Squire Park / Affordable housing

Discuss items in the urban core outside of Downtown as described above. Everything in the core including the east side (18th & Vine area), Northeast, Plaza, Westport, Brookside, Valentine, Waldo, 39th street, & the entire midtown area.
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Critical_Mass
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Squire Park / Affordable housing

Post by Critical_Mass »

Well, if you care about affordable housing see legislation 180242 coming up on the Planning, Zoning & Economic Development Committee agenda on 4/11: http://cityclerk.kcmo.org/LiveWeb/Docum ... FVOGx%2fKX

Basically downsizing 35 acres of the east side to permit only single-family housing. Many of the parcels in this area are under 5000 sf so you would not even be permitted to build a home on these lots w/o a zoning variance. NO duplexes or multi-family housing of any kind allowed except for existing properties. Making density illegal like this seems ridiculous and is the exact opposite of KCMO should be pursuing in neighborhoods with existing infrastructure that were at one time much more dense than today.

Sponsor: Jeffrey Williams, AICP, Director, Department of City Planning and Development
No opponents

PLAN REVIEW/ANALYSIS:
The Squier Park Neighborhood Association in their desire to stabilize their neighborhood is proposing downzoning of about 193 parcels. The area proposed to be downzoned is generally bounded E. Armour Boulevard on the north, E. 39th Street on the south, The Paseo on the West and half a block east of Troost Avenue (approximately 130 to 166 east feet). The proposal is to downzone about 155 parcels within the core of the neighborhood from R-1.5 to R-5 and 34 parcels from R-1.5 to R-2.5 along Paseo and on Virginia just south of E. 37th Street. There a total of about 38 vacant parcels.
The predominant land use within this area is single family residential with some duplexes and four plexes. The existing residential zoning is R-1.5 and R-2.5 which allows for detached house, zero lot line house, cottage house, attached house, townhouse, duplexes, and “multi-unit houses” of up to 8 units, subject to a Special Use Permit.
The minimum lot size requirement in the R-1.5 district is 3,000 square foot per lot and 1,500 square foot per unit. The minimum lot size requirement in the R-2.5 district is 4,000 square foot per lot and 2,500 square foot per unit. The proposed R-6 district has a minimum lot size requirement of 6,000 square foot per lot and 6,000 square foot per unit. The existing R-1.5 and R-2.5 districts permit Multi-unit House residential building type outright.


The goal of the downzoning is to preserve the moderate-density residential character of the neighborhood by limiting future development, including the conversion of existing structures for the purpose of adding residential units
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chaglang
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Re: Squire Park / Affordable housing

Post by chaglang »

So... this was complicated. We had a lot of discussions about this within the neighborhood, and there are a lot of Squier Park residents (including myself) who are concerned about affordable housing. There were also a number of people who felt strongly about wanting the 8 square blocks north of 37th Street have the same zoning as the 8 blocks south of 37th Street. So the compromise that we came to, which is what is at the city now, is that we downzone the interior streets and leave Troost, Paseo, and Armour at a higher intensity.

The intent of that is to guide the large developments to the perimeter streets. In the past, that was accomplished by placing multifamily on the numbered streets, ala South Hyde Park, but most of those buildings are long gone and the lots either combined with the adjoining lot or bought by the adjacent homeowner. So there wasn't much appetite for building multifamily there (and I asked). But the change of Troost from commercial to mixed-use presented an opportunity to add multifamily where it wasn't even possible before. As a result, fully building out this plan would put far more residents in Squier Park than it ever had historically. It's definitely a compromise plan, but one that allows the neighborhood to get a good place in terms of density.
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