ModSquad

Jeff, I do not disagree with you at all. Let me point us back to the title of the topic, "Affordable Housing." While Eastbrook Builders is certainly able to deliver at $110-$118/sf, they are able to do this on land they control where they can build critical mass, and bring in a sales price north of $200K as a baseline. The KCLBA has brought Eastbrook Builders, along with at least 6 other large scale developers through the City to tour our 100+ buildable lots to see if there was any interest. There was none, even from Sable Homes who builds very basic entry level homes in the region at a price point less than $200K. So, we turned to local smaller builders and our price per square foot ballooned quickly to $150/sf at the min to a high of $185/sf. Even when we exclude the cost of the land because we own it outright, we are still looking at $225-$250K sales prices for 1,300-1,500/sf homes. This brings me to modular. I will try to use as much restraint and grace as I can in this next comment. The KCLBA had a lot of hope with Bossardet's modular concept. All we were told was that his concept would deliver to the urban in-fill market a price that would fit the neighborhood. The $249K sales price blew our hair back. Frankly we wish we were not mentioned in the article about his project as we don't want to be associated with it...Oh well. Here is the good news. The KCLBA has partnered with Champion Homes, one of the largest modular home builders in the country. They have vast experience in the urban environment using modular for in-fill new construction at a neighborhood level. They are working on specific designs finishes, and floor plans for the KCLBA. I posted a draft rendering of one design here. [Side note on the photo: A3 -before you tear into this design or use of materials we are making some substantial changes so it does not look so suburban, changes to pitch, gables, porch post materials, etc.] What you see here is a 1,400 square foot 3 bed, 2.5 bath. We also have a couple of REALLY cool long narrow front to back ranch homes. Based on substantial meetings last week with the Champion executive team, we are pretty confident we can deliver these completely finished with appliances at the $159-$189K price point and not lose money. To be fair, the KCLBA does not have to worry about cost of land, and we do not need to build in huge mark up due to our funding model. That being said, I do not think there is a neighborhood in GR that couldn't support these price points. Now that I understand costs for modular, it leaves me a significant question about the price point on the Race Street modular home. The land was purchased for a very low cost. What I see looks like two very simple modular boxes stacked on top of each other. I find it hard to not imagine there is a rather hefty mark up on this project at $249K. Although, there was one little pearl in the article that did make me pause a bit. The manufacturer that built this home state they did 77 homes last year. Champion has two plants making our homes and each plant produces 350 units a month! Stay tuned, there is a lot more to come from the KCLBA on this front. I am hoping it will be a game changer when it comes to affordable home ownership in the City. As we get more details, I will post them here.

Seeing it last night, I was really impressed at how much is new and how many historic elements have been maintained inside. I spoke with the builder last night and he told me about the incredible amount of work that went into reclaiming the terrazzo floor alone, and it is impressive. Plus the open kitchen is really impressive and I cannot believe the amount of work that took.

I was able to take part in Georgina's soft opening last night. I believe their grand opening is today. In the spirit of this forum, let me say what an amazing transformation of this building. I also think it is pretty darn cool that Chef Tony, the owner will be living in one of the apartments upstairs. Let me also add that our meal was probably one of the top 5 meals I have ever eaten in our fine dining City. This is certainly a welcome addition to our restaurant scene. Chef Tony is a bit nervous about this new venture as it is a huge investment, I hope people support him. Latin/Asian Fusion, seriously good!

Overall, I am pretty concerned about the incredible overuse of metal panels as an exterior application on many of the new developments around town. I am not sure how they will hold up over time. I believe one of the first uses was Metropolitan Park Apartments on Ionia (photo attached). I drive/walk by this development multiple times a day as my office close. These have not held up well at all. They look pretty weathered and grungy.

With an average sales price of $249,000 and the fact that it costs about $250,000 to build a reasonably sized home it means we are not going to be able to build our way out of the housing shortage any time soon. On another, somewhat related note, I was told by a VERY credible source that the rental market in GR is softening very fast. To quote my source: "The rental market is down, various sectors of the rental property business have rising vacancies and good tenants are getting harder to find forcing the to reduce rents and re-think their requirements for an applicant." We should watch this closely.

You are brave. I am deathly afraid of heights. Looking through those photos made my stomach queasy.

Jeff, I could not agree with you more. The housing recommendations are live now, we finished them up this AM. Potentially even more impactful is the recommendations from the Rose Fellowship. As I just stated in the morning commission meeting, if one understands the full implications of many of these recommendations, they have the potential to be incredibly controversial and impactful (the latter is my personal opinion. Here is a link: http://s3.amazonaws.com/downtowngr.org/general/Rose-Center-Presentation-to-City-Commission-11.14.17.pdf?mtime=20171114104222

Back story, I got a call on Friday from someone telling me that they saw that I was on this panel. That was news to me! . Since my mug was already distributed for the event and I had the evening open, I participated. Frankly, it was kind of hard for me to answer some of the questions because they were so pointed as it relates to the City Commission. Regardless, I was open and blunt and will own what I said. The room was packed.

So do you take an elevator up to the cab or do you have to climb all those stairs? I was talking with GRFD leadership last week. A few weeks ago they did some training exercises with one of the cranes, practicing a rescue from one of the cranes. If anything happens to the crane operator while up there it is our firefighters/rescue teams that have to get up there, with a bucket or a stretcher and get the person down with ropes and cables. Funny, you don't think of those type of things typically.

Duh, now I see it, Mondays...

So, is the Olive Oil store leaving?

I have to share a funny story about this development. My mother lives in the Chicago area. She is 76 and is legally blind from macular degeneration. She sees pretty good far away, just not so good up close. I drive to the area quite a bit to bring her up to GR for weekends to visit her great grandkids. She likes it when I take 196 all the way around to 131 South to get to my house because she loves that view of the City. Needless to say on most of our recent trips she has been looking at "The Castle" and monitoring its progress. When I take her home I do use M6 so she only sees it as we are driving north. The last time she was up, M6 was closed for reconstruction so we had to take 196 home. As we drove past the Castle heading south she exclaimed loudly, "Holy crap what was that developer thinking? He built the doggone thing looking over a concrete factory and a drainage ditch!" I almost died laughing.

Mike and Lenn have retired. Good for them! They had a long run on the corner. They told me that they sold to a women's clothing company that was moving off Division. I assume it is the one being discussed earlier in this thread. The new business owner will be living upstairs as Mike and Lenn did while running her business on the main floor. She plans to preserve the gardens.

Art Prize "Officially" starts in two days. I was just downtown walking around and noted that there are VERY few pieces set up in public spaces. What gives? Is there a more intentional attempt by AP to spread out the art to various venues outside the Central Business District?

Look what they just installed in the upper corner of the building!

The bigger question is could our region fulfill 50,000 new jobs?

I have been reading that there is a push to reinstate the Historic Tax Credit program to spur development. Perhaps this is a preemptive move.

Habitat and ICCF along with the other non-profit housing corps are having a hard time getting houses, just like everyone else, but I would point out that Habitat and ICCF are currently sitting on a large number of build-able lots and tracks of land. The KCLBA has a ton of sites/lots available to build on our web site www.kclba.org click on the "Buy from Us" link. Problem is builders are having a hard time making the numbers work on these sites.

For obvious reasons I always have to be careful when I comment on this forum, especially on this topic. But Jeff has really hit the nail on the head. When discussing "affordable housing" I think it is extremely important that the discussion NOT focus on the actual price for rent or cost of a monthly mortgage, but rather on how much a person can afford based on what they earn. Industry standard is that a person should not pay more than 30% of their monthly income on their housing costs, 45% for total monthly debt to income. Average rent in GR for a 2 bedroom is $900 a month. So, to "afford" this much rent a household must be earning at least $39,000 annually, this equates to about $19 per hour. Too many people say, "well then rent should be lower!" That is an easy assumption to make. Problem is that whether it is a 2 bedroom home or duplex, or a 2 bedroom unit in a larger complex, rental property owners will tell you that it is hard to keep up a home unless you are taking in that amount of monthly rent. Think about it: Property Taxes: $1,300 annually (at least) or $108 a month, insurance $75 a month, water $40 a month, maintenance $50 a month, replacement reserves (putting away money for large repairs or replacements) $75 a month, vacancy (5% of rent) or $45 a month, and then debt service (when one considers the vast amount of rental property in our city, very few are owned free and clear) let's plug in $300 a month. This adds up to $693 in monthly costs. So the owner is netting $207 per month in a best case scenario. If the landlord is charging less, there is a great risk of the property falling into blight. Let's get back to the $39,000 in annual household income a family must earn in order to "afford" a two bedroom rental unit. There are 73,026 households in GR. The Median Household income for Grand Rapids is $40,355, meaning half of the households in the City earn below the $39,000 threshold I mentioned earlier. I could go on and on, but I think I have made my point. Jeff is right, we have a wage issue here in Grand Rapids.

If this does not get approved...just saying

We submitted for approval of the site plan but not for the design. If HPC approves the site we will then submit final drawings for approval. Final drawings will have flat fronts, meaning no bump out, the single family home will have a steeper roof pitch and no shakes in the peak, all of the windows will be a bit taller and more narrow, and none of the windows will be paired. Each window will be individual with siding in between. The 2 unit townhouse is almost the exact dimensions of similar buildings two streets over.

Correct, the KCLBA intends to do several of these developments, all in neighborhoods that are not in Historic Districts. So the work we put in is being split across 13 units. However, with this project being rejected we cannot recoup the $6,500 per unit cost for these three. As far as the flat roof goes, it is done for a practical reason. Because these are single family owned and not condo projects there is a parapet in the roof allowing each unit to have its own roof. This helps immensely with insurance and financing. We are contemplating revising the project into one narrow stand alone home and then a 2 unit townhouse and resubmitting.

x99, I cannot say I totally disagree with you on this. However, when it comes to design elements on this project the HPC made a huge issue about window sills, yet half of the buildings in this neighborhood had them and half did not, they made an issue about the width of the trim, yet half of the buildings in the neighborhood had wide trim and half had narrow trim. Each time they would bring up these design elements as issues, we had the expense of redrawing. In regard to the size of the building itself, a strong case can be made that the vast majority of the homes in this neighborhood take up almost the entire parcel, save the room for the occasional parcel that has off street parking. To me, there is still too much that is arbitrary in this whole process. One more thing, we did find the widest building in the neighborhood, it is 349 & 353 Visser. These are side by side co-joined two units with flat roofs. They are each 17 feet wide and the buildings are built almost next to each other's property lines. We contended that our project was not too dissimilar to these two buildings.

The flat roof works better for our attached SFH projects because each unit literally owns its own roof individually.

There is a little more to this saga than the rendering above. Here is a breakdown of the process: KCLBA staff and our architect had a preliminary meeting with City Planning and HPC stadd to review our conceptual drawings and site plan and received the following feedback: o For planning we only need to submit to the Planning Commission there was no need for a zoning variance. o A neighborhood meeting would be very important o It would be good to offer the neighbors choices. o Was told it was ver important to get approval from the neighbor to the South as he was very active with HPC o We took this feedback and authorized our architect to produce more complete drawings. • Invited the entire block of Donald to Sparrow’s coffee for a meeting. Two neighbors showed up, one of them being the neighbor to the South. KCLBA staff reviewed the two building designs and the site plan for the 3-unit attached single family home project. Both neighbors approved the project. Their salient points were: o Neighbors liked the amount of off street parking as they said on street parking was a problem from time to time. o Appreciated that it was home ownership and not rental. o Neighbor to South requested that the drive and parking be moved to the north end of the development. o One neighbor did not necessarily have an opinion on the building design, neighbor to South really wanted a pitched roof. • The KCLBA relayed the feedback from the neighbors to our architect and the site plan changes were implemented and full drawings with a pitched roof was authorized. • Attended the Historic Preservation review meeting to receive more feedback on the proposed drawings and site plan. Received feedback and our architect implemented more changes to the drawings. Of note the HPC members really liked the flat roof design. However, for final approval we had to move the pitched roof design forward. We had our architect implement the other design changes to the pitch roof design • Attended the Historic Preservation Commission meeting for final approval where the neighbor that approved it at the meeting now opposes the development, especially the roof design that the neighbor specifically requested. Everyone was concerned about "massing" the visual size of the project. The decision was tabled until the next meeting. • Since the neighbor that we were told to please now opposed the pitched roof design and the HPC members preferred the flat roof design, the KCLBA had our architect submit the flat roof design for final approval. • At the final HPC meeting neighbor to south came out again and had a letter with a few signatures on it opposing the project. It was unanimously rejected. There were two reasons given: 1) Neighbor opposition 2) Massing. We cannot do anything about neighbor opposition but in regard to "massing" the following is the federal guidelines: "New additions, exterior alterations, or related new construction shall not destroy historic materials that characterize the property. The new work shall be differentiated from the old and shall be compatible with the massing, size, scale, and architectural features to protect the historic integrity of the property and its environment." I am not sure what the heck HPC Members see about this project that make it not compatible with the historic integrity of the property and its environment. Look at the scaled rendering below. In closing, how in the heck did Green Cane's MASSIVE housing/retail development along Crofton pass this "massing" litmus test? Needless to say the KCLBA is out $25,000 and a TON of staff time. Never again in a Historic District, never again. Rant over...