Fantastic point about the union street west facing facade. I dont think that building is i mean, i think maybe the facade of anything might be historic, but that would potentially be an opportunity for facadism for another project. I do believe that all of the neighbors wi neighbors of that building will be here with the pitchforks when something in the future is planned, because starting with the third story about, if anything goes in there, it will be blocking some views, and not just views, but light because theres not a huge space between those buildings. I do think that thats slightly problematic, but on the flip side, theres the example of a building right on polk street where they tried to account for that, and theres just a blank space of an apartment and in anticipation of something going in next to it, and thats been the case for like 15 years. So you know, sometimes its dammed if you do, dammed if you dont, and if there is a building that goes in, itll have to be something maybe some sort of lshaped or something different. I want to acknowledge that that made a lot of sense to me and kind of caught my eye a little bit, but thinking more about it up here, i dont know that id want to see any changes to the building to account for that. And then, i definitely agree with having some sort of building entrance on vanness. I noticed that before. There are four retail spaces on vanness, two or three of which will definitely be empty for some period of time, and i think that you need to have that pedestrian traffic there. I do not buy the argument that vanness is too busy to have people coming out there just in general. Thats not the plan for the vanness rebuild. It is being beautyfied. Theres a brt going up there. Its a lot of reasons why people street it like a boulevard or street, not like a highway, and from personal experience, i live off king street. People coming off of 280. Its the potential setup, and the front enter rabs to my building and all the other ones are on king street, and its a good thing because it puts people on the street. I want to see this then reorganized to have at least one entrance it doesnt have to be the main entrance things, but it has to be some entrance on vanness, and so i would say those are the things that i would like to see different about this project other than do the state density bonus. Commissioner moore. Director, my understanding is if you have an understand on vanness, your front door has to be on vanness. That is a requirement that is a requirement. The post office will not accept a building that has a vanness address and they have to deliver to some other obscure whatever there is a big fight on buildings nc 3, who for whatever reason didnt want to be off Market Street, but chose to have their address one off whatever. I very vividly remember the post office does not allow an entrance to be other than on the street to which a building is named. Im not aware of that requirement, commissioner. There may well be. Im not aware of it. You can ive mentioned that on other projects and people kind of thought about it, but i think its maybe time to investigate that. My understanding is that you cannot have a a building entrance your minute entrance other than on the street to which the address is given, and this is a vanness property. Youre speaking about a Postal Service requirement as opposed to a city requirement. I think its a city requirement support the postal requirement. You cannot just reorient your building other than what its basically saying on the property map is my understanding. Im not familiar with that, but we can you can change this street to a union street address. You cannot just change it like that. Yeah, you can. If your mail comes to 2465 vanness, the entrance to your building has to be on that property. I think you can change this to a you can change this to a union street address. You can definitely change the address to union street. Theres no question about that, what im not familiar with is the entrance beyond the address street. Thats something we might need to ask the city attorney. Its interesting because these things come with a pretty high price tag. Just call back the unit size. I think i like them, too. We dont see a lot of larger two and three unit bedrooms like these. We often complain that were jamming two bedrooms into a 750 square foot unit, so im so im glad to see kind of larger two and three bedrooms here. I dont know if thats signed the way you wanted or just kind of a design of the density rules. You know, that kind of question about a vanness entry or union street, there is the two retail entries on on vanness with, you know, retail glazing through throughout that side. Commissioner koppel. Yeah, echoing commissioner richards comments, id feel better if the enter rabs was on vanness, and id at least like to see another option explored with a density bonus that would give you a couple of extra floors which would allow you to have the affordable onsite, and also some type of earl change on the external of the building to differentiate it from the building. Can i say a few things . Sure. Okay. So ill start with the material because i am also the architect for the other building so i know the buildings pretty well. The buildings are pretty. The other billion, were using a masonry. This is a precast system that were using on this building. The one element is similar is the coloration of the metal that were using on this building is similar but not identical. I also want to say that as an a architect, we see a lot of buildings that look exactly the same. This building does not lookt exactly the same from the other building. It is different. If youll go up and down vanness, youll see some of the buildings that were built in the 30s that look all the same. Cant tell one from the other. With respect to the entries on vanness, the problem with that is we, from an ada standpoint, union street is flat. It works extremely well. People come off the bus, they can go shopping, they can go right in. Its all level. One of the things we would like to recommend, we had two units on the far end of union street on vanness that we could actually add stoops to and create two entrances into those units, then, well have two units that enter off of vanness, well have retail that enters off of vanness, and the main entrance off of union street where we have the ability to have the appropriate sized lobby. Its all level. Its so much more accessible than the 5. 5 that we have on vanness. Its a very difficult percentage to work with from a level standpoint. Also, one of the requirements that we have is that we need 14 feet clear for that area for those lobbies. Thats a requirement, so weve almost created like a 16 foot high lobby space on union street in order to work with the grade, so i do really feel that union street is the appropriate place to have the front door, the main front door. But we could add those stoops along vanness street. Thanks. Commissioner richards. Mr. Mcdonald, just i heard every commissioner up here mention density. If you could please just give us some comments, maybe answer the questions. So to do a state density bonus or home sf, what would it entail to do the existing all over . Right. You have stuff you have a lot already here. You know, im a layperson, and commissioner moores going to which h wince when i say this. Just put a couple of floors on top. Really simple. What would additional floors entail in terms of timeline cost . So it would be a tremendous expense. It would also be tremendous in terms of time expense, because we have unlike a lot of developers who will right lane a schematic plan, get approvals and just potentially sell the site. Thats not our intention. Our intention is to build these development. We have almost 100 construction drawings, and so we are intending on building the project, so weve spent literally millions of dollars on this design process, and so if we were to even just add a floor, thats going to mean redrawing, you know, a very significant portion of the building because weve taken it so far, and so theres a tremendous expense, even if its just adding a floor. In terms of the community, again, when we talked with supervisor farrells office, it seemed like adding height in this location was going to be very problematic, so Community Outreach kind of getting the support that we need, it was very difficult just getting support for a six Story Building at this location, so getting a higher building at this location, we were viezed was going to be very difficult. Over the course of a year what weve seen is Construction Costs have gone up 25 over the last year, and so Construction Costs could escalate making the project that much more uneconomical and unviable, so we want to move forward with that project because were almost finished with the drawings. We could, upon entitlement move right into building permits, and we wouldnt have to be concerned about Construction Cost escalation whereas if we, you know, have additional year, there would be a lot of uncertainty, so theres a lot of issues around doing that. And if i may, just so you know, wed have to restart the ceqa classes. Yes. There would be a whole new ceqa analysis. I think one of the questions that we should be asking in terms of getting buildings built, is do you have schematics. Commissioner johnson. Thank you. Sorry. I turned my mic off. Thank you. Commissioner richards sort of had you address i wanted some more details on density is the question we had, again. Its a choice for you to make as a developer. Its your choice and youre okay. Its okay. You can sit down, thank you. I think the only thing i would say is the suggestion to have stoops opening onto vanness is definitely acceptable to me. I think we may have made it sound unclear if there is an exit, its more like a fire exit for the building onto vanness, so its not like there are no doors into the building. Its just that you want to create some activity where its you know, at least the appearance, even if not at 2 00 in the morning, its not happening, that people are coming and going. The retail spaces are there. Theyre probably going to be empty for some time. Its going to take some time to get that up and going, and you want pedestrians traffic coming in from both streets. And i would also add the loading zone are on union street, so thats where people are going to be taking their packages or getting picked up. I think that main entrance should be there, but you also need to create the need for that pedestrian on vanness so you have people coming and going not just for the retail but also into and out of the building, and i think the stoops helps with that. Commissioner moore . Could you briefly talk about what ideas you have about retail . You heard us earlier that were very concerned about too many good spaces in approximate well designed buildings staying empty, and this particular corner would be rather deplorable if it could not delivery tail, particularly going south. Retail on that side of the street has always been problematic for the last 30 years. Its east facing side. Its mostly in shadow in the afternoon, and theres things that are going in and out, but it never really fully takes off. What are your thoughts here. Yeah. Thank you for the question. Retail is very important for us. We see it as an amenity for us. Our buildings arent 100 floor highrises with gyms and movie rooms and stuff like that. We treat the retail as our amenity. At our other buildings, it was a way for us to create community, and so we were very, very careful about selecting the right restaurants and the right retailers, and those retail spaces filled up long before our buildings were completed because people were clamorring to get into them because we were doing retail and marketing of the retail spaces. It really has served well. We have local, unique, and its additive. I think, however, there are a variety of different retail sources, neighborhood serving bank, for example, might be very workable here, and in fact we have been approached by a neighbor of retailers like this already, so we could literally sign a lease today, so theres really no concern of mine that were going to go kind of empty in that space. Its really a question of who will it be . Will it be a restaurant, will it be a retailer, will it be a bampg, will it be neighborhood serving, and were excited for this fit not only for the project but for the neighborhood. Your success in hayes valley is undisputed, your buildings greatly contribute to the neighborhood and a variety of other eclectic things. However, this is a very, very different setting. Youre right. And since this commission is in no position to dictate what you put in there, i would actually think as a first reaction that a bank, a Real Estate Office or a smaller medical thing would be exactly the opposite of what we would want here. Okay. Because it would have just the same deadening and dead effect, the unsuccessful retail spaces which are on that side of the street werent able to deliver, so im not quite sure if this wouldnt be the time for the Planning Commission, with the help of planning, to start really look at how insistence of our ground floor retail really is rather than extending a couple of walk uptown house units into these spaces. I would rather prefer to see residential in this part of vanness, because its gravitating towards that section. But i would rather see additional ground floor units in some of the retail space and only something which would stand empty or let only banks or Real Estate Office come in as next use. Commissioner, i think one of the things to consider and i dont disagree that we have to look carefully at all our retail. There actually isnt a requirement here for retail. The one particular difference on this project was this was on the corner of union street, and this is kind of the beginning of the retail on union, so that does suggest there would be more pedestrian activity than there would be on another section of vanness that doesnt have a strong connection to a strong retail street. Thats the difference from other sites on vanness. Well, one thing, its a corner space itself the vanness corner with union is definitely kind of the lantern where you want retails, animated retails, not a bench bank, but if you go further up on vanness, there is additional retail space which could perhaps become drawing units, additional ground floor units with a stoop, which may be, from our perspective, mor more animating and more residential than a retail space which would never succeed. Are you making that a requirement . No. I mean, i agree with your requirement. I think a bank tends to deaden the space on vanness. We cant require a bank i mean, a nonbank use. I think retail on both sides of this building is important, because youve got vanness which has larger scale retail and needs more activation. In those two spots you do have housing, i think retails more active than a stoop, and it is although it gets spotty on union street, theres that black horse bar, youre starting to get an intro into the union Street Retail corridor, so i think its a its the right mix here, and i would take the addition of the stoops on vanness. Commissioner richards . So seeing nobody else on the role and trying to get mr. Mcdonald to increase density, but we understand where youre at on this project, and you want to get something built, ill make a motion to approve this project with stoops on vanness with with the additional parking however, id like three spaces to be car share for their units that dont have any parking, and im open to other amendments. Ill second that. Commissioner moore. Id like to ask, do you see the possibility of adding additional ground floor united on the upper part of vanness . No, i dont. I think when you look at the plan, its 2900 square feet of retail, so were its a great restaurant size, and if you look at the plan itself, its 165 feet long, and i believe about onethird of that is the two apartments and the egress, so its only two thirds of that entire length that were talking about. Plus, with that slope of 5 , it becomes very difficult. So we have to go down into the space, so it would be very difficult to get that Additional Units in there. And i think once you make the retail space too small, then, youre going to limit yourself to the capacity that these guys have done in the past where theyve been able to bring on some great restaurants, so i think 2900 is exactly what we need for the kitchen, for some seating areas, and so on. Theres been a motion and a second. Just for the record, they are at their maximum density with the 41 units. They could do the density bonus. Correct. Commissioners but theyd need to start from scratch. Commissioners, there is a motion that has been seconded to approve this motion with conditions as amended to include stoops on vanness and three car share spaces. [ roll call. ] clerk so moved, commissioners. That motion passes 42 with commissioners koppel and moore voting against. Close the public hearing on the vanness and im inclined to grant the variance. Well take it under advisement. Press hillis. Yeah. I have a question. I made a very important comment. Would the applicants stay in the room for a moment . I made a very important comment about the building facade being held back on the roof deck. I think it was a very unfortunate building expression, and nobody ever responded to that. You mean that the glass i am generally supportive of those, but i think where it is, it adds some interest to the frant facade. I thi front facade. I just think it the height here is not a problem. Were actually taking it asking them to increase the height, so i dont think that gives you to me, i didnt think i was fine. I was just asking. Okay. Thank you. Commissioners, itll place us on items 28 a, b, and c, for ite 799 cost re, and 3 80 through 38781st street, a conditional use authorization variances, and a discretionary review, commissioners, this is an odd situation where weve actually accepted a discretionary review on a project that includes a conditional use authorization because their conditional use request is for the building or structure at the front of the property, and the discretionary review is for on a building at the back of the property. And so because this is a rare occurrence, i should have run this by you prior to the hearing, and i apologize, but how would you like that to occur because generally, it would be staffed, project sponsor, and then Public Comment for the conditional use authorization, but theres also a discretionary review associated with this project. And how many theres one discretionary review filer . Yes. All right. So lets do lets do staff, project sponsor ten minutes, the discretionary review filer, five minutes, and then, well just take Public Comment for and against the project. Very good. Okay. Good evening, commissioners. Nancy tran. Planning department staff. The items before you are a