The developer behind the most ambitious proposal yet for
Philadelphia's Delaware River waterfront wants to get high with a little help
from City Council.
To seek support for an ordinance that would shatter the
waterfront area's building-height limits, executives with developer K4 LLC
visited a South Philadelphia community near its proposed complex of townhouses
and residential high-rises, called Liberty on the River.
The ordinance would tweak regulations adopted three years
ago that govern development along the central Delaware riverfront. Jeffery
Kozero, K4's managing member, said he needs to be able to build higher than
currently is permitted to generate enough floor area for the project to be
financially feasible.
"There's a financial threshold that we need to
meet," Kozero said in an interview Wednesday after the first of what is
expected to be several presentations to Pennsport Civic Association members.
"For us, going higher is better than going squatter."
K4's plan is the latest proposal to come to light since
the adoption of the 2013 zoning overlay, which seeks to map out the
waterfront's transition from a largely blighted strip of big-box retail and
disused industrial buildings into an inviting extension of the city's urban
core.
Far to the north, near Spring Garden Street, Jefferson
Apartment Group and Haverford Properties plan to build about 550 units of
housing and 30,000 square feet of retail on a property known as Festival Pier,
where concerts now take place.
Just to the south of K4's land, on the tract where a
Foxwoods casino had once been planned, developer Bart Blatstein has proposed
apartments and townhouses fronted by a convenience store with gas pumps, plus a
large supermarket.
The K4 plan covers nearly all the land east of South
Columbus Boulevard between Washington Avenue and Reed Street. The Rockville,
Md.-based developer acquired 18 acres there last year from Sheet Metal Workers
Local 19 and is negotiating with the union to purchase an additional eight-acre
parcel, which is partly covered by its meeting hall, Kozero said.
The proposal calls for 10 residential high-rises and
about 100 townhouses encompassing up to 2,000 units around a broad throughway
that originates on Columbus Boulevard, across the street from an I-95 ramp. Two
narrower east-west throughways to the north would provide more links for the
public between Columbus Boulevard and the river. Shops and restaurants are
planned for the ground floor of each residential tower, with several decks of
parking on the floors immediately over that retail space.
The first phase of construction, which K4 said may begin
as soon as the spring, involves a 22-story, 264-unit apartment building with
ground-floor retail and a 23-story, 200- to 220-guest-room hotel, said Seth
Shapiro, a principal with Barton Partners architects, which is designing the
project.
K4 expects to get automatic permission to build the first
two towers by tapping density bonuses under the zoning code for including
ground-floor retail and open space, and for selling a riverfront easement to
the Delaware River Waterfront Corp. for a cycling and walking trail, Shapiro
said.
But the later towers, which may soar up to 34 stories,
are higher than can be managed under current zoning. That's why K4 is asking
City Councilman Mark Squilla, whose district includes the site, to sponsor
legislation that would give the developer additional bonuses for including the
east-west throughways that ease public access to the riverfront trail.
"Creating these connectors should be rewarded for
providing the enhancements to get to the trail," Kozero said.
Squilla said in an email that the development "would
first need community support before we would consider moving forward with any
plans."
During Wednesday's Pennsport meeting, which lasted well
over an hour, community members seemed noncommittal about the plan, asking
pointed questions about construction timing, parking quotas, traffic
management, and benefits for the surrounding neighborhood.
Harris Steinberg, whose work on a planning committee
nearly a decade ago helped inform the 2013 zoning overlay, said after being
briefed on K4's proposal that he was unimpressed.
Especially bothersome, he said, are the levels of parking
close to ground level that he believed would deaden the streetscape and what he
saw as a haphazard layout of buildings that are too dense for the amount of
accompanying open space.
"It just seems grossly overscaled for that
site," said Steinberg, who now directs Drexel University's Lindy Institute
for Urban Innovation. "It relates to the I-95 off-ramp and not to the city
of Philadelphia and the walkable urbanism that the city of Philadelphia is
known for."
Source: Philly.com
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