Gussie Belle Brown Apartments at Former General Hospital Site in for Site Plan Review

The first phase of the Gussie Belle Brown affordable housing project has been submitted for site plan review with the City. It is an administrative approval process and there is no formal Public Hearing.

Phase 1 along 23rd Street

The project may be the second actual housing proposed on any of the new MU-I, II, and III zoning. The first, I believe, was the project on MU-I for the corner of Bush and Commercial Streets in Sleepy Hollow. So far that seems to be the only project that meets the spirit of new MU-type zoning.

Other recent projects do not meet the spirit. You may recall a medical clinic in a MU-I zone, and a car dealership and coffee shack going in on a couple of MU-III parcels. Certainly the MU-III zone has seemed a continuation of older commercial zoning, and the "mixed use" part a real misnomer, something that allows the City to talk up the great extent of new mixed use potential. But it reality it's pretty vaporous. The City should consider renaming MU-III so that overall maps of "mixed use" zoning in the city area give a better sense for what is likely and possible rather than what is merely theoretical and highly improbable. Mixed use types would still be allowed, but the name would reference the primary kind of usage rather than a misleading one.

MU-I zoning

The parcel here for the proposed apartment complex is all or nearly all zoned MU-I (apparently there's a tiny bit of CO zoned land also).

According to SRC 533.001,

The purpose of the Mixed Use-I (MU-I) zone is to identify allowed uses and establish development standards that promote pedestrian-oriented development in vibrant mixed-use districts, encourage a mix of compatible uses in multi-story buildings, and emphasize active commercial uses on ground floors facing major streets.

As laudable and necessary as this project is, it is not that. It's a standard issue apartment complex with a single use. There's no real mixed-uses, and it doesn't greet the street like a streetcar era set of buildings might.

Concept drawing from 2023, looking SE
Phase 1 in back, and phase 2 in foreground

Developers are asking for several exceptions.

Adjustments requested

One of them, at No. 2, the matter of ceiling height, reducing it from 14 to 9 feet along primary streets, was recently addressed in a wholly separate conversation, in SCAN's comments to the joint meeting of the Planning Commission and Historic Landmarks Commission earlier this month on a set of proposed changes to code. SCAN suggested the City

Delete the minimum ground floor height standard of 14 ft in the MU-I zone and 10 ft in the MU-II zone. A recent development in SCAN (Hunsaker Dental Office at Commercial St and Kearny) requested an adjustment to reduce the ground floor height to 9 ft for a three story medical/office building in the MU-I zone. The applicant did not want the added cost of heating the greater space; felt it was not needed or appropriate for a dental office; wanted to reduce the required setback based on building height; and noted that very few recently constructed buildings in the downtown area have ground floor ceiling heights of 14 feet; and most commercial buildings in the City do not exceed 10 ft.

SCAN supported that adjustment because it allowed the building to be lower and more compatible with the adjacent one and two-story residential uses. Staff approved the adjustment based on the finding that "the nine-foot floor-to-ceiling height of the ground floor of the proposed building equally meets the underlying purpose of this standard. This is because the proposed nine-foot height is consistent with the ground floor building height of other retail and office buildings within the City as indicated by the applicant; and the nine foot floor-to-ceiling height still allows for a variety of non-residential uses on the ground floor of the building consistent with the underlying intent of the standard."

If a 9-foot ceiling equally meets the purpose of the minimum 14-foot standard, then a minimum ground floor height standard is not needed and is not consistent with the pedestrian oriented standards in the MU zones.

The 14 foot requirement might imply something like 5 over 1 podium buildings with a more generous ground floor retail ceiling height.

But the new developments on mixed use zoned land are not anything like that here yet. This project is oriented inwards, to the courtyards and parking lots, and not to the street.

Indeed, even without any minimum required parking, there's lots of parking proposed!

Lots of parking still: 1.7 stalls per home, for 208 total

Developers will still often provide parking.

There's more detail in the tree protection plan, and it may be that efforts there are finally gaining traction. The developer also requests a Tree Variance to allow encroachment on root zones of five trees. The encroachment itself may or may not be bad, but at least the request is explicit now rather than after-the-fact carelessness.

Detail on tree protection

Example from tree protection plan

See previously:

• Here, on a pass-through by the City, "Redeveloping the old General Hospital Site"
• And earlier at Salem Reporter, "Affordable development with 120 new apartments planned for northeast Salem."

In a formal Work Session Council will this evening consider early stages in the Housing Production Strategy. Part of it is "Conducting a market study to determine the feasibility of developing housing in mixed-use areas."

The project here is an instance of developing housing in a nominally mixed-use area. The question for Council on the Housing Production Strategy might not be so much "feasibility" as "likelihood." Another question is not just "housing" in general, but actual mixed-uses with housing. The City also still has not grappled with the mismatch between swaths of new MU-type zoning and the big stroads the newly designated land abuts. While we desperately need just plain housing, we also have ancillary goals for walkable housing and walkable neighborhoods. A Housing Production Strategy that stresses later 20th century housing types, neighborhoods, and the implied transportation will be much too autoist, sprawly, and anti-climate.