northern only nation this would be the talk of bell taco bell you can see there's a two way traffic and there's room to put a drive through lane with stacking for five cars there's not enough not agree to let taco bell do any traffic comps or anything on their site still trying to work that out just side now we made it a condition that they put any other questions for shannon i was wondering if i could ask you a question actually countersteering advice about if we were providing a metal canopy to protect down that window from drivers who are waiting at that window do you tonight the owner of the building approval of any signs on the northern or southern elevation of the building but we're ok with the two signs on the front the bell and the letters how should the board recommend approval early on in our in our project and we would like to socialize the idea of what we're doing with the community and get your input along the way we'll be working with staff on the official process but we want to introduce ourselves this evening ed mentioned also we are a developer owner operator senior living communities so we handle a full spectrum of senior living options from independent living through what we call assisted living there are some licensing issues in pennsylvania that dictate what you can call that but it's assisted living people are familiar with that in that sense and then also dementia or memory care services for elderly who have dementia issues and need a higher level of care so we handle the full spectrum of services and we have very much a focus on wellbeing and whole whole body health it's not about it's not your grandmother's nursing home kind of concept it's a very  new and innovative concept in senior living it's high end think of it it's kind of higher and senior apartments that are focused on a more independent sr and there's programming and restaurants in property that's encouraging people to live a more full life at this stage in their life the average resident in our property is probably about eighty years old and we have many folks who are very independent they drive they have a lot of visits and they go out to doctor's appointments in restaurants and things and then we also have folks for whom certain issues have caught up with them and they need some level of service that they're less mobile and those services can be delivered to them in their units  as needed so when you sign up to live in one of our properties you may come in and just pay rent essentially and take advantage of the services in the building and then over time if your needs change you can get access to services in your unit as needed and that's just priced carts so you don't come in with a big bundled price the way you do in some senior living options so we have seven or eight property actually seven open properties one hundred development in the minneapolis st paul twin cities area and we've identified the pittsburgh market as the next market for growth for a company in our plan is to develop somewhere between five and seven properties in the metro pittsburgh area what we have done and what we plan to do in this community is find areas of the metro that have a strong sense of place a sense of identity where we see both an aging population that's interested in in senior housing options but also where their adult children live or close to where their adult children live because we find that our residents are very interested in staying in the communities in which they've grown up raise their children and feel connected they don't want to be put out to pasture so to speak in a community somewhere that's thirty forty five minutes outside of their home area so we like to find places where we're at the intersect of the adult children who want to be involved in their in their parents lives and the grandchildren who are obviously very important and then also place we have a certain number of of aging seniors who are interested in downsizing moving out of their off and out of their single family homes into some kind of a simpler style of living this is just a quick representation hard to see of some of our properties they range in size from about ninety units to one hundred forty  units and when i say units i mean apartments apartments are fully furnished apartments soon enough furnished with furniture but with all the amenities kitchens it could be two bedroom two bath apartments many of them have balconies washer and dryer in the unit so these are fairly high end properties and as you can see from the exteriors we spent a lot of time and energy designing communities that fit well in the areas in which they're located we're often near a commercial center in a community but close to the residential areas as well so we have to appeal to folks who want to be closer in and more dense environment but we also have to peel to the neighbors who are often residential so i think there's a high sense of design and style that goes into these properties  i describe a little bit what our service looks like on the inside this just a picture that represents you know it's a pretty high and almost a hospitality environment we think of senior living as being the intersection of hospitality and lodging and health care in our concept is really have the year around the hospitality angle really creating a great sense of place and a place to live and health care services are available but we don't lead with those so you're not going to see orderly people walking around in in scrubs and that kind of thing it's very much secondary but available to folks who need it so this just shows you what these common areas spaces look like and some of the units there they're very light and bright and  space i talked a lot about generally what we look for in a community peters township bubbled up fairly quickly in our evaluation of the metro area because of the combination of factors i described before the number of elderly folks who live in this general market area also the availability or the the presence of their adult children who are typically in their high income earning years and want to be involved with their parents as they get older we see both of those things coming together in a community like peters and it has the reputation and the sense of identity that people feel connected to so they may have been here for forty years and they want to stay here so it typically meets a lot of our criteria and then also when we looked at the site on the corner of friar lane and valley brick road we like the accessibility to the town center concept and as we became more familiar with your comprehensive plan and the things you're doing to try to create develop a senior living community that would have approximately one hundred twenty six units that would be divided between what we call independent living so think of those as being more like a market rate apartments for seniors and then specialty care units which are slightly smaller and that's where people who are have more assisted living needs or memory care needs would be housed there part of the same building but one one wing of the building you will would be focused on specialty care and one wing would be more focused on independent living very nice amenities in all of the units i think they would be very appropriate for this market and in fact what we do in terms of the services is quite different i think than many senior living options that exist in the pittsburgh metro i know what cathy's firm does a lot of work around here and i think they would agree that we're designing units that have nicer features amenities i think are suitable to this more upmarket area the metro there will be a restaurant with you know chef prepared meals there will be a cafe that would be kind of an in house version of a starbucks where you can go get coffee or a yogurt or a sandwich at lunch or continental breakfast and then a variety of common area spaces and then typically our properties would have some type of transportation whether it's a van or small bus or even linotype cars that would take people as needed to doctors appointments or special events or to the grocery store to try to reduce the number of people who make individual trips in their cars we like the proximity to the town center as i mentioned also abuts the parking lot of the church and we found in our other properties that connections to the church are really important thing for seniors i've reached out to father bob at st benedict i've not connected with him live but i think they will find it to be a really nice amenity for their parishioners as well one of the things that we see often is that churches lose their attendance of their loyal elderly folks who is harder to get to in the winter and so i think that now we're really close could be a nice future for them as well i've got some slides on perkins which you may or may not want to go through the reason we wanted to have kathy here is to impress upon you the importance of design in what we do and perkins is doing a ton of work in the senior living space and would be helping us design this property here you want to introduce yourself quickly and depending on timing we can skip on to the actual site plan internationally to our pittsburgh office started out because of the senior living market here and one of the first buildings that we did here was called woodside place and that was a real sort of ground breaker in terms of memory care how you dealt with the seniors with that issue it was the first sort of home like environment that was designed it's been used as a model you know since then  ok these are just our different practice areas but again and here we just talk about our again thirty year a i a design awards for woodside place and we're always always trying to push the envelope with our designs were always trying to to go back and evaluate them after see what we could have done better often doing all kinds of you know all kinds of different research projects with them  here's some of the stuff that we've done in the pittsburgh area asbury heights was one of our projects i don't know that's in mount lebanon and the embassy of aspirates was also there we've done woodside place felician sisters we've done work for the university of pittsburgh also u p m c and now let let's go to the site as i'm sure you know enough the person sees now but we started looked at the site with john and you know we're very captivated by it again for the same reasons that john pointed out that it seems to be a great fit with your comprehensive plan for this area you know it would be a good neighbor that would contribute to it and the site seems large enough that that's kind of our job to test it if we can get in a certain amount of units how we can get the parking fitting in here you know these are some of the goals and visions that we support the one it's a built in customer base for the surrounding commercial cities also access to the library you know we would propose like number one is a connection to the church number two would be a pedestrian connection going into the town going into the grocery store over there  down on number three would be extending the connection along valley book road i know you intend to extend the sidewalk along there and to try and you know build up their urban urban commercial character of that and then number five  connecting over to the to the pathway or to the trail so i think i think in that way i think it's a it could be a great fit here some of the views so what we're proposing yes exactly exactly so what we're proposing over here is that the main entry this is the alley book road down here and here is friar lane the main entry would be up the top and that's in response to the steep topography between valley brook road and the site so we would enter up here and this would be the front door of the facility we were proposing a four story building up here and that would be within the forty five feet that specified in the code and then over here would be the entrance to that memory support and that would be a three story building what we're trying to do is step it down on the hill so that when you're when you're driving or walking along valley book road when you look up the hill you'll perceive it to be a lower building so we're we're being sensitive to that the there would be a garage entry access here and we're proposing underground parking for the i l building and that again is something that john found in their market in the high end market like this having underground parking is a real plus and it's so much easier for the seniors you know they can they can drive in and then just go up stairs so that would be the garage entry over here the entry into the adjoining townhouses is this approximately right here in the middle let me see and then this would be a courtyard over here so the buildings would would look inward but when you walked along here you wouldn't perceive this as one large building you would really perceive it as a three story building and then sort of a green landscape area with with a courtyard with a little bit more of an urban character and then another building here and you can kind of see that a little bit more here this is the embassy of asprey heights this is down on beverly road in mount lebanon and this was an old building that i actually worked on and we got it the entire building and then built i l units in there and this is actually a green roof over their garage but again it's kind of showing the character you know be a heavily landscape walking paths just a very beautiful open space that could actually we propose having a pedestrian path down here that would connect to the sidewalk so if it could be used by more by more people over here we always have a memory care garden that's a little bit more secure again usually with planting or fences just we call it a wandering garden just for the security of people and again as john said that the idea is to stress the independence of the residents and that's what that's what we're always striving to do here's a section through the building you can see this is  section line right here and you're looking this way so over here you would see the three story section that would be over the parking down here and then this would be the four story part over here and then this part right here would be the concept of the common spaces usually on the ground floor and then units up above this is the forty five foot high that we would we would be meeting and it's the correct distance from the residential zone  where we're proposing is to to add sort of a row of street trees and then set the sidewalk in a little bit so it becomes you know it's a nicer sidewalk to walk on there and then we will just landscape it up gently towards towards the building material concept again we're talking mostly about a cemetery just material different different patterns here's a shake pattern board and baton and then we're also proposing a cultured stone base in certain places to help sort of break up the massing and these these are the the issues that we would have to go for vari the big thing ok so it would be it's a non residential mixed use residential permitted use and and and this is with as ed explained before maximums a two story building for type b facilities that we would need a variance for that because we have three and four stories and then also the this is a big thing here is the f a are right down here right now it's calls for point three five and we're actually at a point one two but when we looked at that the comprehensive plan were lower than recommended by the comprehensive plan which is a one so were that that would be another variance and then here again the density of the units per acre so when we when we first met with ed and my to talk about our project we identified fairly quickly that there would be a couple of dimensions of a project like this that are going to bump up against the current zoning and what we understand is that that there is current there is a complex and that's sort of pointing a direction toward more density in this part of town we think that this is a great kind of case study for what you can do with more density in a town center area would love the opportunity to work with the city or the township to figure out a way to make this work for the kind of concept that we have something that fits with your comprehensive plan and whatever adjustments to the zoning that may be required in the form of a variance or other changes we we've seen strong support for senior living in communities where there are seniors mostly because it generates a healthy turn of the housing stock so you get people moving out of their single family homes into senior living in their existing community and frees up their single family homes for younger families with kids and it keeps a vibrant housing stock in the community that walkability connection to the commercial cent of town is important because it keeps keeps people connected to the communities and makes it easy to visit mom and dad when you're coming in going making up the kids from school or driving to take going to church or those types of things and it's also you know it's a fairly substantial investment that we make to build a property of this size and brings jobs and you know economic value to the township so we found it generally to be a very successful partnership with communities who are interested in courage in this kind of development in town so we wanted to present the idea to you we're not looking for any answers today as much as just socialize the idea get some indication of what sensitivities you might have to a project like this or what your level of courage mentor enthusiasm is around it and then we would take our guidance from from it in staff in terms of what specific steps we have to go economics of operating these types of properties and there's a minimum scale below which the staffing the staffing to resident ratios don't work so this is about in the sweet spot and that's wh need the force the height and the density are really a function of that size requirement so we need to go up because the key is to keep your floor plan efficient because if you have long sprawling buildings they're not efficient for seniors because in the distance between the restaurant and whatever other activity there is becomes too long and there are actually some funding sources that will not fund new buildings that have hallways longer than one hundred x feet so there are some practical considerations around spread of the building and then from from a number of units standpoint as i mentioned the staffing ratios are such that we need to have that kind of size so that's why we've fairly quickly identified if the this kind of development belongs if you will and there aren't a ton of places except maybe on highway nineteen or washington road and there you are competing with retail and traffic and some of those things are scary for seniors  try to wage in residential on a very highly trafficked road like that can be an issue we just saw that with some of the earlier things you were looking at the seat so this was this was a nice combination of a center of activity without being too highly traffic fully independent living facility or is how does that work or how did pariah that that's a good point we have not done a detailed market study which would help drive the mix in that sense there is we've thought about and i only building typically what happens however is that if your average resident is eighty something it is just a matter of time until the wheels come off the bus in some way or another and then they want access to care because they don't  have to move again when they're eighty three or eighty four so that continuum of care in the same property is actually a huge benefit to the residents what we have talked about is how do you size this specialty care in proportion the so that it kind of can feed itself you know there's enough demand on the aisle side that actually keeps the especially careful in the ratio that we have there is sort of kind of where we net out in our properties but it would we would find to not based on the market study there are also because of licensing there are some construction differences between constructing a building that's license for personal care versus the construction type for an occupancy like independent living or you would frame independent living independently would frame underground parking and the p c h would be ideal construction's has a higher fire rating a different construction style so we have to end up in that's much more expensive so you have to get the right mix of had you know actually you heading in that direction or jeff we want to get more height one more dense one seniors to to be able to be part of the town's dinner and it's it's interesting concept if you coming up here then you have to find a way to go down and get down below the ground to get in your garage so it is a bit awkward in that respect will there be any tangled up here and couldn't figure out how to get these things to work we'd probably want to revisit the idea but our starting assumption was to let's try to stay away from valley brook as the point of entrance because it's that's a tough turn in and out yes so we've talked about it's a sidewalk with a ball of our trees and such and then we also have connections that are contemplated to the moreland property and beyond for walkability to the town center area and then know and then i just want to make a last appeal if you will to think about you know the look and feel of a building like this is it really can become an important signature kind of look in the town center it's not at all your grandmother's nursing home so i take that picture out of your mind this is more apartment style living that evokes the residential feeling that people are familiar with but it has a density component that creates a sense of community and connectedness to the town center i think it's got a nice it would look very nice in that in that area and it's my personal biased opinion i would think that you get a lot of comments on what the facades on valid broke and fryer would look like a lot of comments on what that the over there in materials we do we don't typically have a backside of our building and a front where the front is all glamorous and nice in the back is just plain vanilla here you have several fronts in fact all sides are going to be visible from different directions and all sides will have you know it's somewhat balconies and so well they'll be architectural elements around the building to make sure that it looks appropriate from from the different directions not really familiar with the ceiling market you said this was higher than is there comparable hoosier large competitor you would different flavors and has an entrance fee model typically which are communities that are cut off from campus space with different buildings and there's often an entrance fee associated with there where you could plunk down one hundred two hundred three hundred five hundred thousand dollars to two sit buy into the community and then you pay a rent rent our business is all rental so there's no downstroke of hundred one thousands of dollars to secure unit so it's it's more like high end or market rate apartment where you're paying for a two bedroom unit in a system sumi an independent living it might be twenty eight hundred three thousand dollars a month or something like that i don't know the exact numbers in this market but something in that range and then if you had services which would be very much tailored to your individual needs some people might want more housekeeping or they might want more help with medication management or at some point you need help with bathing or getting dressed or whatever those services are available all the cart and there's get added to your monthly fee and those could be you know two hundred bucks a month or it could be two thousand dollars a month if you need a high level of care and that's all driven by your individual needs and we will provide those services on the independent living side you might have i don't have exact numbers but i'd say maybe for thirty to forty percent of the units would have two people in it so couples in the balance would be single on the assisted living or specialty share it's more single occupancy typically because it's just the higher acuity but that's one of the fun things about independent living is that you can often attract couples and couples tend to be more community oriented and there's a lot more energy that comes with that that's why we feel it's important to have a significant independent living component to to create that sense of community and also the difference between  have a you know a large kitchen and count all the care facilities origin vision that to be on your side yeah your front door i would imagine it's a very good question i don't know that we have all the answers but let's let kathy  work their way back ok well i appreciate your comments and appreciate your time just to hear is out and i don't know if there's other mechanisms for providing feedback that will be in touch with at about the next steps in and maybe back in front of you in an official capacity at one of your upcoming meetings they hear thank you very much that decision was communicated with walgreens were pretty walgreen don't even know where they're located and talk to bell has been reaching out to them and trying to get them to offer rise us the township and talk about it get out there figure out what works best in they have yet to authorize permit taco bell to do any traffic calming signage stop signs beat arms on their property they're just not committing or giving any approval for that to happen and wall greenside in it's difficult when we place conditions on a site on a taco bell for example in the it's out of their control they can't just go in and start it's interesting because if we would've it was a permit it was nature appear for something we had that is a condition we could let the developer construct at risk and say you need to get this permit you need to be sure with your team you as permits and you can't have a