zoning amendment that is being sponsored by the planning board having to do with the general residence zone and some showing that we've recently got passed through town meeting we promised that as time went on until it sunset time that we would try to offer suggestions that that make it better and stronger and give us more tools to help control many of the of the things that we set out to  control and hopefully make right in the in the g r s zone from from sitting in the neighborhood trying to control density as best we can both size mass and him things like that so to that end we came up with an idea that would give us some options as a zoning board within a two family was to family home was was possible by a special permit i won't go into all the details but the other board members will but so what we did is we created a subcommittee as we do trying to offering an amendment at town meeting and that subcommittee working committee really gets together and kind of bangs out all those of you who have joined us this evening are referee divided into two groups those who have been at virtually every session of the planning board at which this was discussed and then click and could more or less lip sync the presentation with us and background those of you who were at a town meeting two years ago will remember this line that the general residence district faced a epidemic may be too strong a word but  upsurge in the number of paradigms of small generally single family houses that were replaced by a large a believe large is a fair description of what you see in front of you large two family house yes the citizens group so owning changes for the general residence district that were voted at town meeting last spring next slide for the most part i think we have been think the planning board and i'm looking at my colleagues here the the the new zoning has worked well we have been able to put into we've been able to get to produce a city to work with the new with the neighbors with the developers to come up with a set of new houses new housing that is much more  terms of the neighborhood we've tried i'm not i do not intend to go through each line of this chart but we've tried to come up with some tools for letting both the neighbors and the developers see where we are going this is one when a developer brings us a proposal one of the things we do now is to find the neighborhood of which it is a part and then looking at a variety of character look at the proposed development and try to quantify how well it fits into the neighborhood when you win this when the proposal comes in generally speaking everything will be in the top twenty five percent because it's much larger than the neighborhood as a whole and we pull the numbers together and say this isn't consistent with the spirit of the zoning that was passed which is  development needs to in joe's phrase enhanced the neighborhood so then my colleagues who are much more design and architecture lead oriented than i go and sit  developer for a while and improve upon his plans and in the end i think we've been pretty successful in evolving a set of new plans where the new construction is going to be consistent that's with the neighborhood that said there are and it would be surprising if this were not true there were a couple issues that remain and one of them next slide is the one that we want to we hope to address a town meeting this year and is the subject of tonight's discussion this is we'll try to inform improve the graphic quality of this prior to town meeting where it's a group of a couple hundred sitting eighty or ninety feet from the screen one of the issues that we have is that we have there are a number of lots in town which do not white meat did not quite meet the requirements for splitting the lot in putting up two single family homes and as a result the developer bill one very one good sized i would not say oversight but one good size two family and the planning board looked at it and i think like you were among the first to point this it would be really good in these cases if we had the flexibility to left the developer build two smaller single family homes rather than one large two family in the graphic that you see  amendment that we're planned to bring forward we it would have been possible to instead of having two single families that took place and everything that you see in purple and to town meeting and asking if there if a lot is larger than eight thousand square feet smaller than ten thousand which is the the number at which you would by right be able to b two single families and has frank each of ninety feet or more and therefore is eligible to apply for a special permit for a two family that the planning board be allowed  to below the current requirements for single family lots which are five thousand and fifty thousand feet of frontage and allow a developer to build a single family home on four thousand square feet and  four thousand square feet or more with a minimum of forty five feet  and why are we doing this next slide well the obvious is to control density that was one of the key objectives of the a re of the by you'll have a minimum green corridor between those two houses of twenty feet it's a better fit with the neighborhood we felt it would also maintain the diversity of the housing stock under the is proposed loaning will push the developer to building smaller one families and we think that it is a very useful thing for this community have a variety of housing  including some smaller single families particularly for people who wish to downsize don't necessarily want to move into a condominium and it will help preserve the mix of single into family houses in the general residence district one of the other key goals of the zoning we understood there would be some concerns and at this point i'm going to  are greater than five thousand square feet really greater than seven thousand square feet and less than ten thousand square feet again have that frontage that is at least nine  style housing so what we've done is if a lot for instance is forty five feet you then take your ten foot sideline setbacks of ten in ten and that would leave you with a twenty five foot white house you would then multiply that by one point six you would end up with something that's twenty five by forty so it's it's a much nicer it's proportionally much nicer to look at rather than  narrow box car style house that we've also seen pop up all over town so people were taking some narrow homes and sticking them in sideways that's that's not going to occur under this b said that really the goal is is to to add more diversity in the housing starts as you recall people were buying to families and knocking it down and putting it back to finish but more than that whe they were buying single families knocking those down and putting back to use so the single family housing stock in the two years on really was being depleted so what this is trying to do is to actually put back some single right that yeah we have a history that that could have been a much different project if we had had to buy a walk that we're proposing if that was in place she would have found two singles on that rather than that monstrosity of a house  less than ten thousand square feet you're going to need at least ninety feet in front of open space is going to get increased dramatically i believe to forty five percent it's currently forty the building height  is going to get reduced also from thirty three to thirty two which i think and in terms of like you say although it's only a foot it's likely that the geo zone is in this higher some of the sorry zones where you have thirty five or thirty six foot high would also have to you know conform and comply with the section sixty of the performance standards of the violence can go to the next lie jeffrey so right now as you can tell we viewed over two thousand lots twenty one hundred texas thirty seven lots have this have a thousand square feet and ninety feet in front of  i guess if you read through it twelve twelve see going to lots of two point eight percent one thousand to get it up to one point three and six it seems like well she's not that many of us but actually anough wants to make a dramatic impact on the s so bottom line is that when you multiply that out you're looking at a great opportunity for the for the town in terms of creating a little bit of diversity in their stock and actually putting back some of the singles that were knocked down in that list touched earlier on that that we had a project come before us already that was luckily we had merrill avenue and hamilton road which actually we were able to get two singles on there all i think that the buyout of work opposing is up could make a big difference in the town and could correct some other things and balance off some of the some other things that really i think because many people about you concern there's so many different types of housing in it and across it this gives us one more tool so if you can if you can visualize alternate families in a row on one of the streets of that year i was on one of these properties comes up with a developer suggest to family it very well may be that the two family fits the character of that neighborhood better and she let me get into singles but when you get to a more diverse area where there are you know a single single too big to family that's already been developed a media that a traditional two family and other single that is very well that next watching us develop may want to be two singles and that's what we don't have the ability to do now out of this current zoning  time member of the warren committee and the town meeting member from precinct six i think this is a splendid proposal and i just have a friend friendly amendment to make it even thinks so i i have a friendly amendment to make a splendid proposal even more splendid and here's my concern i talk briefly the jeffrey today to hopefully understand the various setback requirements and it sounds like if we think about the smallest possible lot that you can build on because i think that's a natural place to focus just the math says it would be four thousand by forty five and given the sight setbacks of ten feet and the front set back of twenty feet then actually that means that in order to achieve an open open space coverage of twenty five percent you're limited to a forty foot depth so which turns out to be a one point six factor so i have to a couple of observations one is that the implication of all that is that the rear set back becomes twenty eight point nine feet even though seventeen feet would be permitted otherwise but and that's fine so you have a larger yard but here's my concern so we have a structure which is a let's say twenty five by forty rectangle that gives us an even thousand square feet of structure if the parcel itself is four thousand square feet that's twenty five thousand if you then have an open space  requirement of forty five percent that would theoretically allow up to twelve hundred square feet to be paved as driving a driveway and park and services so i did all the math here if you just consider the front of the house the house is now twenty five feet wide and it has a twenty five foot with the house twenty five feet wide and there's a twenty foot setback and if that whole front area was paved which is actually wider than a two car garage would be that with the twenty five by twenty would only be five hundred feet of driveway  that would imply open space of sixty two point five percent but the way this is drafted where the open space could be i would say as little as forty five percent that would actually as i understand it allow somebody to pave the full width of the lot the whole forty five feet and actually on the two sides in what was supposed to be the side such back you could actually pave  an additional fifteen feet back on either side of the house flanking the house and i and i think that would be an undesirable outcome so my suggestion would be to modify this proposal to increase the the open space to sixty two point five percent which would limit the paved surface just to a driveway in front of the house or something close to that figure but still this is still a special permit process and it is really inconceivable to me that the board would allow a plan to move forward in which someone proposed to pave their entire front yard that does not mean that it's not good to have some other restriction on it but i think it's really important to understand that this is not by right it has to go through the same special permit process that every any of this construction in the general residence district can so the scenario you're describing is not likely to happen unless you have a very very different planning board we my comment would be much the same as this is a special permit temper situation the other thing where you have to remember we have twenty five foot white house you have to assume that at least on the front of the house that part of town if not twelve feet on the with would be taken up by a single car garage so you're going to go in on that left side and your driveway is going to be naturally there the party be anywhere from i would think it is if it's it if it's if it's clear that the door is nine feet wide to give yourself a nice wide to whirl k if you gave yourself to feed on each side you're talking about a driveway that's roughly thirty feet wide possibly fourteen feet wide to give yourself the apron and i would have to think that  to go to feed to the left are going to be with you going to be inside that that sidelined in that setback that we're talking about the ten foot so my comment to say i don't think that that you that would happen the other thing i want to point out is that the twenty foot set back in most cases in a g r zone in the front it's not going to happen because of the what end up happening when we wrote the g r pilot we're not going to allow people to actually push back if europe matters your neighbors are at seventeen feet you're  going to be right there you're going to be at seventeen feet so just by moving the house up three feet you're going to create much more rear yard so you're going to get more open space as a result of that i can't imagine a scenario where you would want that much that where you would want so much of a lot paved as i said was at least a possibility under these regs so why even leave it as an option because the there are plenty of instances around town where there are well an awful lot of cars parked in a small lot and people do park on the grass and things like that and it seems like this is creating an incentive for people to do something what we would actually prefer not to have or what i would think that we you know all the special permits that we we actually improve you based on conditions so as a condition i can't see anybody on this board actually not putting a condition and where you would have landscaping is very big now with the planning board so we're calling for larger tree somebody comes to get a permit and a plan i submitted which has a narrow issue driveway for us and say this is single door barrage then ten years from  section sixty that gives us a lot of guidelines as to as to what these properties will have to look like no site front door is set backs average check see what you are talking about by the way the establishing of the f you know continuous board that the majority of us are on you know we've already ruled on many of these things which system on that's good drugs we see the driveways we see the decks and patios and we're restricting them to what is on the drawing period that's the condition board in being a developer who is listening to the plan what we urge them to do that and they did that with this set of rules which we we can insist on along with many of the things that we've you know we've got we've got to do it and i get the point it's a good and i just want you to feel comfortable that this board is it's very we kind of know that that would not be something we would like and maybe just one last comment which is that yes these are written into the special permit no no one can come the next owner can't come and change them before coming back to the board but it is also true that sometimes people just go ahead and pay with out but then you get the neighbors have to step forward and make a call to town hall get hold of geoffrey and say this doesn't look like the kind of thing that's supposed to go you'd have to have regulations for every single aspect of the building where whether you're with the or regulation that your view of the sixty five percent of the spaces sixty two point five percent of his face was what was enacted or not if someone's going to break the law they're going to break the law if they're going to pay if they're going to pay for whether this is well a lot of twenty five percent or sixty five percent or eighty five percent if that person that you're talking about is interested in doing what you're thinking they're interested in doing they can do it anyway it  just for some background in pretty much every case that's come before us since the g r zoning has changed pretty much every developer will will push beyond the love to the max allowed by the zoning and in pretty much every case we pushed back and said no we know you have thirty percent but coverage we'd like to see in this case twenty six or twenty seven doesn't fit the neighborhood we'd like to see it smaller we'd like to see it lower and in you know the developers of can be might have pretty much  of creative continuity in the neighborhoods so that you know roof lines all look pretty much very similar in terms of height in terms of style so that we're not ending up with a mishmash of new construction in there they're building and they're leaving and what they're building and leaving behind you know is great for them because if they're doing returning a nice little profit but you know it's detracting from the value of the existing homes in the neighborhood because it's it's not being done in a very tasteful manner and they just they're using they were using the buy a lot to it's maximum capacity and i think what this is looking to do is it's we're not looking to you know hamper or or stop development what we are looking to do is to encourage smart development that enhances a neighborhood and answers the town in the community so that gross revenue the town is slightly better off with the two small single two smaller single families and that's largely because and this is something that we look at joe and i have been looking at this in a systematic way we have the celebration we have with we have a database of all sales in twenty fourteen we're going to be adding to it sales in twenty fifteen admittedly it's got oh i can tell you i mean this is i've seen it done work actually be done tastefully can actually get it to the right inside you could actually make a nice little design if someone wanted to do that i mean as a board member you you would probably just see asphalt there some of them want to park in that bad you would probably see something in a paper or something like that because to me i happen to agree with you too much asphalt is not good that the green looks very black when there's too much asked for i'm saying that the remaining green front of the house it just we're not looking again i agree with you i think we're not looking to overpower anyone with a bunch of asphalt for just for that to be anywhere from two thousand and twenty six hundred square feet you know i don't see you know yet exactly i don't see that that that scenario happening where you have that many adults living this is more a tool for us to push back to a developer and say look instead of that two in this case perhaps two singles might work better let's check it out and it really it is going to be on a case by case basis if it works for the name you know and again you know these are eight thousand to one thousand nine hundred ninety nine square foot lots that could even consider being split they're small it's small it's going to get split so there's not a lot than you know the duplex style tuesday they're currently being built and there are massive so think about it i mean if you have a wife that's ninety feet and someone does their ten foot you know sidelines you've got a seventy foot mass in the middle of that it's huge rather than having fifty it's it's it's you know fifty feet twenty five twenty five so i think it's it's it's it's a huge huge huge tour for th out of the two unit building that's what's going on in the g r isn't it so you're making you know a mcmansion type building even though it's two units to me in my mind it's one building and the building is disproportionate to the neighborhood process of education that we think that you know before the beginning of july we'll be seeing new single families of the size that we're talking about in the general residence district and you know the these will be facts that we have that will be presenting to developers will be averaging over five hundred dollars a square foot in selling price and there is huge daylight between what developers are getting for it to family and what we will be able to show they can get for a single family we've modeled modeled this out carefully the differential is large it's growing over time there's a clear preference in this community and you know we will be talking about three figure per square foot differences thousand square feet with a fifty fifty feet in front of it and so in this case that could be a while right next door to one of these double lines basically where if you put two singles of those homes the right on a i know one square foot bigger lot potentially than forty nine hundred ninety nine square feet next door with five thousand feet next door that one would be restricted by the he's special further restrictions one would only be we know of a few actually that those folks are going to be coming before us for singles and you're talking about putting a house there that although we might not be so receptive to thirty percent a lot coverage none the less  you're talking about forty percent or so to me and i think you're going to end the way as i said i do fault you can end up getting more open space just because of that one point six buy look at no one's going to use i know myself as a developer if i ever saw sixty five percent and i love open space ok if i ever saw that you're really scaring people is what you're doing ok so that's the one thing you don't want to do to it to a developer you don't want to the numbers actually push out and get get get larger than twenty five percent it never stays at twenty five percent i mean if you go to forty one hundred boy the numbers change it's not twenty five percent coverage it's actually great twelve they represent it let's take the twelve single family two point eight percent they are the answer to the question how many single family lots are there in the general residence district many single family right and if one takes two point eight percent of that number one comes out with twelve so mike said you need to put in dust pictures jeffrey originally we had the absolute numbers so for example there are four hundred and sixty three single family lots