Councilman
Mark Squilla has proposed legislation that would
boost the permitted height of buildings along the Delaware River as part of a
plan for a new cluster of residential towers and townhouses on the South
Philadelphia waterfront.
The
ordinance that Squilla introduced at Thursday’s City Council session would
tweak the Central Delaware Overlay zoning district to include new “height
bonuses” for projects that integrate stormwater-management features and
throughways between major streets.
Although the
legislation would apply to the entire waterfront-area overlay bounded by Oregon
and Allegheny Avenues, it was motivated by K4 Associates LLC’s Liberty on the
River proposal, which includes 10
high-rises on a waterside parcel between Washington Avenue and Reed Street.
K4
attorney Stephen Pollock, who worked with city planning officials to devise the
proposed zoning change, said it would help “allow a new neighborhood to be
developed that will continue to attract people down to the waterfront.”
But
critics are already attacking the legislation, saying it disregards
compromises among neighborhood groups, property owners, and open-space
advocates that yielded the four-year-old overlay, which aims to keep waterfront
building heights in line with those of surrounding neighborhoods while evenly
spreading population density along the river.
“Each
of the points of the overlay that’s currently in place was hard-fought,” said
Joe Schiavo, vice chair of the Central Delaware Advocacy Group, a coalition of
river-adjacent neighborhood associations. “There was a logic behind every
decision made.”
Squilla
said the terms of his bill will probably evolve during the hearing process,
with the one chance for stakeholders to weigh in coming June 13, when the bill
is to be reviewed by City Council’s Rules Committee.
“We’re
going to keep an open dialogue with everybody,” said Squilla, whose district
includes all but a sliver of the Central Delaware Overlay. “I believe we can
come up with legislation that satisfies most people.”
Philadelphia
planning and development director Anne Fadullon said in an e-mail that the
proposed ordinance represents an effort to enable work toward activating the
waterfront while maintaining the overlay’s basic tenants.
“We
hope the legislation serves as a starting point for a broader discussion that
will include the community and other stakeholders,” she said.
K4’s
proposed project would be built on an 18-acre site it acquired in 2015
from Sheet Metal Workers Local 19, in addition to an eight-acre panel – covered
partly by the union’s meeting hall – that it is negotiating to buy from the
labor group. Former Local 19 head Tom Kelly, who also previously chaired the
city’s Zoning Board of Adjustment, is a partner in K4’s local development
entity.
K4’s
past projects have included financing a hotel in Dallas and managing
construction in the conversion of a San Antonio, Texas, air base into an
apartment complex, according to its website. The Rockville,
Md.-based company is also affiliated with an agency
that arranges EB-5 investor visas for people overseas who
sink money into job-creating projects in the United States.
When
asked last year about projects that he or the company have fully developed, K4
managing member Jeffery Kozero would mention only a Baltimore-area shopping
center called Village at Waugh Chapel, saying confidentiality agreements kept
him from identifying others.
Alicyn
Ames, a spokeswoman for Waugh Chapel owner Greenberg Gibbons of Owings Mills,
Md., shared no information about Kozero’s participation, emailing that the
company is not “the right contact” for such questions. She did not respond
to a follow-up request to elaborate. Kozero did not respond to a phone
message late last week and Pollock had no immediate details about his or K4’s
development background.
K4
has applied for $44 million from this year’s round of state Redevelopment
Assistance Capital Program grants for the first four towers in the Liberty on
the River project, the round’s largest funding request for one development
site, according to the Pennsylvania Budget Office’s website.
K4
has said the first phases of construction – which include a 22-story, 264-unit
apartment building with ground-floor retail and a 23-story, 200- to
220-guest-room hotel – could be completed by tapping available height bonuses,
but the higher towers planned in later phases would require adjustments such
as the one introduced in last week’s legislation.
The
bill would increase the maximum possible height of buildings along the river –
with bonuses – to 316 feet, or nearly 30 stories, from 244 feet, according
to a copy of the ordinance provided to the Inquirer. That would put it just
short of the 329-foot Regatta building at the Waterfront Square complex near
Poplar Street, which was constructed prior to the Central Delaware Overlay’s
implementation.
The
newly proposed legislation doubles the height bonus available to developers who
set aside space in their projects for public use, presumably allowing K4 to
take greater advantage of an easement on its property to
construct a waterfront recreational trail.
Additional
height is obtainable through two new bonuses copied from a separate overlay
district aimed at encouraging development in an industrial area north of Old
City bounded by Second and Ninth Streets, between Spring Garden and Callowhill
Streets.
The
so-called East Callowhill Overlay grants additional height to projects with
open space that can feed rain runoff into an underground sewer main running
through the area. Squilla’s legislation would offer an identical height bonus
for such stormwater-retention infrastructure anywhere within the Central
Delaware Overlay.
The
East Callowhill Overlay also grants additional height to projects with
east-west throughways along the route that Noble Street used to take through
the area. The proposed changes to the Central Delaware Overlay grants such a
bonus for connections between Columbus Boulevard and the river.
Kozero
said last year that the height K4 hopes to earn through these bonuses will save
it from having to design short, squat buildings to reach the square footage it
needs for its development to be financially feasible.
But
Schiavo, from the river advocacy group, said existing limits have not impeded
recent projects such as the One Water Street Apartments near Vine Street
and the 75-unit Bridgeview townhouse complex at Catharine Street. Festival
Pier, near Spring Garden Street, is also on its way to being developed, with 550
homes and 30,000 square feet of retail space under existing guidelines.
“If
the current tools are working, why would we change them?” Schiavo said.
Source: Philly.com
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