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There's a 52 -page study from the Civic Center Master Plan Task Force that talks all <br />about this. It talks about usage, ideas, thoughts, and nowhere do they say O is this <br />smoking hot deal to go to. So I just wanted to throw some of that out there because <br />we've really ping - ponged back and forth with staff on the O zoning. I think when we <br />drew it, Tim did a lot of research trying to get the best fit for the City, and I don't think it's <br />O. 1 think it's mixed use and everybody's going to figure that out pretty soon. So I'll let <br />Tim talk on the site and all that. <br />Tim Ward — Architect: I'd like to talk more about the architecture and planning. In <br />working with this and actually going to the farm vernacular, what we were trying to do is <br />develop a palette of a variety of materials. The low pitched roofs, the buildings <br />themselves are much smaller, for instance all of the residences are half the square <br />footage. We're around 393 square feet on the upper floor and within the roof. So we've <br />lowered the plane heights down by seven feet so that the whole appearance is a cluster <br />of sort of a farm with different materials. I know no one seems to like the galvanized <br />metal siding that we have on some of the residences on the upper floors but it's really <br />sort of trying to pick up some of the nuances of the old farm style and the metal roofs <br />that used to be there. <br />The placement of the buildings was originally much closer to the street and we spread <br />them further back and re- arranged the parking so that it was clear that there was a very <br />simple way to get in and out of garages for the residential sites. On the commercial part <br />of the project, the lower floor, we have about 900 square feet or a little bit more than <br />that, and the three studio units. They aren't really three floors. Technically, we have a <br />mezzanine because they are open to the lower floor. And that was one of the things we <br />weighed when we looked at the residences; if we did a mezzanine kind of room on the <br />upper floor, technically the building department looks at them as a mezzanine and not a <br />full floor. <br />I think working around the trees, in terms of the guest parking, we have some additional <br />space there and I think we have some flexibility to make it work. Our hope was that we <br />would provide a little variety of housing types that are so close to that transit, that's like <br />three blocks away. The studios and the small 1,800- square -foot homes would offer a <br />different kind of housing type to single people or single couples than we typically see in <br />this neighborhood. It's sympathetic really to the houses, on the west side the houses <br />are adjacent to another two -story house, two -story houses behind them, and they're all <br />in the same range. We're 30 feet at the ridge and probably 27 feet at the eave line. So <br />that's kind of where the thrust of where the architecture was coming from. If you have <br />questions on that, I'd be glad to answer. <br />Chair Ritter: Questions for either speaker? <br />Commissioner Brown: So for the mixed use building with the studios up, is that <br />considered per the City's Planning Division a three -story or two -story with a mezzanine? <br />Ward: You know, I don't know. Planning looks at it differently than the building code. <br />The California Building Code, I don't know..... <br />Beaudin: A mezzanine level would be considered a third story. <br />PLANNING COMMISSION MINUTES, May 25, 2016 Page 11 of 28 <br />