Highlights:

• The staff recommendation has increased to a 35% building coverage and a .50 FAR.  The bulk planes remain unchanged, and would still force the mass of a home on a slope uphill (see our previous articles for illustrations).
• The report contains a number of alternative tradeoffs, including a small 240 sf exemption from the FAR for a one-car garage (but not for building coverage).
• There are two options for recommended starting points for Council to start redrafting the ordinance.  Option 1 uses the old numbers (30% and .45) as a starting point, while Option 2 uses the new staff recommended numbers.
• At the last Council meeting, Council asked for analysis of a building coverage/no-FAR/tighter bulk planes ordinance as proposed by Mayor Appelbaum.  There is an analysis in the last 20 pages of the staff memo.  However, we have discovered that the analysis that was performed by Winter and Company and staff may have failed to apply the proposed bulk plane ordinance correctly for sloped lots.  Hence, we still have no idea how well the Mayor’s alternative proposal would work.  Moreover, we don’t have a sound analysis of how the staff’s bulk plane ordinance would work on sloped lots either.

We would like to see council pursue further and more accurate information about how the bulk plane standards would interact with slope before taking any action.  We also strongly oppose the building coverage limit at 30%, and while 35% is a more reasonable number, we would suggest instead that council seek a different way to restrict the impact rear detached garages have on the effective building coverage after setbacks.  We would suggest that the current effective building coverage limits of just under 40% on a suburban 7000 sf lot and 42.5% on the old Boulder 6250 sf lots are just about right; the problems come in when–especially on the narrow old Boulder lots where alleys are common–rear detached garages occupy another 7 to 8% of the lot.

We have proposed two ideas to address this issue.  First, a rear yard setback of 25% instead of 25′ would increase the overall size of the rear yard on the narrow and deep (50′x125′) old Boulder lots, so a large two-car garage in the rear setback would cover around a third rather than nearly half of the rear yards.  Second, and alternatively, we could simply require those with detached rear garages to preserve that much open space within the primary building envelope on the lot–that is make detached garages count against the size of the building envelope that your main home must sit within, just as having an attached garage already does for suburban homes.

Lastly, we would like to point out that should council adopt a FAR of .50 or .45, as still seems likely, having a larger building coverage limit means that if first story construction is maximized, there will necessarily be a smaller second story and above.  In other words, if a home were to be built out to the limit of 35 or 40% on the first floor, the second floor would be limited to just 10 to 15 % of the size of the lot.

As we have repeatedly pointed out, most of the neighborhood compatibility concerns result from mass contained in the second story and above; the upper stories are what contribute most to perceived bulk and mass, generally require taller and looming walls, block neighborhood views, and decrease the neighbors’ rear yard privacy.  If instead Council persists in ratcheting down the building coverage limit, those problems will become worse, not better, as a result of an action that forces anyone expanding their home to build up and not out.

To fix this we bring you three perspective drawings of how the proposed ordinance would prevent an ordinary homeowner from expanding their small, single-story home with a non-walkout basement.  These drawings were done by a FairFAR member who studied the proposed standards in detail in order to understand the effect it would have on his family’s home.  He’s not an architect, but an electrical engineer who spent over 40 hours working to develop the thousands of dollars worth of drawings must of us would need to pay an architect to do in order to expand their homes under the proposed ordinance. These three views show the interaction of the slope on a site, the existing setback and solar ordinances, and the new bulk plane regulations.  Tip: You can click on a picture to get a larger view.

In the two diagrams at left, a front view and a perspective view, you can see how the trifecta of bulk planes, solar access and the slope of the actual lot combine to create an extremely distorted building envelope that is lopsided and off-center on the lot. In fact, it would be virtually impossible to expand the existing home under the proposed ordinance; it is far more likely that the homeowners will be forced to scrape their home to expand should the proposed ordinance pass.  Consider, for a moment, what a misshapen horror of a building would result from an attempt to expand one’s own home into the tight spaces that the new regulations would mandate.

The top right and lower right diagrams illustrate how the ordinance drastically curtails another possible way to expand the home, this time by limiting the building coverage.  Under the proposed ordinance, the homeowner would only be able to add about 500 sq. ft to the rear of their home (note diagrams currently reflect the planning board proposal and not the staff proposal), or put up a two-car detached garage.  In the diagram on the lower left, you can see how the natural slope of the lot partially exposes the walls of the basement, making it count.  Note that this home’s basement has no exterior doors; it can be accessed only by a narrow flight of stairs from inside the building; it is by no means a “walkout” basement.  However, because of the fact the lot is on a natural slope, about 25% of the basement square footage will count toward the home’s overall size limit (FAR).

City Fails to Consider Sloped Lots in the Direction that Matters (i.e., side-to-side)

One last point: Consider how the city’s analysis of the interaction between the slope of a lot and their proposed bulk plane standard differs from what actually is the case in the real world.  In the real world example above the direction of the slope is primarily across the the lot from side to side, but the city makes a simplifying assumption in their diagrams–that the slope will be along the front-to-back axis of the property (see the diagram to the right, which comes directly from the proposed ordinance council is being asked to vote upon).  Of course, the city has “analyzed” slope only in the directions that would actually work for their proposed ordinance–and they haven’t done their homework to see how it will work in the real world, in situations outside their idealized models.

Among the current proposal’s lowlights are:

• Proposing not only a 45% cut in the FAR standard (from .8 to .45 on the mythical “reference” 7000 sf lot), but piling several other ill-considered regulations on top of that cut
• A 30% building coverage standard, despite obvious questions of fairness to owners of ranch homes (likely the single most common architectural style of single-family home in the city).
• Abandoning the idea of a larger single-story building coverage standard of 40%.  If you want to expand your own ranch home, you’ll have to block your neighbor’s view by building up, not out.
• Still including basements as part of the FAR calculation, with increasingly complex rules about measuring the grade and increasingly difficult calculations.  And if you have big enough windows to bring enough natural light into your basement to save energy, even your window wells might not be exempt from the FAR calculation.
• Perpetuating the illusion of “increasing” the FAR to .45 from the .42 proposed by Winter and Co.  This of course wasn’t an actual increase, but instead a sleight-of-hand trick by the Mayor and other FAR proponents.  When faced with the fact that not counting detached garages was unfair to the large majority of homeowners who have attached garages, the City compensated by eliminating all garage exemptions while adding only .03 FAR (or 210 sq ft on the “reference” 7000 sq ft lot), blithely ignoring the fact that most homes on any actual 7000 sq ft lot are likely to have a standard two-car garage of about 450-500 sq ft.  In fact, if you already have a detached two-car garage, your effective FAR just dropped by about .04 (280 sq ft on the “reference” 7000 sq ft lot, assuming a 490 sq ft garage size).
• Exterior stairways of more than 30″ high, wherever they are located on your property, are to count toward your building coverage.  We can’t wait until some of the folks who live on steep slopes find out they have to count the steps on their front walks or their basement stairwells.  We know of some tiny homes on slopes in Newlands that just grew by one or two hundred feet!

But let’s be fair.  What they may have done a little better on includes:

• Continuing to treat RMX-1 differently, acknowledging the denser character of the city core (e.g. RMX-1 would only face about a 33% reduction in FAR from .8 to .55 on the 7000 sq ft “reference” lot.)
• There is a new bulk plane requirement that seems to simplify some of the debates over the wall heights at setback, etc.  However, we’ve noted two reservations about this new development.  First, it appears that calculating the bulk plane from the grade at the property line will be particularly hard on anyone who lives on a steep slope (in places, that 45-degree bulk plane might call for earth removal!).  Second, it may in practice turn out to be effectively a backdoor attempt at lowering the height limit on our homes.  No one at the City seems to have asked basic questions such as How wide does a lot need to be before the bulk plane is superseded by the height limit?  And what percentage of lots in different zoning districts are actually that wide?  How many existing homes would actually violate this proposed standard?
• Exempting at most one, but certainly not all, garden sheds, greenhouses or other small detached structures (they must be less than 80 sq ft!).  We have some environmentally-minded neighbors who have a greenhouse or two, a garden shed, a doghouse, a rabbit hutch and a chicken coop.  None of it bothers us, but when City gets wind of this, they’re going to force them to tear them down.  Not only that, but the way we read the ordinance (that is, “literally”), all but one of these small structures will count toward their FAR and/or building coverage.  And we’re pretty sure that garden shed’s roof is more than ten feet high.  We do have snow occasionally in these parts; a pitched roof and putting a shed on a foot-high foundation are both rather sensible.
• Dropping outright the Mayor’s absurd “virtual floors” idea, which attempted to turn a two-dimensional measure (FAR) into a three-dimensional measure under certain conditions where the FAR bears no relation to perceived bulk (that is, basically any time you have high ceilings).  Of course, dropping the FAR measure entirely and choosing a volume-based, three-dimensional measure to address a three-dimensional problem would have been a more logical approach, but logic would be too much to expect in this debate.
• Proposing to waive some of the newly required documentation (and the associated costs to the homeowner) when a home improvement project will obviously not come close to violating the proposed new standards.  We thank City Staff for their consideration here.

We’ll have more to say later, especially about the mathematical irregularities and arithmetic errors in another post.  But if you spot anything else, be sure to comment!