Success ... by a hair's breadth?

As if in a coda to my post the other day, Plan Philly brings news of the apartment project at 43rd and Baltimore -- across the street from Clark Park. It went before the Zoning Board seeking variances, doing so after:

• Extensive community input shaping the development vision
• Jannie Blackwell rejecting spot-zoning proposal

By the time it got to the ZBA, the project had racked up letters of support or nonopposition from every single involved party. Yet there were, in the meeting, two dissenters:

At a hearing in April, the developers sought variances for height, 35 feet more than the underlying zoning allows, and commercial space. It was supported by local civic groups and Councilwoman Blackwell’s office, but opposed vociferously by two neighborhood residents who live a few blocks from the property. 

Mary McGettigan and Larry Caputo, the opponents of the project, noted that the project didn’t conform to either the existing or proposed zoning of the property. They argued that the developers hadn’t made their case that the zoning designation represented a hardship on the property.

The ZBA voted to support this project. But it only did so by a 3-2 margin. This, despite the fact that the developers had gone above and beyond in incorporating the community voice in their design. It's fairly clear that -- had there been no dissenters who showed up at the meeting -- the project would have sailed through the ZBA.

Two dissenters.

That's all it took to nearly derail a small apartment building that is in scale with a number of similar buildings scattered throughout the neighborhood.

As if you needed any more evidence modern zoning is excessively restrictive!

Whelp, We're Boned

From this article: http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/2/corporate-welfaresubsidiesboeingalcoa.html

The size and range of the subsidies the tool has uncovered helps explain the burdens taxpayers must bear because so many major corporations rely on welfare for much or all of their profits rather than earning them.

Holy fuuuuuuuuuuck...

If we, the taxpayers, are subsidizing their profits, doesn't that imply that we live in a right-wing socialism?

ETA: Thank God we've got a gubernatorial candidate who gets it, and gets that the only way to win this game (thank you Jon Geeting for calling it the "Ripoff Game") is not to play and play the Economic Gardening* game instead:

Tom Wolf’s Fresh Start plan has a different idea that’s not based on blowing a bunch of money on propping up zombie firms. He wants to invest in Ben Franklin Tech Partners and other regional incubators that have a proven track record of creating new Pennsylvania businesses, and commercializing the good ideas coming out of our many universities into working business models.

This is a slower process than the Ripoff Game, but it actually creates new value, and it’s actually sustainable in the long run. This would be the benefit of having a self-funder Governor. Unlike Tom Corbett, he wouldn’t try to bet the horse on stupid get-rich-quick schemes conveniently timed to the election calendar.

(Keystone Politics)
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*Would you believe there is no Wikipedia page for economic gardening? Now that's ridiculous...

Postgreen's Mojo

First Steel, 1703 and 1705 Howard

Can Postgreen do it again?

Postgreen Home's 100k House at the corner of Susquehanna and Amber in Kensington is fueling a mini-boom around it. It recently sold for $300k and Postgreen and other builders, mainly LEED, but not all, have been infilling that stretch like crazy. Postgreen developments within three or four blocks or so of 100k include: Passive House, Skinny, and 2.5 Beta, with Passive being furtherest away.

Will Postgreen spark another renaissance? They have just unveiled two projects along the 1700 block of Howard in Old Kensington, about a mile from the Susquehanna and Amber nexus of their previous efforts. These two projects are the K'House and First Steel. K'House is designed by DIGSAU, and First Steel by Postgreen's stalwart architectural firm, Interface, the folks behind most (if not all) Postgreen designs to date, as well as other impressive infill designs, like Fishtown's Nine.

The corner of Howard and Cecil B. Moore today looks like the corner of Susquehanna and Amber two years ago, when 100k first went up. There is no question Postgreen's innovative and pioneering presence at that corner is what sparked the mad development there today--but the question still has to be asked: can they do it again? Or was that corner somehow unique? Can K'House--and K'House is really the big one--be the destination "spark" 100k was? Postgreen certainly thinks so, and I hope so. This is an area of the city ripe for reinvestment, and reinvestment has been percolating north of Girard and west of Frankford for some time now, but only recently has it been this far from either.

K'House, 1713 Howard, 1712-14 Hope