February 20, 2026 — Meeting Transcript

Good afternoon. It's February 20th. We're here for our discussion session, and we have a great group of our planning crew here to update us on a number of things. So I will let them take it away.

Yeah, well, I have an easy day today for presentations because you get to hear about all the work that these guys have been doing. So I'll just turn it over to Hobie. He's going to go through outdoor dining first. Great. All right.

Okay. Well, one of the big takeaways that we learned during the comp plan process was that even within Clayton's two and a half square miles, that people strongly identified with their particular neighborhood within Clayton. And a big part of that was the kind of local commercial node that was often within walking distance that was very important to the the placemaking that people had and so in the comp plan we okay so we the city regulates outdoor dining with the goal to promote a pedestrian pedestrian connectivity, have an attractive streetscape, and also promote general commerce. And a lot of the feedback we got about those goals in the comp plan were kind of focused on the transportation and connectivity aspect of that. So balancing the competing priorities of restaurants and their diners, and then uh, pedestrians and people, uh, with wheelchairs or strollers or other, uh, um, requirements, other needs. Um, so, uh, So in the comp plan, the objective is kind of a general statement. And then the key result is kind of a more specific way that we're going to achieve that objective. So for Outdoor Dining, we want Clayton to continue to foster a vibrant public environment that encourages community connections. And towards that goal, we're going to modify the current existing outdoor dining permit to increase enforcement. So that's what we're going to talk about today. So even compared to other parts of the city code, other permitting requirements, outdoor dining really is a case of whack-a-mole. That even if a restaurant is in compliance on Monday, there's no guarantee that it'll still be in compliance on Tuesday or the rest of the week. Or even for lunch, tables and chairs can move around and they can be out of compliance by dinner. So it's a difficult... thing to keep on top of. And even through no ill intent or anything, people without enforcement, the dining areas can kind of stretch out and spread their wings and get in the way of the required pedestrian access route, which is required to be five feet. So This is a case of something where we have to balance really important competing aspects. It's kind of a tough needle to thread. The current process is that all restaurants that want to offer outdoor dining, whether on both public or private property, apply for an outdoor dining permit and submit a layout, a kind of site plan showing the setup. And then if they use the public right-of-way, they also need to submit a certificate of insurance, which names the city as an additional insured for general liability. And the reason we do that is to both protect the public right- of-way and also protect cover the city in case of any, any incidents happening. But and then if both of those things are submitted, then the permit, the permit is issued, and it can last for one to two years depending on the applicant, but even compared to other other types of permits, the Enforcement is really reactive here. We don't really send inspectors out. No one walks a beat for all of the restaurants. So if we get a complaint, we'll investigate it. But that situation leads to a lot of kind of a wide range of... of compliance. So some things that we hear a lot about are that required pedestrian access route, which it all has to be on the same surface, so all the sidewalk. So you can't have two feet on the sidewalk, two feet on a decorative brick, and then the last foot on a tree grid. It all has to be one surface, and that's to help help the accessibility for wheelchairs and strollers. So another issue we run into is that a lot of times the person, the applicant applying for the outdoor dining permit might be someone in the office, the restaurant office or even a corporate office if it's in the case of chains. And so it's hard, it's not clear whether they're really in touch with the people who work at that restaurant or that particular restaurant and the people who would be setting up the outdoor dining furniture on a daily basis. In order to really ease the administrative burden of keeping track of all of this while ensuring compliance, we're trying to kind of streamline the process and lead to more enforcement. we're proposing a move to a seasonal standardized renewal timeframe. So rather than you apply on February 20th for two years, and then the permit stays in effect until 2028. We're going to move to a spring start of the permit for everybody, and the renewal notices will be sent out, and then it would kind of become something that everybody can expect and remember to do. Another change is to remove the requirement for an outdoor dining permit solely on private property. So in the pictures you'll see there, there's the crushed red outdoor patio, which is only accessible from within the restaurant, and then the Seven Gables Inn restaurant, which uses some of the public sidewalk. So we want to kind of treat these differently. And if the connectivity and enforcement goals are really going to be prioritized, we're going to ease the burden on restaurants like Crushed Red and regulate their operations, continue to regulate their operations through their existing conditional use permits. and then focus the outdoor dining efforts on the public right of way. So focus more on the accessibility aspect rather than aesthetics of the types of furniture and that kind of thing. And another note, thing to remember here is that if there are heaters and other things, those would still be subject to the fire department. We wouldn't be giving up our ability to regulate that. So another aspect for enforcement is before the permit would be issued, there would be an initial inspection with somebody from the restaurant management. So a staff member would go on site with a tape measure and look at the proposed after-dining layout and then verify that if they said they can set this up while accommodating the pedestrian access route, whether that actually is true on the ground and also communicate the requirements to management with the expectation that then they'd pass that on to their staff and the people who would be setting up and taking down every day. And then once the permit is issued, we would also... have random follow-up inspections throughout the year to verify whether they're, to keep them honest and also hand out a new violation notice to the public works and police department staff who are tasked with the central business district to kind of walk the beat for us and ease the burden on staff and kind of spread it around so that And these violation notices would identify whether a permit expired and then was never renewed, or a restaurant opened and set up after dining without getting a permit, or whether they're not keeping to the terms of an issued permit. So we think that this would really lead to increased enforcement and be a better situation for everybody. So another aspect would be that require, unlike some of our permits, like other cities, we don't require building permits to be posted at a window. But we would require the outdoor dining permit to be present in every restaurant so that if there was a spot inspection, we could ask the manager, you know, let's take a look at your approved layout and see here, this is where... You're doing things wrong and we need to come into compliance. So those are the main aspects.

Yeah, that's about it. So we don't really just want to give you an update. If you have any questions, we can answer it. Otherwise, we're going to proceed with going through some of the changes, which will come back to you all because there will do an update to the ordinance.

So I've got a question. I'm just curious, what has been our actual experience in terms of interaction with the restaurateurs? I'm wondering, this all makes sense to me. And so I think it looks good. But I'm wondering, is there either confusion or is there a lack of willingness to comply or we just really haven't enforced? I'm just curious what's been our experience?

Um, I guess all of the above. I mean, it depends on the restaurant. Um, sometimes, uh, it's been hard, you know, we get ahold of the restaurant, uh, restaurant owner and they say, Oh, I wasn't aware of this. I'll talk to my people. Or sometimes specifically if there's a chain, it might be, you know, the person who applied is no longer with the company or has moved on to a different store. So it's hard to get ahold of, uh, restaurant management or other restaurants, we've had continuous complaints and issue violations.

We do have a lot of certain restaurants. Is there like an area like it's more downtown, the central business district versus another area? Or I'm just more curious about making sure that we're solving the problem, but I don't really know what the problem is. And so at least in terms of our experience.

um i guess i would say kind of the demand area maybe neighborhood commercial areas with maybe smaller narrower sidewalks and more restaurants in a row would be an area where we've heard heard more complaints

and it's is it complaints related to litter and then also just accessibility like people being able to get through yes yeah and i know in the We did hire somebody. We were able to hire somebody who's patrolling the commercial areas. And is that the person who, Hobie, when you talked about that act of enforcement, that person is generally responsible for being proactive and like we hear about Chipotle all the time or I did, you know. So hearing there's trash all over. Especially the trash

can.

Yeah. So having that person be proactive rather than a resident having to email us or talk, you know, and say, There's trash all by Chipotle or whatever the case may be. So, yeah.

And I just know from personal experience in the DeMond neighborhood that it is a challenge to navigate as a pedestrian. And I can imagine that the patrons of the restaurants are free to move the things around as well. So it may not even be the restaurant. So so and there's just only so much space there. So it's a real challenge. Right.

Well, one of the things that I was thinking about is, I mean, I think you have really varied experiences along the month because some of the restaurants just have like it's like an open free for all. And others have really quite a defined space that they've set up, like where they've even really it feels like created a barrier that. is the outline of their outdoor dining space. And so in that case, you get very little variability in what's going on. Honestly, the exception is Calde's, right? Like everything else on that block has some form of barrier. And so I think it's interesting. I guess what I'm curious about is if you're considering or how much you would consider even like requiring something like that in order to make it easier. And I'm also thinking about, like, I think at the place I mentioned in particular, people who come, like, it is absolutely the people visiting that are moving the outdoor furniture. And I like to imagine that they're not thinking about the impacts of what they're doing outside of how it's making their experience like more cordial. And so, you know, even what would it be like to, would there be like some kind of signage? I don't know, just things to think about to help people either have like literally like a visual or barrier to that enforces what's been approved and deemed like meeting accessibility, I would be open to those kinds of things.

Yeah, we stopped and Matt might want to chime in. I know he's sitting back there, but we stopped requiring barriers for outdoor dining for a number of reasons. A lot of times, DeMunn actually has more of a depth with those restaurants. So they're able to kind of have a barrier. And I think in some cases that some of that is even on partially on private property still, even though it feels like the sidewalk. So yeah. We stopped requiring those because barriers can, then they become another thing that can introduce a level of restriction and impede some of the access ways. So we've talked about it. We also don't want them to be permanently affixed to our right-of-wakes and that creates issues when we do things like sidewalk projects or streetscape stuff. So that's why we moved away. We've talked about potentially using like chalk, you know, if it's somebody who's having a lot of violations, maybe we need to go and chalk their sidewalks. for them for a little while so there is something because then it will go you know eventually it will go away so we're we're definitely gonna keep an eye on those types of elements but hopefully this um this violation notice sheet that hobie worked with jackie one of our commercial inspectors to put together will help because that will give people like a you know, Matt and not that Matt, but the other man in public works who is going around our business districts and, and our police officer, Scott, who are Seth, who has all those relationships that might not be familiar with after dining. That little sheet is very, you know, it kind of just gets to the quick facts so they can also pass that out pretty quick. So that's our hope is that it will be a little bit easier to do these touch points, but it's, it's going to be, we just have to keep on top of it. So

I have a quick question. I apologize if I missed it. Is there a monetary fine or something for violation or a grace period to comply, or how does that

work? It's up to the inspector's discretion that they'd issue. Well, the current situation in which we're not proposing a change would be that if you don't If you repeatedly don't comply, then you could go to municipal court

and

the judge could levy a fine.

Right. Yeah, we can't levy any sort of fine, but we can file their case in court.

So hopefully that would be enough.

I mean, we could also not if they're if they have violation issues, we can revoke their outdoor dining permits, you

know, the ultimate. Yeah.

Yeah.

Just one other quick question. I recognize we have more to do. What's the status of these temporary, put a platform in a parking spot, whatever those are called? Do we still allow those? Do we discourage those? Do we encourage those? What's the status? There's

a program for it, but I am not as familiar. Gary Carter. manages our city's parklet so i would defer to him on more of how that's being used or even if anybody's asked for it

and my only point there is is if somebody's struggling with compliance or we know that we have a accessibility issue maybe there's a way to try to accommodate or fix it by using that it may not make sense but

he can provide more but we have tried to send people in that direction i don't know why but there's a lot of people who's don't want it and then there's the same person who wants it every time so it's a yeah they don't aren't they i mean they'd

rather have the parking

especially in demand i think you know there's just everybody's kind of competing for the the same real estate that you know i think

add one before they expanded just because they wanted more space but yeah they haven't since they expanded they haven't brought their park the parklet back so and then sasha's has their own

They built their own parklet. They were one of the only businesses who did want it repeatedly, and so they built their own. But other than that...

That's exactly what we heard after the pandemic was the restaurants that were participating in those programs, they stopped. Most of them were having trouble actually getting enough wait staff, just having enough servers to cover inside, let alone inside in the expanded seating that they had outdoors. So we've really seen that decline. The city had that parklet But that thing really got beat up over the years. So I don't know that that's even an option anymore. But, you know, it was it was. Yeah. Yeah. See, it's gone. Yeah. But so, yeah, we had that and we would we would open it up every year and a different business would utilize it. And it was it was good. But, yeah, it was expensive. I know when we initially acquired it and over over time, they just really get beat up. Yeah. Very little interest at this point from the restaurants around, which is kind of surprising because they did well during the pandemic.

Great. Well, then we'll move on to the next topic. So we have Thomas and he's going to talk a little bit about food trucks. Yes.

Hello, everyone. Clicker. Okay. So we're going to be talking a little bit about Food Trucks. As I know, it just started to come up in the Clayton. All right, so looking back at the comp plan, one of the key results that we found was that We want downtown Clayton to be a place that is vibrant and bustling. And specifically one of the call-outs we got from residents in the comp plan was that, you know, residents want to have the ability to go to food trucks. And specifically looking at the weekday lunch hours, they want to have those additional food options, specifically during those times when people are at work. So currently, food trucks are by and large prohibited in Clayton. You can have a food truck operate if you, you know, in a few key select ways. So if you have a approved private event or special event, you have an event in the parks where you get approval from Parks and Rec. or if you are a restaurant in downtown commercial district, you can have a food truck onsite but not offsite. And those food trucks have to be sponsored by a Clayton business resident or property owner, so it can't be a food truck like another company. It has to be your own food truck. And currently we have some permitting regulations which we're not looking to change in terms of health and fire codes. So why do we have currently a situation where food trucks are prohibited? Oh, and I forgot to mention, currently... within those events are only allowed in this downtown Clayton mobile food vending district, as you can see here. So why do we have those prohibited? A lot of the reason why we have food trucks kind of on this prohibition is that there's a thought that food trucks being allowed will represent a threat to our brick and mortar restaurants, which we care a lot about here in the city of Clayton. And we want to protect them, and we want to have them be very successful because they are a key part of our downtown. And so we want to protect those businesses, and we're worried that food trucks are going to present a threat to that. However, there is a lot of research now that we see, particularly this 12-year study by the Institute for Justice, which is probably the most comprehensive study on food trucks that we have. And they conducted a study over the course of over a decade, and they found that there's no evidence that food trucks The growth of the food truck industry does not lead to a decline in the brick and mortar restaurant industry. In fact, food truck growth was positively correlated with restaurant growth within the same year, meaning that as food trucks grew, it actually correlated with the growth in brick and mortar restaurants. They also observed no statistically significant negative impact of food trucks on the number of restaurants in the following year, meaning that the entry of food trucks into a market did not, in a statistically significant way, actually lead to a decline in the number of restaurants. So what these findings show is that perhaps a lot of our fears about food trucks being a threat to our brick-and-mortar restaurants is, in fact, false, Our restaurants are to be loved. So that leads us to wanting to welcome food trucks into Clayton. So there's a lot of different ways you can look at and a lot of things to consider when you want to consider how to regulate food trucks and entering them into your market. What a lot of municipalities do, if you look in that bottom left corner, is distance-based permitting. And this is a regulatory approach which is kind of a direct response almost to the fear of food trucks harming our brick-and-mortar restaurants. And that is kind of saying, okay, food trucks have to be 500 feet away from any brick-and-motor restaurant. It's been a popular method of regulation, but there are some issues with it. And we likely want to avoid this. Distance-based permitting does not properly consider location-based needs. So by saying that food trucks would be allowed, say, 500 feet away from any brick and mortar restaurant, it doesn't really control for where that food truck must go. And it kind of gives us a random assortment of where food trucks would be And the purpose behind and the thought behind distance-based permitting is kind of at protecting brick-and-mortar restaurants from food trucks without necessarily a correct basis that they do, in fact, harm them. So when we're talking about our useful regulatory approaches, we're looking kind of at our top three, as you see there. So we can do location-based permitting, and all these can kind of work in tandem. So location-based being food trucks can operate in certain designated zones, lots, you know, areas, whether that be a street, a block, a parking lot. And using this kind of strategy can really help to minimize some traffic conflicts which can arise from allowing food trucks. Some municipalities use what's considered like a food truck park model. So the food truck park is a designated and specific area, a singular area where a city allows food trucks to operate. And typically when cities kind of create a food truck park, they might kind of build up the infrastructure around that. So in terms of adding seating, adding restrooms, whether that be portable or permanent, you know, putting up string lights, things like that, maybe even having events with live music. And this would be popular. It can really help activate some underutilized land and contribute to placemaking. And then we kind of have like a time-based regulation where we would say trucks are only allowed during lunch hours, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., and only on weekdays. And this can make administration enforcement a lot easier to manage because you're only having to worry about traffic issues and pedestrian issues and various things with food trucks during certain times. and this also is something that we wanted to consider because specifically going back to the comp plan citizens are really worried about food trucks predominantly in those weekday hours when clayton is the busiest so Things to consider. Going into looking at how we want to do permitting and things for food trucks, there's a couple questions we want to look at, and that is what is the primary outcome we're desiring by allowing food trucks to enter Clayton? What times is downtown Clayton the most busy? And to what extent does the city want to be involved and have to engage in the management and administration of food truck permitting and things like that. And we also want to make sure we're mitigating potential issues in all of the approaches. So kind of creating a program that'll work for Clayton's unique needs. So then it's important, you know, if we want to utilize a location-based permitting approach, it's important to consider our site selection very carefully. So we do recommend that we stay within that downtown mobile food vending district as just outside of that area does not really seem like a very logical place to allow food trucks for a variety of reasons. But then going within that district, considering where is foot traffic, where are people walking around, where is visible, where can people see, you know, or, you know, driving down the street, where can they see? Where is there easy access in parking areas, both for pedestrians and vehicles? Like where can people get to? And then what areas, you know, conversely are too busy and it would present a conflict to add a food truck in that location. And then finally looking at where is there good physical infrastructure, you know, even without the city providing any additional infrastructure, as we discussed with the food truck park model, where are there places where, uh, You know, there's shade for the summertime when it would likely be most popular. Trash cans for trash to prevent litter on the street. Room for people to line up, room for people to stand around while they eat if they want to do that and potentially even seating. So those are all things we want to consider as we're looking at places to potentially allow food trucks. And then lastly, we really want to look at our surrounding communities. So within St. Louis County and the region at large, a lot of all the municipalities may have their own regulations regarding food trucks where currently some are allowed year round. Some are kind of like Clayton now where they're only allowed during special events and some where they're prohibited in all cases. And then looking at that, we want to think about how food trucks that we welcome into the city are not just going to be operating in Clayton, but they're going to be operating across many jurisdictions. So we want to make regulations that are pretty simple and streamline the ability for a food truck to not have to jump through a million extra hoops to be able to operate in Clayton to make it a desirable place for them to come while also preserving the regulations that we want to have. So what we are proposing is a pilot program. Why do we want a pilot program to welcome food trucks into Clayton? So we need to do some market feasibility analysis. Currently, we don't have enough information to welcome food trucks in and kind of modify our code for that. We need to answer questions like how many food trucks are going to want to come to Clayton? Will there be a lot of demand? What is our capacity to host in terms of how many trucks could we have in the city at once and on which days, which locations are ideal? And what is the consumer demand? Are people going to want to go to food trucks? And how is that going to impact our brick and mortar restaurants, if at all? And these are all questions we need to troubleshoot. before we start a permanent implementation of year-round food truck permitting. So what we are proposing is a two-year period where we're gonna introduce temporary food truck reservations in select locations. In these locations, vendors will be able to register with the city as food truck mobile vendors and then reserve daily slots to operate the trucks. And through this program, we'll be able to gain a lot of information, which will lead us to a final proposal for our mobile food vendor code. So looking at which locations we want to select as locations for our pilot, we ideally were looking at wanting to pick around three locations to allow food trucks to keep it manageable for the pilot program but also give us a variety of locations to kind of see what's working and what's not working. And so we were looking for parking lots, streets, and city blocks that meet our desired qualities. So locations with appropriate zoning, but then also looking forward at working with Public Works to narrow down from the areas on this map which specific areas will be functional and which will not. I imagine that a lot of area on here may not be functional if we talk to Public Works, but we'll get into the specifics of that later. I'm not sure if you can see the legend down at the bottom. It's a bit small, but... We've kind of highlighted in green, that is the downtown Clayton mobile food vending district as we have it now. And we want to keep that the same. The yellow lines that you see are our consumer emphasis areas. So while we don't want to overstate the impact of food trucks on our brick and mortar restaurants, we also do want to be mindful of where the restaurants are, not just for impacting their business, but also just in terms of where people will be in traffic. And then in purple, you'll see the areas where we believe could be good locations for our food truck pilot program. So specifically looking at the St. Louis County buildings parking lot, the city of Clayton manages their parking meters. So if we're having food trucks reserve slots, the way we intend to do that is by having them rent a parking meter, rent a parking meter for the period of time on the day they want to operate that they reserve. And so because we operate the parking meters in the county building, we believe that that could be a good place to test out how that would work as well as having like a parking lot as opposed to a street or a city block. And then we're also looking to some city streets. So we've looked at Bonham and Forsyth as potential locations with Forsyth predominantly You know kind of being at the top there of the section where we're looking at and bottom just do like the lower traffic flow, but also still being a central location. But this may narrow down because we're going to consult public works and and see what works as a location. And then as for the permitting process, currently there's several departments that a mobile food vendor would have to work with, and we want to keep that mostly the same. Food trucks would have to get their business license to operate in Clayton through finance, work with Public Works for reserving that parking meter, and also potentially getting right-of-way permitting. for various streets that they may park on. They will still need a specific permit to operate in a park through the Parks and Rec Department. And then all mobile food vendors who operate in St. Louis County are required to have a health permit and inspection. Clayton currently requires that for... events and we would still require that as well as with fire currently all food trucks that operate in clayton have to have a valid inspection from the city of st louis which they have to keep posted at all times and if they don't have that um and don't intend to get that they can get a uh fire operation permit through the fire department and we want to keep all that the same um There is a, you know, moving forward, we may want to like streamline that into kind of a combined thing to make the process a little bit easier, but substantively it would not change. And then once a vendor has completed all those necessary permits, they'll be registered with the city and then they'll have access to start reserving those daily time slots from the 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. times at the designated locations. Um, so our next steps would be, uh, we're still collaborating with other departments to, you know, kind of narrow down and make sure that the locations we've selected will work and kind of look at what, what that's going to look like. Um, as well as coordinating again with like fire and, uh, finance as well to make sure everything looks good. So the next steps are going to be to draft the framework for the pilot program and present it to the council as a formal proposal here, uh, in the next, uh, couple months, potentially sooner.

Thanks so much, Thomas. Of

course. Thank

you. Does anybody have any questions? I know I've already heard from a couple – well, at least one restaurateur who's concerned. So I do think a pilot program initially is a good idea because it allows us to test it out and certainly then provide some – allows like restauranteurs or, you know, our brick and mortar restaurants to give us some feedback on their thoughts and if it didn't impact business. So, yeah, I'm thinking about like if they're, I suppose the food trucks, I mean, it's one thing on the county lot because that's off the street, but then would you potentially maybe find other areas i guess in the city where the food truck would be like on the street where parking's less of an issue like i think of down merrimack or something like that or

yeah that's definitely something we're considering and then i know it said foresight on there but i think that's also something that we want to review as well as uh just looking at what um streets and blocks would be most functional because i'm not sure you know even if we say okay we want to have them on bottom if that would be every block on bottom would be allowed or just specific blocks um And things like that. And then also there may be traffic considerations on any of those streets that we need to work through. So that was just kind of a general idea. The county-wide is one I think we want to try out, but I think in terms of the streets themselves, we're still working and want to kind of finalize that.

Thank you.

I'm sure other. I have a couple questions. First, would you allow the local restaurants to do food trucks too? I was surprised to see that restriction that someone can come from outside but

No, so currently they can have their own food truck. It's just that local food trucks can only operate, like if you're a restaurant and you have a food truck, you can only operate that food truck by your, you can't be off-site, so you have to be in front. So this, they would be allowed to, you know, if you're a, restaurant that has a food truck and it's not in that area, you could come park it there,

yeah. And then, this might be in your market survey, and I don't, this is an industry I really don't know much about, but I think it's great that we're looking at it because they're really fun um the location of the food trucks there's one thing about accessing like the county parking lot across yeah um the justice center it's probably bringing in could be bringing in new new um dollars new investments yes versus putting it right where the restaurants are which may be more directly competitive but then again you know those builds by home depot and which brings more customers there is that the type of thing that the surveys supposed to try to gauge about the best locations and bringing in more people, more activation.

Yeah, we want to look at that. And then also just, you know, I think the price point also matters as well, where, you know, sometimes we would hope that the food trucks could offer a different price point that may not be as available or just provide more options, as well as kind of providing like a change because the food truck probably would not park, you know, the same business wouldn't be parking there every day. So, you know, you potentially have different food trucks week to week and giving a new kind of variety to the downtown area.

So you do see that they change. I thought like in some places, you always know that you can find X food truck at this spot.

See, that's why we want to do the pilot because we're not sure who would come or how long they'd want to reserve for. So I don't know. We don't know. So that's why we wanna look at, yeah.

My last question again, because I don't know this industry. Would you be looking at regulating the types of food brought in to make sure we don't have you know, five taco trucks or is that just something you wait and see who applies and does whatever?

You know, I honestly had not thought of.

I don't think we would get into regulating the type of truck. Yeah,

I don't think so. All

right. Thank you.

Thanks a lot. I have, I'm curious if we know how full the county law gets during the day. Like, is it usually pretty open? Like, are there spaces available?

It's usually pretty full. So that's part of why the goal would be to narrow down probably two streets, partial streets, and potentially a parking lot, because it would allow us to evaluate how those different settings work. So on one hand, it might be easier for A food truck to fit in a parking lot. But on the other hand, we don't want people lining up in a parking lot that's active. So that could be adapted. So seeing how where within the parking lot would even make sense. That's something we have to work through. And then in terms of roads, you know, you want ones that have. the right of way and have spaces available so that people can navigate those with. So we're going to kind of try and narrow it down to a small space section in terms of limiting people's options because we also, we just don't know what the demand and response will be. So we don't want to open this program up and then all of a sudden just overwhelm our staff's ability to keep up with everything. So that's where we're trying to choose a couple of places that vary slightly so you can see what might be most successful.

I presume we'll get sales tax from what they sell today. Man, like that just all works.

Right. Yeah. Probably part of getting their business

license and everything.

Exactly. They'll be through the same business license and everything else for any other restaurant.

And when you had the list, it seemed like maybe five different types of permits or applications. It's okay, but you can if you want. But you had health from St. Louis County and fire from St. Louis City. And I'm guessing somebody who already has a food truck would already have those. Yeah. uh the time

it wouldn't be like

they have to go get

it yes

for us

right in terms of health permit yeah you'd already have to have it as for the fire i'm not i'm that's because we offer a fire inspection i think anyone that didn't have it in the city has the option to get it through us right i think that would vary but the health permit to know if you're operating in st louis county you have to already have that so

but we would definitely be asking people even like well-established food trucks to register with two or I guess like two to three offices. And those are like separate applications.

Yeah, so the goal of the pilot program is to utilize our existing procedures. So what you have up there is pretty much pulled from exactly what a food truck would do right now under the special events program.

Because

we don't really want to spend a lot of time trying to figure out a new system, a new permitting system. Fees are already established and everything, you know, so we'll see how it runs. But if the pilot project goes really well, then I anticipate we would try to figure out a way to streamline it moving forward for the formal program.

That makes sense. And then I was thinking about in terms of thinking about the place that it might show up or might be most valuable or utilized, like during the comprehensive plan, we had access to all that like cell phone data where people go. Is that something we have ongoing access to or was like a snapshot? presumably we could try to get that, but it would cost money at any time. Okay. Cause I'm thinking even it might be different. Even just it's, has it been two or three years since we would have had that data?

Yeah. That data was 23 data.

Yeah. Okay. And then in terms of like the system for registration, I think you covered this where you said basically the, we're not going to be setting up like a new registration system. We're going to be directing people to these, like to these existing processes under the outlines of the pilot.

Yeah. So the there's, so for registration in terms of like registering with permitting, that would be, you know, the same as you see up there, but in terms of the reservation for the slot, we'll have them. Yeah. I figured it might be a, yeah, but the, the reservation itself will utilize like the structure of public works. You know, you can reserve a parking meter. I'm not sure what the like interface will look like for people to reserve specifically for the food truck pilot, because I, I'm not a hundred percent. Somebody can correct me if I'm wrong, but with the parking meter rental, you can rent that anywhere in the city, right through public works, but this would only be a specific location. So that may need its own kind of interface, but

I mean, we could, we'll be able to set something up and yeah, we'll work with,

It'll be a great problem to have if we have hundreds of food trucks thinking that they can get good business in Clayton. Yeah, thank you very much.

So I like that we're pursuing this, and I recognize the value of doing a pilot program in terms of learning more since we are relatively low on the learning curve and want to learn all that. So I think that is a good idea. That said, I'd really like us – at least I'd like to think more ambitiously about what we could achieve, though. And so – What I would, I'm not saying that this is the right idea, but this is sort of a vision thing, which is the county parking lot. I like the idea of utilizing that. I like the of even using some of our central business district economic taxes we collect to actually pay for the parking spaces rather than renting them to the food trucks, at least initially, in order to encourage people a more vibrant environment initially rather than something piecemeal, and then might even consider things like structuring some type of seating as well, whether it's covered seating or otherwise. And then if you really wanted to go and you thought it was successful, even consider entertainment at some point. And so this becomes almost event-oriented. And I know that's not your department, and I know that's what you do. But what I'm thinking about here is I've seen other activities where these kinds of things are successful. And it might be like food truck Fridays in June to August or whatever it is. So you help structure something from an economic development model. Clearly, we have to have the infrastructure behind it, which is what you're trying to propose here. But what I'm thinking here is would it make sense to also talk to our central business district economic development group to say, can we work together on this? And then our events people and Gary and others to really say, let's not just sort of wade into this. Let's create an environment for success right out of the box. So that's what I'd like to see, which is way more ambitious than I know what you're trying to propose. But that's what I'm thinking, at least to see if we can get there.

I was going to say, you're kind of like, I think I mentioned the food truck park model. That's kind of along the lines of what you're discussing is having the live music and seating and things like that. And I think they can both exist at the same time. So if that's something that people are interested in.

Yeah, I think we were trying to outline a program that... minimized essentially the city's cost to start off with. So we were thinking utilize as many existing permits, you know, all those structures. So I if that's what the if the council wants to go larger, I will say there's a little bit of a food truck park model potentially forming with the Shaw Park So I don't know if we would want- That's what I was thinking of,

yes. Other than that's down the road a ways because it'll be a while before we have that ready, right? Yeah, but

if you want us to put infrastructure in to do like a big event or something, that would-

I'm thinking rentals, but I'm not thinking that we'd make a major investment on that. But what I'm thinking just in terms of goal achievement is- A, we're looking for more vibrancy in our central business district. And what I frequently hear people talk about is while they enjoy eating in Clayton, the price points are relatively high. So this provides an alternative for a lower price point as well as vibrancy. So if we can encourage that and maybe, you know, I do think it's maybe a good idea for it to evolve to Shaw Park instead, but that may be a couple of years before we can do that. Let's try to figure this out as quickly Yeah,

sure. I think I'll probably defer some of the event side back over to the as you as you come back over to the event people into the into the special business district. But yeah.

Yeah, well, and I think too, I mean, I think those are all good ideas. I think about like, you know, that big vacant parking lot at the corner of Hanley and Forsyth. Thinking about working with the property owner, okay, you're not doing anything with this. Can we use the parking lot once a month on a Friday? Again, I know that's more event-based, but trying not to cost the city a lot, but thinking about bringing people into downtown on a Friday for this big giant lot that's not really being used. So And then also I would think as this model, the pilot, we'd have to have like Kristen reach out to, you know, building owners and stuff, depending on where these go to say, hey, we'd encourage your employees to go out and eat at the food truck. Like, would you envision there would be some communication and kind of marketing efforts? It's

a good idea.

Yeah.

I believe that that's allowed currently, right? Because food truck events are currently allowed.

Well, but they can't sell anything.

And I mean more just so that people know. Yeah.

No, yeah. Right. I mean, I think so that business could, for their own employees, could bring a food truck that they purchase everything for their employees.

I thought we were live. Okay. But I think just making sure that people in the county building know that a food truck is going to be there on a Friday, you know what I mean? So there's some communication. So people say, oh, I don't have to bring my lunch tomorrow or I get to take a break from bringing my lunch, some sort of communication. Jeff, do you have any?

Becky brought up the sales tax. Should I get in theory that we would collect it the same way, but do we have any sense as to whether it's collected and how well that works? I guess brick and mortar makes it a little bit easier, I would think, to collect sales tax. I'd be a little bit concerned about these cars that are in Maplewood today and Clayton tomorrow and UC tomorrow. Do we have any sense from other communities whether the collection actually happens?

I don't know on the larger ones. It's probably a big enough revenue source that it shows up on your state reports and what's collected. In a situation like this where you maybe have a couple that are there once a week or something, it's not enough revenue to really show up on those reports. It's just going to get buried with the rest of the, the restaurant receipts, but they should be paying sales tax just like anybody else.

Um, you guys mentioned, um, the Institute of justice survey.

Yeah.

Can you send that around or client? Let's get a copy of it. Um, I, I, I just want to see kind of what the assumptions are and like, I get it because a lot of the ideas based on this, I based on the study that says it doesn't affect businesses. I just kind of look at it and just kind of see what the underlying assumptions are. Um, The only other thing was more of a thought, like it's someone who kind of works in Clayton and I have struggled with finding nice, relatively affordable, quick lunches that there's a part of me that says, I don't want to hurt the businesses. There is a part of me. It's like, it's a kind of Rick to your point. I think there's a niche for these or a lot of folks who just want to walk out, grab food and go back. And they're just Chipotle notwithstanding. And a few others, there just isn't a ton of that. So yeah, My only concern is, and I don't know if it's a concern, will this make it harder to fill open retail spaces already? Because if a restaurant wants to go in and they've already got food trucks, are people not going to decide to go? Or is it really two separate things? Because clearly it's going to be cheaper to run a food truck than it is to build a million-dollar kitchen out, which we hear all the time as part of the problem. That's my only thing that I'm kind of struggling with is like, will it make it harder to fill these? Or is it just two different animals to the point where it doesn't... One's not going to affect the other.

Yeah, at this point we feel pretty comfortable saying that we don't think... that would be the case, that would make it harder. But that's part of why we recommend a two-year pilot program because that will give us a little bit more data to see if we feel like – and if we feel like things are headed in the opposite direction of what we want out of the program, then the council can end it. So that's kind of the upsides of the pilot program. But we feel pretty comfortable right now that the food trucks would fill that niche, like you said, rather than take away from – Got it. Other business.

That's all I have. Thanks.

Yeah.

Yeah, just a couple more specifics on the pilot program. So are you going to like assign a specific day, a specific area for like each day of the week? Or are they going to be at different locations? How does that work? Just so, again, if you know on Mondays it'll be here, on Tuesdays it'll be here. How will that kind of work?

That's kind of part of what we want to make sure we're on the same page with with Public Works. Because there is a little bit of demand on their staff if people are requesting the parking meter reservations and coordination and everything from that standpoint. So we want to make are all on the same page and know what we're getting into but the idea would be something of you know it might be a this block is available for reservations on a certain day or it might be here are three different options of where you could locate and you can choose any of those at the same day so that's we're gonna have to work with them a little bit

and so like each day you could have like three food you know i'm saying like how How will people know, like, what days, how many, like, where, and all of that? Like, how would our public know, our buildings know, and things like that?

Yeah, once we finalize the program, we'll make sure that there's digestible versions of the program out there for trucks to know to come here. It's a Wednesday. Well,

and then will we require them to be, like, there for a certain – I know you limit the time, but are we going to require them to be there, like, for – a specific length of time also or is that like

i don't i don't know that we'd be able to require them to stay long so i would say no but certainly would limit yeah that the plan is to limit them to that amount of time but i don't know

And just the other quick thing is just on your, your map. I noticed like the high school is kind of off to the side, but that's just a big group of people that leave every single day and they actually want to leave their building and go out. And so you might consider something. I can go back to the app really quick. Yeah. Yeah, that's a lot. And they'll want to eat.

That is a potential location. I know we talked about Shaw Park, but then there was that kind of bit about the Parks and Rec Department is currently doing something. So it

sounds like we can chat with her.

Yeah, so that's something that's been on our radar. We just want to make sure that's okay with what's appearing. But yeah, I think that's a great idea because that would be a large group of people, a captive audience. Yes, that would be great ideas.

And I don't mean on the property. I just mean like in close proximity to it, you know? For people

going to lunch and getting out of school. Right. Yeah. I

mean, because they walk far farther than you would think that they could in an hour window. But anyway, so just a thought.

What time does school get out in Clayton?

3.05.

Oh, well, the kids may not.

In

high school,

it's like an hour and a half

for lunch. Every day, and they

can leave campus.

Open campus, wow.

Yeah, they get from 11 to 12, 15 every day to go wherever. Great situation.

Or to go visit teachers.

Or to study. Study time.

Rehound time, yeah.

Sure. If you've already addressed this or not, but I was in I'm wondering if we would consider this going forward. I was in Sarasota recently and I noticed right on one of the busy streets in their central business district. There was a essentially a coffee and donut truck and it's there every day. And it's generally there from whatever, you know, six to two or whatever time it is. Is that something that we would look at as part of this program? Or is that something we definitely don't want to do? Or have you thought about that? That is something to consider. I mean, I mean, yeah, just I'm just thinking again, going back to again, Starbucks might not like that idea. But, you know, whether it's people that are closer to other buildings where it's just like I want somebody to be able to walk to it. It's a seed of an idea. I'm not sure it's well-developed, but all I'm suggesting is I got the impression from this program it's maybe more limited on an occasional basis, and this is something that's there all the time. Is that something that we even want to consider, something that might be there all the time?

Yeah, right now we have it. We didn't have a restriction on as we were talking with Kim. At this point, we were not recommending to you anything in terms of a formalized days or times type of a thing. So we'll definitely look at it.

I mean, I think it's some of this is from my mind. I mean, I won't always say this, but I think for this one, it's like I think the market's going to drive part of this. So it's like if there's somebody who's going to if there's enough people that want to walk out at nine in the morning for coffee, if somebody shows up selling coffee and donuts, they'll keep coming back as long as I just want to make sure we don't have trucks. I mean, it's a good problem to have. I don't want trucks lined up every street, but as long as we've. laid what streets we generally are okay with i'm kind of with you like they could be there from eight in the morning until five at night i don't really care as long as they're following the rules if people are using them and at some point if they're not they'll just stop coming

Yeah, we wanted to assess demand from people in terms of do people want to go out at 9 a.m. and get coffee? But also, we're not sure. I mean, we could have 1,000 people sign up. We could have very few. So we don't really know the demand and interest on either side. So one of the reasons we want to test this out is to see what people want. I mean, if someone were to come in contact with us and say they want to have a 6 a.m. coffee cart, I mean – we don't know if that'll happen,

but coffee at 6am.

It's true. It's increasingly hard to find it very early. Yep. Yeah.

So that's it. I have a question and it came, Rick talking about central business district and then talking about the niche again, I think it's on the advisory committee with that tax. There's a lot of restaurant voices on there. It's so important to make sure that we're bringing in new people versus taking from us. And when you talk about being near the hotels or something else, if the, One of the concerns in the advisory committee is helping people find the restaurants. And so suddenly if they walk out and they see a food truck, that's not necessarily a good thing. Now, for the niche, for the quick running out and grabbing something, that's great. But just be very conscious of that, what our restaurants rely on for the price point they have and the locations they are, and then adding versus having that competition by having them right by the hotels or something else. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, I think, Susan, that's a good point because like you said, we want to add. And I mean, I know the purpose is, again, vibrancy. We want to see people walking around. But what is the purpose? Is the goal to bring people out of buildings? I mean, I think that's great. The more people out of buildings, there are people who aren't necessarily coming out of buildings now. you know, and some of the restaurants that do sit on that, you know, some of the restaurant owners, I was surprised they said a lot of their business isn't necessarily from people that are working in the office towers. It's people who have made the decision to come into Clayton to have lunch, to have dinner, which I think is interesting. At least that's what, you know, our IV owner says, you know, that it's not necessarily people that are working in the office building so that, you know, I think, I guess we want the goal to be some of these people to come out of the buildings and walk around a little bit more and have lunch because a lot of our lunch places closed during COVID. So, And Thomas, just to re the timeframe, excuse me, the timeframe would be more of the lunch hour. We're not suggesting to extend this into dinner time.

At this time, no. But especially because in the comp plan, the specific feedback was that they wanted more options specifically in the lunch hour. And I think what your point of lunch places closing down in COVID was maybe a big factor in that. You made the point of an earlier slot. I guess we just don't know. But I would say as of now, yeah, we're just looking at the lunch hours. Yeah. I mean, it's a pilot, so I guess it'd be flexible.

Yeah, I mean, I worry more about extending it, like thinking about just making sure, because that's where I think we start getting into more concerns about taking away from our brick and mortar.

The only thing I'd say about that, I want to be respectful of our restaurants too and not cause them a headache. That said, remember we're trying and have tried hard to create a neighborhood of downtown for the apartment dwellers and the condos. And so where do they go, especially the apartment dwellers at night? They're always many of them will say they're looking for a more affordable price point. And so and I'm not suggesting it's there all the time, but if it's there periodically, it gives them an alternative. And I don't think periodically is that necessarily a threat. Right.

Yeah, I think that's. I think it's a way of mind that I think all of us have traditionally thought about as the downtown population is the work population. And I think it's something we should all be thinking about in every decision we make is that we. we have a downtown residential population and we're hoping to grow it seven up building another. So thinking about how this would play into, to that, I mean, we don't have the bars where you could have a bunch of food trucks at 10 PM or 11 PM after people are stumbling out, but there could be a spot for residents at seven 30. It's like, I want to, I don't want to cook. Where do I go? And there isn't a ton of options to walk to. So maybe part of, maybe part of the pilot program, we try a couple nights that we let everybody know and see what happens. Yeah.

Yeah, I think this is good feedback. So we can refine some of it and we'll come back with a more formalized because you'll have to adopt the pilot program too. So we can do that. Just to get to Ryan's stuff, I would encourage us to move on because he has a lot more too. Thank you, Anna, for keeping

us open.

Joy terms. Is this perfect? Are we just doing the mouse? No, no. All righty. Neighborhood standards. So we got a lot of feedback through the comprehensive planning process that the character of neighborhoods is really important to residents. People move to Clayton, people appreciate Clayton because of the way the neighborhoods currently look. And a lot of the neighborhoods have what residents said is their own unique character. And as part of that, we want to make sure that when people are thinking about making improvements to their properties or maintaining their properties, that those fit into the context of those surrounding areas however whenever we want to think about potential future infill development we need to understand what those neighborhoods actually look like to begin with So in the Clayton 2040 Comprehensive Plan, falling under this category of review the architectural guidelines against the character and development patterns of different neighborhoods to establish appropriate neighborhood identity standards. Right now we have architectural review guidelines. They're kind of broad and standard. We have a couple of overlay and urban design districts in some of the neighborhoods. But what we really wanted to do is we wanted to evaluate, is there actually a prevailing neighborhood character? And how does that relate to our current regulations? So the way that we went about assessing that is it largely revolved around GIS. And I know as time has gone on, this council has gotten more exposure to GIS. But just to clarify, GIS is basically a process of establishing a relationship between data and a physical geography. I want you to think of... GIS is a software that makes Excel 3D. It's pretty much how it works. You can attach spreadsheets to a specific point in space. And so what we were able to do is we were able to go around and collect data about specific geography points, that being parcels, every single residential parcel in the city. We were able to analyze that data. We did that a couple different ways. One, there's some pretty updated Google Street View. And so we're able to look at a lot of properties remotely. But then we also wanted to verify that those were accurate. And there's also areas where Street View is not updated. So then we were able to go out in person and via our tablets or phones, we're able to actually go and assess each of those properties. We're going to talk about research questions a little bit. So kind of getting into some of the data that's come back out of this. This is some data that we already had. This is data that we collect in the field, but it was something interesting that we thought you guys might want to see. This compares the year of construction of homes to the floor area ratio. We talked a little bit about floor area ratio during the commercial regulations, but that is a relationship between the size of a lot and the size of a building. So if you have one square foot of lot and one square foot of building, that is a floor area ratio of one. And so over time, what we can see is we had a big chunk of construction that occurred in the 20s. You can see a little bit of a dip during World War II, post-war boom, and it kind of trails off. But we see it's pretty consistent through the 20s and that post-war boom in terms of how big the houses are. And then it just slowly ticks up over time as we get to the current day. And it's not exactly a doubling, but it's pretty close. A lot of our new construction is close to double the size of the housing stock that was built around the 20s, 30s. Getting to some of the other items that we assessed. Architecture was really interesting. I would like you to think of this data, and I say architectural influence because this is what I'm calling the vibes of the architecture. Please do not go and review all of our responses very specifically. We are not the world's greatest trained architects to know all the wonderful little details that folks on the architecture review board might know. But there are some patterns that are out there. I can tell you that what I observed whenever I was looking around at places is that You know, a building, a house, it might have a trend that follows. It might have a lot of colonial influence. It might have Mediterranean influence. But if you put those two buildings right next to each other, they're actually going to look pretty similar. It just might have a different style roof. It just might happen, you know, a different color brick on the outside or slightly different material. But there is a common relationship. And so my takeaway from architecture in Clayton is that, yeah, there's some influences. But to say that and we've got a bunch of Tudor architecture, a bunch of colonial. I wouldn't say that's accurate. I'd say that we kind of have our own character that is a combination of influences at the time and the personal taste of those who were building those buildings. What else we got on here? In terms of the height of these buildings, Two stories is common because, you know, we've got a lot of single family homes throughout Clayton. A lot of those are two, two and a half stories. Once you start to get into that three story or higher, very rarely is that going to be single family. Most of the time that's going to end up being our multifamily. A lot of our materials... Oh, the massing. So whenever you look at a structure head-on, does it look like just a big box, like a block, or does it have step-downs on either side? Yeah. Yeah, so most of the structures that you see around Clayton, they kind of have that box look to them. It's only really a minority that you have step-down. So a lot of that is because our lots here are pretty narrow. It's really kind of hard to... create that tiered step system on buildings whenever you have narrow lots like we do. A lot of our materials, it's predominantly brick. There's a little bit of painted brick, but most of the buildings out there are going to be brick. Most of the secondary materials are going to be your stone or your siding. A lot of the buildings are going to have details, so you're not going to see a lot of blank facades. Most of the time, if you are seeing blank facades, I noticed a lot of it was like in that post-war, immediate post-war construction. And if you kind of get into some fun nerdy architecture details, you'll find out that like Post-war is that era whenever, you know, everything was very, very expensive. And so we need to be more conscious about things. So you'll notice some of those buildings that you get in the mid-century may be a little bit more plain.

When you mean that, can you say more about what that is? Just like whether there's detail or like dimensionality or something?

Detailing on a facade. Right. I don't know the

specifics. So if people had different brick courses, so they had areas of patterned brick or they introduced maybe some stone headers or had bay windows or awnings or other things that just provide a little bit

of The interesting takeaway I saw from this one is, so right now our architectural review guidelines require that at least 75% of a facade be a primary material like brick. And we'll often get waiver requests from that. So one thing we wanted to assess is, do our architectural review guidelines actually reflect what buildings look like? It turns out, yeah, they do. Most buildings, they have 75% of your facade is going to be your primary material, brick or stone or whatever that may be. Garage information. There's a decent distribution of where garages are, whether that's attached or rear loading, front loading, all that fun stuff. There's definitely some trends in different neighborhoods. So if you go to the Moorlands, you're going to see a lot of front entry garages, particularly on the multifamily side. You'll definitely see some front entry garages in parts of Clayton Gardens. They're going to tend to be smaller. I know a lot of times we think about front entry garages and we think of like the stout houses where most of it's taken up by a garage, but we see a lot of those homes that might have smaller one on the front. But we do have, I mean, most of our homes are, they've got rear entry or detached and then we have a variety of driveway materials that you'll find. On that list, it says city standard concrete and the exposed aggregate are kind of similar. What I ran into, and anybody else can jump in if you saw something different, but those are kind of one in the same in many ways. It really just depends on how old that city standard concrete is. It's kind of a guess if it's really weathered as to whether or not that was actually a flat concrete at one point or whether it's just been kind of roughed out over time. And then ribbon driveways was another interesting one, because as time has gone on, we've seen developers consider ribbon driveways a little bit more. And that's where you kind of have like the strip cut out in the middle for a little bit of grass or something like that. And that's because of impervious coverage requirements, which is now our green space ratio. But there's not a character for them throughout Clayton, which I think the architecture review board might feel a little justified as they continue to evaluate their requests for ribbon drives. Retaining walls and fencing. Retaining walls didn't really surprise me that much. They're all over the place. You know, every single front yard has them. It's really, they're willing to stand out whenever they get over a certain height. And most of the time, there's these really old retaining walls all over the place, the stone you can tell has been there since the beginning of time and it's just, you know, held up. reasonably well um with fencing you don't often see that as much in a front yard um there's very specific places where you will see that like i can think of along glen ridge or along uh university drive over in hillcrest where those streets tend to be more of the the side to a lot of these homes that's where you're going to see a lot of that front yard fencing And then this slide looks at elements of consistency. So is the finished floor height higher than the neighbors? Most of our neighborhoods, the finished floor height is really consistent. You're not going to see homes that are, you know, your front door is way up here and the neighbors is way down here. Except for there's a couple spots in altered homes where, you know, that's kind of unique, usually in hillier areas where it's harder to tell. But really only on our newer builds is that finished floor height really starting to jump up. And then is front coverage consistent with the surrounding area that's less in terms of the green space ratio and more in terms of. I would say the styling if you go to a place if you're like why down forest. A variety of front yards are going on, especially because it's pretty hilly over there still have a lot of retaining walls a lot of gardens a lot of terracing. You've got residents around that they like to do something interesting, maybe alternative lawns or something like that. But most front yards are pretty consistent. And then is that front setback consistent with the neighbors? In most of our neighborhoods, the homes are all pretty consistent. Rarely do you have a home that's too far back or too far forward.

Can you clarify how front yard coverage is different than setback? Like, is it like porch and sidewalks or?

Yeah. So I want you to think of the setback as how far is that front wall from the street and the front yard coverage. You can kind of think of what's the character of that front yard. Like, is it just an open lawn? Do they have a bunch of plantings? Do they have, you know, retaining walls, what does it look like visually? Because in neighborhoods like, like in Clayton Gardens, the Clayton Garden Urban Design District has a big emphasis on the open presence of front lawn. And I think I can think of maybe one or two examples of applications we've seen where somebody wanted to put, you know, a front yard fence in Clayton Gardens and that, you know, that didn't always get approved. Whereas there may be other neighborhoods like White Island Forest, which have a wide variety of front yard presentations. And then there's a variety of ways that we can regulate neighborhood character. And this is a table that Thomas put together. Do you want to explain these different methods?

Yes. So there's a, you know, as Ryan said, there's a variety of different ways we can regulate the kind of neighborhood character and the ways that we may go about doing that are all varying degrees of kind of strictness. So The first way being the neighborhood character overlay district, as you'll see in that second column there, overlays. And with a neighborhood character overlay, you're not regulating the architecture and you don't need express approval from any kind of architectural commission or whatever it may be to make changes to the front of your building Sorry, the front of your building and things like that. But you do need a staff review. But it will help preserve the aspects of neighborhood character that you want. And it can limit the development and can limit teardowns. And it can also provide... It also does not provide, sorry... non-binding aesthetic recommendations. Then we're going to go into a historic district, which is essentially, you may be more familiar with what a historic district is. So that's kind of where you say, we have a neighborhood where we believe the character is historic and needs to be preserved. And so you're going to take a lot of more strict measures to ensure that the kind of aesthetics of homes in that neighborhood are preserved and that there's not as many teardowns. So you're going to regulate the architecture. You're going to have a commission to regulate any and all changes to the front of a home in a historic district. So if you kind of designate a neighborhood as a historic district, you cannot tear down, you cannot change the aesthetics of the front of the building without going before the commission. So it will strongly preserve a neighborhood's character, but there are some costs because it's quite strict and we're not sure that's something that we would want to do here, but it's toolkit that's available. And then you kind of move into what we consider a character guideline. And so that kind of goes through on your distinct neighborhoods, you know, that we view as distinct neighborhoods. And you go through the character and you create these guidelines which you provide to people as they look at... new construction and look at making changes to the front of a building. There is no binding element with a character guideline, but it gives suggestions and influences how contractors and how people may go about changing the neighborhood. And there's actually a lot of evidence that by using a guideline or kind of like a lookbook almost of here's a look of what homes look like in this neighborhood, a lot of municipalities that have done that, they see that actually they get a lot of clicks on their links that they publish. People do, in fact, look at those and they try to keep with the character of the neighborhood because... they want to preserve the value of that home and preserve the character. So that provides a non-binding aesthetic recommendation, whereas historic districts and neighborhood character overlays are going to have some binding aesthetic recommendations, albeit to very different degrees, whereas a historic district is requiring that express approval all the time, and an overlay has kind of like a softer approach to that, but still definitely is limiting you know, the activity that can take place in that neighborhood. There's also something called character typologies, which has some similarities to a guideline or a lookbook kind of where you have to have specific, you have to have extra permitting basically for a designated neighborhood, but not exactly in the same way as a character overlay. And you're also kind of giving a sorry, you're preserving the neighborhood's character, but through a less non-binding. It's kind of like you have a typology for that specific neighborhood that you have to keep with, but it can vary neighborhood to neighborhood as opposed to a historic district where it's just about that particular neighborhood, if that makes sense. So a guideline and kind of a character look is probably the least strict regulation and does seem to have some influence there. there may be questions after that, so.

Just to clarify too, we're not proposing any of these specific models today. Really the goal of this is just to present all of this character data to you guys, just because it's very interesting. I could say that we've had some preliminary discussions about how to regulate character going into the future and it's probably gonna be in the direction of guidelines. There's probably gonna be some adjustments to our overlays. And we already have a structure in Clayton if residents want to set up historic district. We're not necessarily proposing historic districts, but that structure is already there if there's a neighborhood that wants to go through. So if there's anything about neighborhood character.

Yeah, just before we go to that, one thing I want to add is we showed you all the summaries based on just the whole city. But they're... from what we found there's a lot of similarities across the city so there are a couple of neighborhoods who maybe fall into a category more strongly um and so we can provide the reason we're thinking guidelines is instead of rewriting a very similar guideline for a lot of neighborhoods we'll we'll establish one you know we have one that goes across and then there might be call outs where a specific neighborhood maybe does not have it should not have as many options so

Ana, can you say that? So one guideline for the whole city? Yeah, basically.

So there are the general trends that Ryan just went through across the whole city. Most neighborhoods pretty much abide by that when you then break out and compare a neighborhood to that trend. There are a few exceptions to that, but not enough that we feel like it's worth our time of writing very specific guidelines for every single neighborhood. Gotcha.

So my observation would be that I want to agree with you and say that I think of certain neighborhoods, Brentmore Park or all of these that are like, oh, they're all very similar, at least in you can generalize more there. Then there's other neighborhoods where they're far more eclectic and how we've seen parts of Clayton Gardens evolve as you go forward. But I'd like us to think about, you know, I'm thinking now of High Point DeMunn, where I know we have some vociferous neighbors that would love to see a historic district there. And I don't know whether that's broadly thought of, but some would like that. So I'd almost like to see us... consider meeting with some of the neighbors, neighborhood associations that maybe feel strongly about this. If they don't really have interest, that's fine. But if they feel strongly about it, consider having maybe a different set of guidelines, maybe historic if that's important to them or whichever other one you think is there, but presenting them an alternative.

Yeah, I mean, the path is there if they want to go with the historic district. There's a path for them to do that. I would worry just in terms of priorities with staff time of offering up for us to do too much on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis. But you guys certainly have the connections to those neighborhoods. So if you feel like there are some that have a different desire, you know, I'm happy to continue that conversation. I

guess what I'm thinking is, is, um, There are going sometimes it's hard to get consensus, let alone unanimity on doing something like this when people don't really understand it. But there may be some neighborhoods where it's really clear where that does occur. And when a neighborhood is more homogeneous, I think it's easier to get that done. And so I'd at least like to test that theory. I don't know that it's true, but yeah.

I think it was high point. Definitely Clavarac went through the majority of the process and then the vote failed with the property owners to actually adopt.

That was a while ago though, right?

I know, but I'm just saying it is an intensive process if that's an avenue. So I think just in the interest of time, because this was more of, we'll come back to it, I think this topic, but I do, the next set of slides that Ryan has are things that we do want a little bit more direct attention

Can I ask a question before we move on? Just can you help me understand, like, because when I think like the first three examples here are, I believe. Mechanisms available are already in use in the city today, right? Like our zoning has guidelines for development. it talks about character and things like that, but it doesn't do anything to define maybe more specifically. It just says it should be with the character. It doesn't define what the character is. Is that right, more or less? Yeah,

it's a hodgepodge of some really specific things, like the calculation for the size of your trash enclosure, and then more broad things like... keeping with neighborhood characters.

Yeah. And then we obviously have the ability to use overlays should we choose, and neighbors can establish historic districts. I'm a little confused about like how what we would do and maybe this isn't the time to get into it so you can tell me that. Like what would we do with guidelines that would be different than what we do today with guidelines or how would character typologies be different than guidelines like.

Yeah, to be honest, it's probably worth us doing a second presentation to get more into that. Okay. Because we can go down a rabbit hole pretty quickly. I mean, because this

is a big topic and I think it's probably confusing and has a lot of options that have impacts that we might not appreciate or want. Yeah, exactly. But it's also something people really want.

Yeah, this was a little bit of a pal, you know, getting you ready for the big stuff. Yeah. Half of Neighborhood Characters, Ryan's going to go into the other piece of it. And we have gotten far enough on some other elements of residential development to ask really specific feedback questions. But I hear you guys. We should come back to you pretty soon, I think, with another discussion about this slide.

I'm going to warn you guys, this next set of slides, it is a little bit dense. I've tried to make it as digestible as possible, but if anybody needs a bathroom break, now's the time.

Power through. We're powering through. Okay. Yeah.

So let's go back to this theme of the feedback that residents have given us, and it's that they highly value the existing character in their neighborhood. And residents are open to development in their neighborhoods, but they want to make sure that development is context sensitive. Lot sizes often discussed in the comprehensive plan or what those lot dimensions are in terms of that neighborhood character. So that's kind of what we're going to dive into. Another aspect of that is density. The comprehensive plan talks about neighborhood density, unit density, how many dwelling units are on a lot of times in context with that lot size. So that's something we're gonna explore a little bit as well. So getting specific comp plan goals, it gets back to that preservation enhancing unique character of each neighborhood. And there's these two key results I wanna point out to you. The first one I have is 2.5, modifying the lot size and setback regulations to better align with historic neighborhood patterns where applicable. and then 1.1 is modifying the unit size and adu regulations to address modern design practices and historic development patterns now i understand why in in the comprehensive planning process that unit size and ad u portions were put together however i want to separate those adus are kind of a different discussion and you know if we ever want to get into that that's another discussion for another day but Unit size, and specifically under that key result where that's mentioned, I know it says unit size, but it was in the broader context of density. I wanna talk about density in conjunction with all of this. So there's some methods that we use to explore our lot dimensions and density going back to GIS. But I want to tell you specifically about that tool within GIS because there's some nuances to it. There's a variety of ways used, but the most dominant tool there was this tool called minimum boundary geometry. And that is a way for the software to basically figure out the exact dimensions, how wide or how deep or something as a parcel of land. And then we would use other formulas or other methods to sort of verify if this was an accurate measurement. The reason there's nuances is that there's easy ways to trip up software. So for example, a perfect parallelogram will give you inaccurate information. A parcel that has seven sides to it will give you inaccurate However, most of our parcels are rectangular and even if we don't have a perfectly rectangular lot, most of our lot widths are relatively consistent. Or you have or your street frontage is enough to be able to give that some accurate data, but just be aware as we get into this data it's not going to be 100% perfect there's definitely some nuances. So first, let's talk about setbacks, one of the aspects of our lot sizes and how you're able to situate things on lots. So right now, the only challenge we've really experienced with setbacks has to do with accessory structures, specifically garages. We get all kinds of variance requests for people to build garages. I mean, I think every... you know, every property in Hillcrest at this point has gone before the Board of Adjustment because, you know, they need to repair their garage. They want to redo it in the same place, but they're unable to do that because of what our regulations are. And that's actually, that is one from maybe a couple years ago. And you can see it's basically right on the property line. So what we're looking at doing is let's revise our setback regulations such that smaller garages, ones that are just one story, we're not talking ones that have You know, a second story above them or even a half story. But a lot of those smaller garages that are just one story reducing that setback to one foot. Now, if a lot of them are against the property line, why wouldn't we just say, you know, zero lot line? There are nuances to this that we want to kind of get ahead of. One, you've got roof overhangs too. Every single, I feel like every single project whenever it concludes that foundation for the garage is not always in the exact location that you might've planned on. It might be an inch or two in either direction. If you do that right on the property line, you could end up in somebody else's property and that's just a whole other can of worms. So given somebody at least a foot distance from that side of your property line is gonna allow them a little bit of wiggle room and allow them to be able to manage maybe some elevation changes if needed. Does anybody have any questions about this before we move on to other items? All right. Let's talk about lot width. This is where we get into a lot of the fun data. So every zoning district is gonna have its nuances and its outliers, but we found that a lot of the neighborhoods, Sorry, there were a lot of lots in our R2 and our R5 districts that had non-conforming width dimensions that were going on here. We can see that a third of them go on an R2 and well over half of them in R5, which is quite interesting. That are for pick sticks up a little bit 10% but that's mostly because there's a lot of town homes and our for that zero lot line where they're all stacked up right against each other. So I wouldn't consider that one. An outlier by any means, but the goal of this is to to look at revising our lot with actually match the character of existing neighborhoods. But what we want to be mindful of is if we're revising lot widths, is that if you decrease that lot width, you're creating an avenue for lot subdivision. That then changes the incentive of what you're going to do with the lot. Do you fix up the existing structure? Or if I can subdivide that and make two lots out of it, do I tear it down and build something else? So we want to be So let's look at our five districts. This one's a little bit easier to digest. So what would happen right now? It has a 50 foot minimum width. What if we revise that to 40 feet? Well, then you'd have half of your lots come into conformance, which is the good thing that we want to see there. It matches the character of the neighborhood. The concern is, does that create any subdivisions? Well, 4% of the lots could be subdivided if that decrease occurred. However, all of those lots could be subdivided anyway, so we're not actually creating any new subdivisions there. You'd still have a small portion that remains nonconforming, but the ones that stand out to me there, a couple of those look like those townhome examples, so I don't see too many concerns there. But yeah, a significant number of lots would come into compliance. I can clarify to

you. So how would you decide or how are you classifying lots that could be subdivided?

So what we did is we... Through GIS, I could say, show me all of the lots that are at least X feet wide and have a minimum lot area of whatever. So that way, I'm making sure that any of the lots that the software selects are wide enough to accommodate the subdivision and have the lot area to accommodate a subdivision because that's the two elements that a subdivision is going to be based on. Do you have enough area? Do you have enough width? And so that's the ones there that are highlighted in red.

And that would just be based on other parts of the code as to those numbers.

That's based

on

the standards for the R5 district.

Yeah, basically like if it's 80 feet and you move it from 50 to 40, then I can turn it into two if I flip it or do something different with it, right? Yeah, but what you're pointing out here is like in these neighborhoods, the ones that are 80 or more are actually 100 or more, so they could be subdivided today.

Correct. They can already be subdivided. Okay.

And the important one here too is when you look at it, if they were subdivided, that wouldn't necessarily make them out of scale with the neighborhood.

Right.

For those lots. Right.

All right. So we're going to leave from R5 to R2. Any other R5 questions? All right, let's jump into R2. This map is going to look like a lot, and I know, so I'm going to try to break it down a little bit. But right now you have about a third of R2 lots that are non-compliant. And the biggest chunks that are different is you have a lot of 50 foot wide lots. Those are the ones that you see in green that would come into conformance. A lot of them in Hillcrest, a lot of them in Clayton Gardens. But you also see a lot of red there, and those are lots that could be subdivided. Now I have an additional map, and we can flip back and forth between these. If you were to revise that lot from 60 to 50, where are you creating those subdivisions? So we've got a bigger scale here. I want to get more specific. The green is they cannot be subdivided. The yellow is those can already be subdivided under the current regulations. And the red is those could be subdivided if they were revised. So what I want to think about here is Where are we creating a capacity for subdivision that is either appropriate or inappropriate? I think about inappropriate places. If you look there on the very left side, all of that red in the bottom left corner, That's, I believe that's the Tanglewood subdivision. That essentially has the typology of Ladue. They're very wide lots. They're smaller ranch homes, but that's governed by an urban design district that would create what houses look, new construction looks like in Clayton Gardens. So that subdivision may not be appropriate. Whereas if you look up kind of on the right side, sorry, yeah, the right side of the Old Town area, you see a lot of hundred foot wide lots surrounded by a bunch of 50 foot wide 50 foot wide lots um now a lot of those are actually relatively new homes i don't think i don't know that those would be subdivided anytime soon but if those were to be split into that would be more in character of the area you also look at some of the other areas like that entire inner ring of polo that can already be subdivided so that's we wouldn't be creating anything new there but if you look over in clavirac in the middle there are a cluster of new potential subdivisions that pop up. And I know there's a variety of lot widths that are in that neighborhood. However, I think we should be a little bit more wary of that neighborhood in terms of, you know, potential subdivisions.

Which neighborhood? Do you mean it's more likely? It

didn't collaborate. So they're more in the middle. Yeah. You've got a lot of bigger, older homes there, and you've got a lot larger lot sizes over there. It could be an issue if somebody all of a sudden took a look at this big, beautiful historic home in the neighborhood that people said they want to preserve, and somebody says, well, I can split this in two.

Excuse me. So is the idea just to have more lots that are conforming and have a general... Is this what you're proposing, to change all the widths to 50 feet? Or

like... Yeah, so if we were going to adjust these, the recommendation would be to go to 50 feet. I would say that this is one that probably deserves more discussion than R5. R5 is really easy to look at. But this one, because of the level of subdivision, that's just something that we want to present to you guys to weigh is are you comfortable or uncomfortable with the ability of some of these lots to subdivide if we were to go to 50?

It's like, wait, what is it right now, though? If you go back. 60.

Yeah. And in an ideal world, you would have the majority of your lots be conforming. So I think if you go to the last one, Ryan. You know, especially with certain neighborhoods you can see a lot of the green clusters are concentrated and in neighborhoods and a perfect example of when you. don't match the neighborhood context is what happened on dartford where you have one larger lot that it's the lot with had been reduced as we're looking at here. We would have had two homes that I think would have been very supported by that neighborhood. but we didn't match everything. And so we would like to have a lot of things conform. It's easier for property owners when their lots conform in terms of a lot of ways, but we don't want to do that at the expense of kind of creating a potential teardown market where it didn't previously exist. The next one is kind of showing us and there's ways, it's not an all or nothing in either direction so there would be ways for us to establish protections essentially you would have to pass essentially another test to actually subdivide the lots but it brings in, it's not as easy as that, like Ryan was looking into that analysis and If we said you could only subdivide your lot down to 50, if it was located in a block where 60% or more of the other existing lots were at that size, it would prevent the subdivisions in like the Tanglewood area that Ryan mentioned. But it would also potentially prevent the subdivisions and parts of Old Town where it might fit. So it's not a perfect science, but that is an avenue that we could go down.

So really just the red parts are new. Correct. Okay.

Well, I wanted to ask why Dartford's not showing up as red. Like, is it less than 100?

This parcel data that we pulled up that's shown right here just still had it split as two lots. That's why it's at the end. You can see there's a weird little sliver of dark, dark green.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Is it before the house was built, it was two lots but I had one non conforming lot that was not buildable. It was a very weird scenario so that but is

it 100 feet, it is. Yeah, okay. Yeah,

we talked

about that earlier. Thank you. Yes.

I'm still a little unclear what we're trying to do by giving us all this information. What I was initially getting out of it is we're trying to either have more uniformity, but then it seemed like not necessarily. Maybe we're trying to encourage or discourage subdivision. And so, and then I understand the context is neighborhood standards, but I'm still not, I'm not understanding what it is that you want to do and what's the impact of doing it. It's not clear to me why we're going through this.

Well, the impact is what we're telling you. So in R5, it was pretty clear. In order to create some character uniform to address the neighborhood standards, we would recommend reducing the lot width. And we were showing you the potential impacts of that being subdivision. In the case of the R5 district, We don't have any concerns with that subdivision having the opposite impact. So that's a recommendation of changing the lot width in the R5 district. In the R2 district, it's a little bit less black and white. We still, as staff, would recommend reducing the lot width because, again, that creates the highest amount of legal nonconforming lots as it stands today. But when we did the analysis of what a potential impact of that is, being creating these additional reds, that's something that we were less comfortable with and wanted to make sure you guys had an opportunity to weigh in. Do you want us to go down the path of finding some sort of qualifier for subdivisions to prevent some of these? Or you don't even want to go there and you just say, forget it. We want to maintain the 60 foot wide width that we have today.

So what do we know? I'm sorry. But the thought is, in this particular topic, it's really geared towards the impact of subdivisions as opposed to other architectural styles and all kinds of other neighborhood style characteristics. I just want to make sure I'm clear what you're trying to get and make sure we understand.

Yeah, this is related to lot width.

It's lot width. Okay. Do you have a recommendation of what you think we should do? I understand that there are choices we need to make and preferences, but from a pure planning standpoint.

Right. So that's where our recommendation with R5 is to reduce the width as was shown. Our standing for R2, at least mine, behind is that recommend again reducing the lot width but potentially adding some sort of qualifier for a subdivision so essentially what that would do is it would make it so that all of the lots that are there today that are already 50 feet wide would become conforming lots but then to create new 50 foot wide lots you would have to meet you know a qualifier to do that going forward

Yeah, I mean, because that's what, I mean, I would have loved to the situation on Dartford had two houses there rather than, you know. It's fine what we have, but it would have, right, it would have looked, the character of the neighborhood would have been more consistent. I do have concerns like in areas in Claverack. So that's where I'd maybe be more supportive of putting some sort of guideline in. Because if you have somebody, you know, you might have a beautiful old home that, you know, potentially has fallen into disrepair. And so somebody wants to tear it down. I think that would hurt the character potentially of that neighborhood if you're subdividing a lot and all of a sudden by building two houses, like, I mean... that potentially look like Clayton Gardens or like Hillcrest, where houses are much closer together, but that's not present in Clavarack right now. So I just think we would receive a lot of pushback from residents in that area, would be my guess.

And I agree. I think that in Clavarock, the yards certainly don't feel that wide. But there may be instances where two homes would be better. I would suspect that those are pretty few and far between. The bigger issue, too, and then maybe for another conversation, is people building bigger homes on consolidating lots. And I don't think we have anything on that. It may be different, but that may be something that's threatening the architecture of our neighborhoods. We

need a maximum law with. But the thing I was thinking was, you know, I'm generally... you know, I wish we had known to do this two or three years ago so we could have two houses, two new houses on Dartford instead of one gigantic one. But like, as I think about this and even the specific properties that I'm personally familiar with, There's this tension where we could be incentivizing a teardown in order to subdivide and build two houses versus allowing, if there is going to be a teardown, allowing a subdivision. So that, because it's acceptable, right? So like, I mean, the houses that I know that are here, I'm like, I think those houses are in pretty good condition and there's nothing super weird about the lots. And, but like, if it was a house in disrepair and it was going to be demolished anyways then i would be fine with it being subdivided which brings me back to what i really don't want is buildings being demolished and i want to know what we do to disincentivize the demolish

yeah that's definitely another topic that we constantly talk about I don't want to make it seem like if we reduce lot width to 50, like tomorrow we're going to have this flood. Because all of the yellow parcels that you see highlighted already without any changes could be subdivided. So there are a handful of lots, especially in the neighborhoods that we've been talking about, that already could have gone through that process. Because they're

already so big.

Yeah. they're already large enough to support it today as it stands and they haven't been developed that way. So there is a little, you have to hit a threshold where somebody can acquire that property at a cheap enough price that they can afford to build two new houses and then get the value back versus if the house is more well-maintained, a lot of people are buying and they continue to live in it and they fix it up in that way. So But at the same time, while I don't think it would be an overnight change, it's just a potential outcome that we think is important enough for you guys to

consider. What type of qualifiers could you implement if you were trying to do that?

Well, the easiest one is the one that I mentioned, which would be based on the block. So essentially it would allow the subdivision if that really fit with the character of the block that it was on. So in some of the cases, if you look at Clavarac, so some of the cases like on Ydown, there's two yellow, so they could be subdivided today. And in between that, there are four red. So in that case, if somebody bought either a yellow or a red, they wouldn't have over 60% of their block with the smaller width homes. So those wouldn't, if we had some sort of qualifier that said on your block, you can only subdivide down to 50%, if you have 60% of the homes at 50 feet or less. So that would protect those homes from doing it. But there's other sections in Claverac that have a red that's surrounded mostly by green. And so that would be a scenario where that potentially on that block, they could meet that percentage and maybe be something. Same block.

How do you define the block when it's so long?

Blocks, our definition in the code today is intersection to intersection.

Yeah. But the Y down would be safe.

So those red ones on clap, those are ones that are wide enough right now that. The reds

are only, no, the yellows are the ones that are wide today.

Oh, I see. But they're okay. So then if we changed it, got it. Okay. So then if change it, they could be because they're just wider than the greens right now. Okay.

I'm trying to stay rational on this as I get tearing down beautiful homes. Right. But it also impacts. you know, impervious surfaces. It's how much you can build on a lot and all that. And grandfathering is already there. I'm not bothered by the nonconformity just from what was presented today, except that when you run into a situation where what you're talking about where the two homes might have been better than one, but that sounds like the, is that an outlier? We have a situation like that? Where you wish you could have built two homes, and now the home there is larger than fits the character? I mean, I think there's

just a lot of things that go into it. it's best practice to try and have your zoning code match. So there's two ways to approach it. We can either approach it by looking at some caveats to try and target our non-conforming lots to make those conforming. That wouldn't necessarily solve the issue that we have with potentially having one house instead of two. Or you can do it the way that we have it here where we make most lots conforming and then we add qualifiers to prevent subdivisions.

And I don't know if, I mean, this is like Ryan said, it is a complicated to end it at like five to five. So I don't know, like, I don't know how much Ryan, how much more, if there, do you have more to present or more to?

Yeah.

So I don'T know. I mean, I DON'T know if this is something, it sounds like we might have to

Yeah, we can. We can just put it on a different I mean, I

don't know. And we haven't heard from I think there are definitely some questions about the reduction. I certainly have concerns. I'm just really afraid that developers will buy houses and like ultimately tear houses down until we get something in place to disincentivize that because i'm just there's so many developers around here that tear down an old house divide it and put up to $4 million homes like so that really that is a big concern of mine

yeah

so. So I don't know, given the time constraints. Ryan, if you want to talk to us for a few more minutes, I just, yeah, I don't know. Or we can have a natural break here, whatever you guys think would be best.

There's still other items to present that I would like to present to you guys today. Of course, I don't want to keep you if you don't want to be here. But I'll continue on if you guys... Okay, yeah, for

a few... I

do want to be here, but I have some flights

I've got to run.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah, if you just want to get through a few more things just to kind of plant a seed and then we'll obviously talk more. Okay. Sure.

And so then the other components, aside from a lot width, is we talk about lot area and density. Now, some qualifiers real quick. So minimum lot area, that's the total minimum square footage that you need to have and able to legally form a lot. So in the R2 district, I want to say it's like 7,500 square feet, basically, and everything above that, it's 5,000 square feet. And then the lot density is the ratio of dwelling units to that lot area. So in Clayton, we regulate that by saying you need to have 1,000 square feet of lot area for every one unit in X district here. So what are our existing conditions, so some multifamily districts do have a character of density that is greater than what is allowed by the zoning. We can see on this chart on the right that kind of explores that there's definitely some examples of lot area that's non conforming but not to a degree that I think is something that we need to adjust. What I would kind of qualify about this chart is where you see that green for the area parallel to the orange for the density. The issue with the density is largely caused by the smaller area. You have lots that are too small, so it flags it as – that flags as something that does not meet our density requirements. So the big outliers you see there would be R5 and R7. So we'll talk about R5 a little bit, and then R7 is kind of a whole different – beast that's there. So a consideration as we think about adjusting densities in order to conform to the character of a neighborhood is if you lower the density ratio, if you say, okay, you can do, you know, 900 square feet of lot area versus 1,000 square feet of lot areas for a unit, that's going to change how dense a neighborhood can be. That can be a significant change. Why not adjust lot areas? Once you start adjusting lot areas, that can dramatically affect the density of an area in a lot of different ways. We don't want to go that direction. So what did we find? So when I looked at the R3 district there, that's our district that allows single family and duplexes. It does have a ratio, but it doesn't really serve a function because we have a minimum lot area of 5,000 square feet and then a ratio of 2,500 square feet for each unit in a duplex. That's the same thing. I think there's like four outlying lots that don't meet the 5,000 square foot minimum. and they're like 4,800 square feet or 4,500 square feet. They're not dramatically smaller. So my recommendation would be we don't really need a ratio in R3. We could save the text on the page and just allow duplexes kind of as they are. The next was that if we were to... If we were to change our minimums to bring lots into conformance, we're going to create a notable increase in the density of neighborhoods. So that upper chart that you see on the right, that's looking at our five. And if we were to adjust the ratio right now from 1500 square feet unit to 1400 square feet, which is not a big change, you're going to start dramatically increasing the number of properties that can add units. that's going to really incentivize teardowns. You're going to say, oh, well, I don't need this property that has four units if I can get six or eight out of it. But if we leave that density as it is, if you have a property that has four unit and say the lot size would only allow three or two, the incentive for the property owner is going to be, I want to maintain that because I'm not going to be able to get this back. And so that's going to preserve some of our smaller and hopefully more affordable housing stock. And then the third item is there's a significant percentage of single-family homes in multifamily districts. There are ways to kind of talk about that, and the chart on the lower right talks about the percentage of single- family homes in those multifamilies. So that looks at R5 and R6. So R5, you can see there's a big chunk there. R6 is maybe just a little bit lower. There is ways to kind of explore that, but it does get a little bit complicated. We can talk about that in a second. But the only recommendation really coming out of that density is to revise that R3 to allow duplexes without having the ratio because the ratio is redundant at this point. Does anybody want to talk about lot density?

Let's just let the, like we'll share the slides. So we can get, yeah, you can do your, so they kind of are introduced to the slides. We'll give you guys the slides and then you can look over those before we come back to talk about it all again.

Okay. Yeah. So R7 is the last piece I want to talk about. I wonder if I kept looking at R7, just R7. It kept showing up in terms of things that are nonconforming. And it's a small chunk of lots. It's four lots right there, right on Brentwood across from Shaw Park. under the current zoning, if something happened to those properties, if there was a natural disaster or some way that those buildings had to be rebuilt, you could not rebuild those buildings as they are today. They can't cover as much of the lot. You know, you couldn't have some of the uses or some of the densities. And actually, if you compare those properties as they are to the zoning district that most supports their current character, that's the M3 high density mixed use, which is what all of the surrounding properties are so in addition to these other items that we've talked about another outcome of this research is when looking at r7 it's probably best in my opinion to rezone these parcels to m3 and just kind of do away with r7 as a district because that's that's going to get those properties closest to conformance

what does r7 offer why is it r7 versus like the surrounding areas

I couldn't tell you the origin of R7. Even if I think about those properties, like the property on the corner there that has, oh, it has, is it Dominic's? It's the restaurant that's in there. That property is not allowed to be mixed use under our zoning code, but it is mixed use. So I

So I'm curious, why do we have a zoning category where they're almost all nonconforming? Did we approve them with variances or did we change the code after they were built?

In all likelihood, the code was changed. But we really don't know. And because of the context of this, to me it doesn't even really make sense to go back and try and figure out how to make R7 work because... With the new M3, we can get high density residential uses and other compatible uses on these properties that way. So the R7 district. It's just our highest density in terms of residential, but we don't really need it.

The people who implemented zoning, like, we don't know who they were or why they did it. I mean, that's why... It wasn't at... Hillcrest is, like, 75% to 90% nonconforming because the neighborhood existed and then they developed this zoning structure that didn't actually match it. Like, it's just... i mean if it's only these buildings and that's yeah and we don't want i think the key would be do we want what r7 would would put there or do we want it to be basically like it is and like the m3 that we just defined yeah

yeah so this is probably the most straightforward right it's good um okay great yeah yeah so a lot of information a lot of this is is informational for you guys to start thinking through it so we'll provide the slides um so that you can do that and we'll work to get on another agenda

okay

to talk more

sounds great all right well thank you very much all of you we really appreciate it lots of work obviously that went into this so thank you very much

yeah

yep thank

you

great all right thank you everybody have a great weekend