that we made in that regard. Our first plan modification was right in the beginning we added a little triangular park, very near the entry of the project because we wanted to have an opportunity to place early on in the project to demonstrate a number of different housing types and to quickly demonstrate this concept of the outdoor room. So we would very early in the project develop the housing that would surround that park so that the early visitors to the site would recognize immediately that something was different. When we toured Somersett in Ames there for do a very unsuccessful project the City put in the infrastructure for the entire project and there was a house over here and a house over there and a house over there and so there were a couple dozen houses built and you the public realm was not at all legible and so people were asked to trade in a lot size and they didn't really, it wasn't very clear what they were getting in exchange for that and that' s really hampered them in the marketplace. And so we added the triangular green, I think I have in my slides here if you can still see them these first couple slides were just talking about the public realm. This is a little triangular green of almost the same scale that' s about three blocks from my house and I have a four year old and we're down there practically every day in good weather. It has homes fronting the green as we would here and it's become just a great community gathering place but again the development of the green, the sidewalk and curb all around it. The landscaping, the play yard, those are costs that we're going to work collaboratively to figure out how to fund because it's difficult to get those back in the beginning until that value really attaches. The second fairly significant change we made was at the noahwest end of the site where we pulled the road back and created more conventional front loaded lots. Now it's interesting in the role I play because when I'm wearing my planning hat I'm forever arguing with the developers about the importance of the public edge and the public realm and moving away from this privatizing the open space and here we are doing the same thing. And so we understand why that was done and we're hopeful that in later phases of the project This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 23 we can be a little more aggressive about some of those things but putting that road on that bluff line as it was originally shown creates a single loaded road and a less valuable lot at least initially until we again get this neighborhood established. So you have a double whammy, more cost and less income, so we're suggesting that tweak of this plan to meet the current Iowa City market, more squarely, we have preserved two significant public access to the trail system there. So we haven't completely privatized that edge but we have changed the arrangement on that end. In the center of the plan, so we're showing 97 units on this drawing in this first phase. Forty-seven single family homes and 50 different kinds of attached housing types. Sort of a 50/50 balance included in the multifamily is 10, affordable rental town homes so we have sort of a 10 percent affordable housing commitment in this first phase. We'd like to see that overall rise to about 15 percent to kind of reflect sort of a proper mix but again introducing the idea of heaven for bid different types of neighborhood and then go the extra distance of affordable housing. We're only going to take baby steps here and grow into this and so our 10 percent commitment hopefully will increase over the course of the project. We're working with, we've added to the team Metro Plains, some other friends in the Twin Cities have just done some outstanding development in the upper Midwest, historically they've gone into small towns and done the old hospital, or high school, the beautiful old buildings into senior housing or different kinds of affordable housings. Their expert in planning and design and in the various financing techniques you need to deliver that kind of housing so we're very pleased to have them on board, they said they'd like to get at least 24 units in this neighborhood in order to make it all work financially and management wise we're providing 10 in this first phase. And then on the triangular green and this block we're showing 16 market rate townhouses accommodation of 1 and 2 story units there, let' s see if I, this is just some housing surrounding a green in another development. Yea, this is an image there of something similar this is in Northwest Landing, it's a four unit townhouse that has one story units on the end and two story units in the middle, serving two markets, the empty nesters are really looking for the one level living, the young professionals the two-story's very acceptable so in one four unit building we're hitting a broad market and we see a building type like that fronting the triangular green and fronting the square on this block and those would be alley loaded. We feel that the alley is one of the means, one of the devices to deliver the end, the enhanced public realm, it's not an end. It's a means and we feel like the marketplace has been around the country and we believe here very receptive to alley's in the non single family housing products because those folks are not as protective as the private rear yard and they typically only have 20 to 30 feet of front to start with. When you take 20 feet for a garage it doesn't leave you much house to show to the street so they've been pretty receptive in the projects that we have worked on and seen moving the garage to the back and alley loading. So our affordable rental townhouses are alley loaded, the market rate townhouses on the square are alley loaded. Just noahwest of the square we have three four-unit townhouse buildings that the flats This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 24 two on the ground floor, two on the second floor, again looking for the one level living, we find some folks like the second floor for a sense of security or being up and other folks like the add grade living. This drawing is showing detached garages because sometimes I just can't get my planner partners to get with me on some of these market based issues, those will probably get attached in the process but again they're alley loaded coming from the rear. We'll also show you some townhouses over here on the noahwest side of the square so we have 47 single family and 50 of different multifamily types in this first phase and all of our multifamily types are alley loaded. Now when we get to the single family we have three different sort of sizes, we have six sort of mega lots over here on such a, on the bluff overlooking the golf course and the river. We have 17 what we're calling small single family lots typically 55 feet foot frontage and then we've got 24 what we're calling medium single family lots at 70 foot frontages. And all of those, or virtually all of those, there' s a couple I guess that are rear loaded but virtually all of those are front loaded because again we've looked to the market research, the projects around the country, there's an outfit called American Lives in San Francisco that has taken a I think a pretty objective look at new urbanism and all the different characteristics we ascribe to those ideas. And found the consumers really like a lot ofwhat's being put out there. The town centers, the mixes, a lot of things have really resonated with buyers and they get very high ratings as they down that. When they get down to smaller lots on alleys for single family buyers 75 percent say absolutely not, the same people that rated a lot of the other traditional neighborhood and new urban ideas very highly. So we pay attention to that in particularly a market that has historically been front loaded at least in the last couple generations of development and proposing for this first phase at least that we have either have an entirely a predominately front loaded single family. Now Dover Kohl recognized that that might be happening, their comment had to do with places that you couldn't do alleys and our position is that in single family that's largely today about anywhere at least in the upper Midwest. But they illustrated some ways, some other devices to allow front loaded houses, diminish the impact of the garage and maintained that prominent public realm, not degrade the public realm so that is the end that we're focused on and highly committed to but we're looking for different devices when it comes to the single family homes to do that rather than the alley at least in the first phase. Now we're showing an alley on this block here, it will give us a chance to test market that, get more direct buyer feedback about their interest in that. But the alley tends to violate the security and privacy that the single family buyer is interested in and so why we're open to it we would love to alleys everywhere, it really enhances the public realm. We think we can deliver a very strong streetscape. The image is that Dover Kohl has presented in your booklet, we think those will be undisturbed in a well executed front loaded arrangement so. And you know there's a lot of, this is a fairly innovative mix of units at least again based on the conventions and the development business, we've gotten very poddish??? about our development. Most developers only build one type of housing and they build it all at one spot This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 25 and so you have all the expensive houses here, the less expensive houses here, all this I'm sure you all know. We are attempting to mix it, we think you can do that if you do three things right or at least three things right. One is create the strong public realm, it's really the armature and the glue for that to happen. Secondly that you deliver these different housing types in small increments. There' s also some naturally fai~y good multifamily building in Iowa City but any good four year building that you do 400 of begin to lose some quality in one spot so we certainly could take some of the buildings we saw out there and bring 4 or 8 over at a time and mixed them into this neighborhood and do quite well we think. And then thirdly that you maintain the design quality that the multifamily types and the single family all read from the street in terms of their design quality, their detailing. In fact many of these multifamily types like the four year condo building will simply look like and be scaled like a large house and so we feel like that we can be successful mixing these types as long as we're careful with those ideas. One of the issues with the affordable housing, we're very excited to be working with Metro Plains, it's been a challenge all across the country in well executed traditional neighborhoods because while it's risky and we're changing the paradyme is a (can't hear) demand for it and when it's well executed the prices go through the roof because people love this stuff. And it's very difficult if you don't have some kind of resale control to maintain affordability, even if we're successful in being the first unit out there it's difficult to hold it's value because people will bid it up if it's in a really high quality neighborhood and also in the low and medium end of the single family range we're really struggling in the marketplace with that issue of developing the public realm versus gee I could sure use another 100 square feet in my house. That's really tough to get people to focus on quality rather than quantity particularly at the lower end of the marketplace. In all of the medium and larger single family lots we will, let's see here, allow me to go back to these for just a second. These are some images of some materials that are out, there's a recent study that suggested that well executed projects of this type have out run the marketplace. Unfortunately I believe there's two or three really unsuccessful ones for every successful one that's out there. Because ideology has gotten out front of real estate discipline but again that' s farther for those of us that are trying to do this right, dealing with bankers, dealing with developers, real estate people who maybe aren't quite so sure about these ideas that American lives study there on the right. This was just a little slide I used in some of my presentations because the builder world is really enamored with some of the ideas about this, the front porch, and so your seeing front porches slapped on cul de sac subdivisions, you see that you want to market it as neotraditional even if your not so obviously we don't believe in that and don't think that the kind of tweaking that we're doing here is abandoning in anyway the really idamental principles that have driven the project to date we hope that your consultants and city find agree with that. I was saying that we are suggesting that we allow and in fact promote accessory units, that unit over the garage which has sort of four potential markets, it could be home office, it could This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 26 be an in-law, it could be a teenager, or a boomerang kid can't get a job out of college, or it could be a rental unit and another piece of affordable housing. Again many communities have been talking about this, there's a lot of talk about it, so far very little interest in the marketplace. If we allow this to, allow this to be coded in our medium to single family, medium to large single family lots I would guess initially we would have less than 10 percent of the people that actually develop it, but let's put the idea in place, allow it to happen, and as these ideas gain currency we'll see more of that occurring. The original plan suggested some perhaps commercial uses at the town center, it's one of the reasons that we looked at the larger plan because at the moment until we begin to look at the larger area this is a cul de sac basically, it's a neighborhood with one connection into it and a limited number of households and population. Very difficult to support in that kind of traffic pattern and that population commercial uses so again we're very committed to the idea of a diverse mix of uses we think in this neighborhood initially that's going to take the form of perhaps a live/work unit where it's essentially a housing unit but there's a space that could be either used by the occupant or rented for someone that wanted to have a home office but out of the home because it's going to be essentially in a residential neighborhood. So we think there' s some potential for that done carefully. A variety of different civic things that could occur here, something as simple as a skating rink, or a swimming pool, a community room, so we're going to look at some different options. Again we're very much at the beginning of this, this is a proposal period where we're only able to invest you know a relatively modest amount of time but it's one of the more challenging pieces of these ideas of really getting the commercial piece to work when you don't have an adjacent population. Just a little image of the post office down at Seaside because this is an example of well just a civic gesture, went through one of your neighborhoods now and the big thing is the plastic mailboxes in front of everybody's house, we think we might gather those up and put them in a sweet little building that will serve the neighborhood. So that's just really kind of cartoonish in the sense that it's just a little wood facade over a gang mailbox but again it's a little bit more sophistication and image than your typically getting. Kind of skipped over this but in addition to the other work we've been doing at Town Planning we've began to hear from a lot 0fbuilders around the country and from some of our other colleagues in the Town Planning movement that a lot of good plans are being done but the builders came to us we don't have any house types that fit on these little lots you build because we sell that to some extent by suggesting that we go for a little bit more typical Iowa City lot sizes here, we've published three plan books, we made a call for entries around the country, got plans from architects, published them, they're now available to purchase the books and/or the house plans that are in the books that are all designed for traditional neighborhoods, many of them rear loaded. They've really become more of a training tool or an idea book than an actual order to the plan. It's very difficult to really find a plan that' s going to fit in a particular market for a particular builder but they're going This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 27 to be a great resource for idea books. And we're going to be sharing those that's one of the resources we'll be using with our builders, see how bad you came about these ideas, there's some front end material and a couple of them talk about these principles and so that takes a lot of education to do this stuff. Speaking of implementation very quickly, I'm running over, we are bringing, our team is bringing some specialized planning and land development expertise to Iowa City, we're here to supplement and add to the local builder community and the local capacity. We're not here to replace anybody that rolled in from out of town, we're going to help the local development community understand these ideas and deliver them so it's our intention to work very closely with the builder community, the real estate community here to deliver this project and simply to add maybe some expertise that we have that hasn't made it to Iowa City yet. However, that' s going to require education, patience and some money. And we are committed to all of those, to work with the builders and to help them deal with some of these costs, we might ask for a little nicer porch detail, oh that' s going to cost me an extra $600.00 bucks, we'll work with these builders on dealing with that risk because we believe in the potential retum of that. But that's a lot of times a stumbling block with builders who have, aren't really confident that the market is going to respond. And the other thing that you have to keep in mind is most of the builders we're going to talk to are going to say gee Michael this is interesting stuff, you know what I'm so busy selling the same old, same old, I don't need to make any change. In fact good bye because I'm awful busy now and so that's also the backdrop that we're dealing with here is a very very strong economy which actually tends to inhibit innovation. So we think that small increments of development and color and variety will all help to create this sort of authentic neighborhood we're looking for, we hope and expect that actually many different builders will participate in this neighborhood development. (END OF 00-31 SIDE 2) Lander/So we think that small increments of development and color and variety will all help to create this sort of authentic neighborhood we're looking for. We hope and expect that actually many different builder will participate in this neighborhood development, there probably will be 3-8 to 10 individual builders who will work here, we think at some level more is better. (Tape quit for just a second.) Where a community had some goals, most of my public/private work has been in redevelopment where we wanted to revitalize an area where it cost a $1.00 to do something but I could only sell it for $.80 and so the City came to the table with the other 20 cents to actually help make something happen. And so we're familiar with that, we're comfortable in that role and we look forward to working with the City on that basis. We are excited about from both the planning perspective and a real estate development perspective thinking bigger, thinking larger because just about the time that the value really attaches to this development we're going to be This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000. March 1, 2000 Council Work Session Page 28 out of lots. And all the heavy lifting and brain damage that goes into getting to that point you kind of end up going home going well that was great. So we are already thinking bigger, having some discussions with some folks in the surrounding area to think about taking these ideas a little farther. So a quick recap, we have assembled what we think is a really great team for this project combining both really solid traditional credentials with really experienced real estate developers in Sienna and while again much of their work has been conventional they are committed to this project and working with Town Planning. We are committed to working collaboratively with the City to meet all of your goals, we're looking forward to leveraging the local talent, maybe raising the bar in the development community here and their capacity to make this exciting new neighborhood. Thanks for coming out tonight, we look forward to working with you. Franklin/Thanks Michael. OK now's your time to put down whatever comments you would like any questions that you have that you think the selection panel should ask of either of the developers that you've heard tonight. We would welcome those comments and questions and you can just leave them on the table as you leave and thanks again for coming tonight. One other thing I do want to mention is that you've heard a lot about Dover Kohl tonight, well Victor Dover is here with Sergio Vasquez from Dover Kohl Associates. They will be advising us and helping us as we go through the selection process and making the recommendation of the preferred developer to the City Council. Thanks again for coming. Good night. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of March 1, 2000.