I went to the Central CAC meeting tonight and the presentation was a good one.
The developer here is Clearscapes themselves and they are 100% intent on keeping the historic, brick buildings in place. The project really doesn’t even touch them at this point. The meeting tonight was for feedback only and no CAC vote took place. The rezoning request was submitted last Friday so it should pop up on the Wire Service soon.
The quick hits:
- 8-10 story residential building
- 2 floors of parking, partially underground (more on that below)
- Public open space between the new building and the brick buildings along Martin
- Access to the open space would be the existing alley betwen the buildings and a new stair to Commerce Place
Here’s my rough drawing of the site from memory.
Along Commerce Place, there would be stairs going up to the open space. The parking deck entrance, along with a residential lobby would also be here too.
Now, if you know the landscape here, this surface parking lot sits almost a full-story higher than Martin Street and even Commerce Place is much lower. You can sort of see that here in Google Maps.
That “mound” that is the surface parking lot will be “scooped out” and most of the parking will go there. The ground floor of the building will actually be half parking, half lobby/office/creative space (looking at the open space) with the residential units starting above that.
The units will be set back a bit from the ground floor parking/commercial space and with the amount of parking they can do, it limits the number of units and therefore height to be around 8-10 floors.
The CAC will possibly vote at their next meetings in early 2019 where it will then move to planning commission so this is one to watch for 2019.