PC 042716 - Laserfiche WebLink

I met the Irby family and was intrigued with their history, the property, its location, its proximity to downtown and I went into contract on that property. I went into see the City, told them about my ideas about that property and the feedback I got was, for infrastructure improvement reasons, for master planning development reasons, we'd like to see the Kaplan Property and the Zia Property as part of it too. So over the next couple of years, I was able to get those two properties as well and make them part of the plan. Just to give you a sense of surrounding uses, the Irby property is in the middle. We have detached, higher density residential across the street, multi - family attached housing, townhome style housing on the other side of the Arroyo and multi - family attached residential housing across the street and the other side as well. I put the photos in here because I wanted to show you in Photo #1 and #3 the rooftops. When you see what we're doing and what we're proposing is a hybrid. It is a detached home with some density. We're about 10 units to the acre. The rooftops that you see there may be 6 -8 units per rooftop that you see attached and those are probably about 16 units to the acre. So in terms of density, we're sort of between what you see as traditional detached housing and high density townhome style housing. So in suburban communities like Pleasanton and like Livermore where we've done this type of project before, it's a nice type of product because the square footage comes in the marketplace and it offers at a price point that is achievable where, you know, in Pleasanton —I'm sure you know, a new home in Pleasanton has a lot of zeros on the end of it. This is attainable housing, yet still detached and you wouldn't have the common walls and the stairs and the expanse and mass of the buildings. I'm always intrigued when I look at this. I've been to many City Council meetings over a decade and I hear people come up to the podium and they say, "we've been here 30 years and 40 years, and I think I've heard one say 50. 1 don't think I've ever heard one say 120 years, and they were actually given an award by the City some years back. But, I think we've had a great time working with them on the Kaplan and Zia property and we're all pretty happy with the plan. It was a 3 Yz year design process. It started in 2012 and this was studied from an environmental perspective for 275 apartment units. At that time, the residences or structures themselves —they were studied more but it was thought that they'd be demolished at that time through that study. I mentioned how high this property scored for residential development and residential use. We got all three properties. We designed it with City staff and we were going after attainable priced housing, size housing, 1,800 to 2,300 square feet and not 6,000- square -foot lots. They use more resources than if you built this size home that typically goes on that, it is a $1.5 million or $1.7 million. It is a totally different project and a totally different buyer profile; not attainable and not necessarily what you would do in close proximity to a downtown. We looked at the time at the zoning and the land use. Of course it's not going to stay open land. It's going to be developed and if you look at service commercial, between talking to Jennifer and reading the types of developments that go in there, it can be pretty broad, but service commercial could be some of these uses that we present. At the time, we were in the Irby property only. We did a traffic study for this commercial park at 100,000 square feet. We used Fehr and Peers; the same traffic engineer that PLANNING COMMISSION MINUTES, April 27, 2016 Page 5 of 43