Big house gets unanimous approval from City Council

By Rachana Dixit

Published: August 18, 2008

They may have done nothing in May, but in a complete turnaround on Monday city councilors unanimously approved a large house and accessory apartment in the city’s North Downtown neighborhood.
“It’s probably not fair to keep prolonging this,” Councilor Julian Taliaferro said.

Some neighbors had ex-pressed fierce opposition to the proposed house and accessory apartment at 509 Second St. NE, saying its size will dwarf surrounding homes — which are on average about 2,000 square feet — and it does not fit with the pedestrian-friendly feel of the neighborhood.
In May, councilors chose to defer their decision on the project — which origi-nally measured 8,500 square feet, according to a staff report prepared by Mary Joy Scala, the city’s preservation and design planner — by asking the Board of Architectural Review to have another crack at the project.
The BAR had already approved the project, lo-cated in a historic district, in March, which neighbors appealed.
Mark and Barbara Fried, prominent develop-ers who live in Crozet, are looking to build the two-story house with an acces-sory apartment and a side garage on their property. In an interview last week, project architect Allison Ewing said the project has been scaled back signifi-cantly, cutting off about 2,500 square feet from the original size. The empty lot is about 9,800 square feet and includes some parking spaces.
The house has gone through design changes since its original presenta-tion — including moving the now two-car garage from the front of the house to the side, and adding a first-floor porch. Addition-ally, several sustainable measures have been incor-porated into the project to reduce its carbon footprint, including a green roof, solar panels and geothermal heating pumps.
“The project as it stands, this is not an entirely new design,” said Fred Wolf, chairman of the BAR. “These are refinements.”
David J. Toscano, who represents the Frieds (and serves in the House of Delegates), said, “The long and short of it is, they liked a lot of the design in the March 18 submittal,” refer-ring to the BAR. But, To-scano said, the new design should be reviewed to in-clude the project’s im-provements, such as the scaled-down size and added pedestrian-friendly fea-tures.
Residents present at Monday’s meeting were concerned about the level of transparency that the project has gone through.
City resident Kristen Suokko, who lives on Sec-ond Street across from the house’s site and the pro-ject’s main opponent, said the design that councilors were reviewing was not the one approved by the BAR in June, and the updated design was only provided to neighbors last week.
“People need to be able to understand and rely on a clear and transparent process, and this has been anything but,” Suokko said.
Jennifer McKeever added, “There is an applica-tion procedure for the BAR that includes notice, trans-parency and openness that I do not believe is in there right now.”
But councilors countered that the proposal in front of them Monday was in es-sence the same with minor design improvements.
“Ninety percent of it is the same as before,” Coun-cilor Satyendra Huja said.
Councilor David Brown echoed those sentiments, saying the new proposal should be considered be-cause neighbors’ concerns are better addressed.
“I sort of agree that this is the same project we considered the last time,” Brown said.