Planning Board - Regular Meeting

I don't think it's, oh, there it is, okay.

Are we ready, Marcus?

Okay, all right. Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the City of South Miami Planning and Zoning Board Planning and Zoning meeting of Tuesday, September 9th. Please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. Okay, we're going to start with roll call online. Cristina, start with you.

Cristina Ortega. Michelle Redan.

Daniel Guerra. Okay, present here.

Jay Miller. Agustin Barrera.

Daniel Alvarez.

Joseph Corbison.

Okay, we have a quorum. I see we have no administrative matters at this time.

I'm really quick, I'd like to, there are no administrative matters, but a board member, Jay Miller, came to my office earlier today to pick up a package and he inquired about board elections for a chair and vice chair. So it's been a year, give or take. I'll check with the minutes to make sure, but most likely at the October meeting, we most likely will be holding board elections.

Good. Happy to hear that. Okay, before we go to the first item, Mr. Attorney.

Yes, we have on the first item on today's agenda is a quasi-judicial public hearing. And so I just want to make the audience both on Zoom and also in the chambers tonight aware that we will be asking persons speaking and making comment on that first application to be sworn in. To state their name and their address for the record and to be sworn in Please be aware that the item the consideration that the board will be having tonight is a recommendation The final approval will occur later at City Commission tonight's the purpose of tonight's meeting is to get the input from the planning board and from you all and Carry that over as a recommendation either to approve to deny or to approve with some conditions. I Um, if you choose not to be sworn in the testimony that you provided tonight's hearing will be given its due wait. Uh, I will also be asking you, as I said, you have to be sworn in if you are testifying, uh, providing comments by zoom. Uh, we will ask you at that time when your name is called to please be sworn in on camera so that we can, we can be sure that you've been sworn in. The same goes for staff. We'll ask staff to also be sworn in so that their comments are given their due weight on the record. With that, anyone who wishes to speak on tonight's first item, I ask that you please stand up and raise your right hand. Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth in your response? Perfect. Thank you very much, everybody. Chair, if you want to proceed with staff presentations and then perhaps the applicant at your will.

I just wanted to go on the record that on Friday, September 5th, I met with Mr. Perez with regards to this item where he presented the item to me.

Thank you, Chair. Board members, if there's anyone else who has had any communications with any of the parties, that being the applicant or members of the public, with respect to the first application, we ask that you please disclose that now. Any other board members have had communications? Anyone online? On Zoom, online? No. Okay. They're nodding their heads no, for the record. Marcus?

I'm sorry? I'll see you with a presentation of the first item.

Okay, I was taking notes, sorry. I apologize. No problem. So the first time is PB-2025-007, the applicant is South Miami Real Estate Partners, LLC. A resolution of the Mayor and the City Commission of the City of South Miami, Florida, approving or denying a special exception application pursuant to Section 20-420-8.7 of the City of South Miami Land Development Code. for a large-scale development project for a mixed-use medical office building with residential dwelling units known as Med Square on the entire city block located on the west side of Southwest 62nd Avenue between Southwest 68th Street and Southwest 69th Street, providing for conditions, enforcement of conditions, corrections, severability, and an effective date. And this item will be presented by the city's planning consultant, Mark Alvarez of the Cordino Group. Thank you.

Mark.

Good evening, I'm Mark Alvers with the Corradino Group. I'm gonna follow up on something that Mr. Martos just said. It may be a little more logical if you wanna have the applicant present first and then we'll comment on what the staff report is. I personally think that's easier because I didn't do a presentation this time, because they do, and I think it may be easier if I then tell you, but I'm perfectly prepared to do it the other way around. I just want to make it make sense.

If the board doesn't have any issues with that, I'm okay with the applicant presenting first. I think it'll work a little better, thank you. Okay, all right.

And Chairman, I'll ask the applicant to confirm they have no objection to presenting first. Absolutely not. Thank you.

Good evening, board members. Alejandro Arias, offices at 701 Brickell Avenue. I'm joined this evening by my colleague, Alexandria San Román, as well as project architect Ivo Fernandez from Modus Architects, as well as our traffic engineer from David Plummer and Associates, and our landscape architect, Robert Paisley, who's been calling in. We're also joined by project principal, Alberto Perez, and we're here to answer any questions you may have. We're grateful for the opportunity to be here tonight and be bringing forward this transformational project before this board. We're also thankful to have staff's favorable recommendation of this proposal. The subject property encompasses an entire city block between Southwest 68th Street to the north, Southwest 69th Street to the south, Southwest 62nd Avenue to the east, and Southwest 62nd Court to the west. It comprises approximately 1.63 acres. The property fronts on Southwest 62nd Avenue, a major city thoroughfare, and is generally unimproved with two existing residential structures situated on six contiguous parcels. A residential subdivision is situated to the west of the property with existing four-story and seven-story offices located to the south as you head towards South Miami Hospital. Larkin Hospital is located to the east of the property across Southwest 62nd Avenue. As such, the property is situated within close proximity of major healthcare employment centers, office, and residential uses varying from low to high densities. The property was recently included as part of the significant city-initiated Future Land Use Map and Zoning Atlas Amendments, which redesignated the property as Transit Supportive Development District, the TSDD. This city-initiated program redesignated and rezoned a significant geographic area of the city, spanning from Southwest 64th Street down to Southwest 76th Street, from Southwest 63rd Avenue to Southwest 57th Avenue, encompassing areas such as Sunset Drive and the US-1 corridor. Now within the TSDB area there are three respective sub districts. The transit oriented development area, the transit supportive development area, and the transit neighborhood supportive area. Each allowing a certain permitted use, density, and height. The subject property of this application is within the Transit Supportive Development Area, the TSDA, on the eastern portion of the block fronting on Southwest 62nd Avenue, and the Transit Neighborhood Supportive Area, the TNSA, on the western part of the block facing Southwest 62nd Court. The TSDA allows for a maximum density of 150 dwelling units an acre and a maximum height of six stories, 84 feet. The transit neighborhood supportive area allows for a maximum density of 100 dwelling units per acre and a maximum height of three stories, 40 feet. The TSTD on this property serves to further restrict height and density and most importantly requires a residential buffer facing the neighborhood across from Southwest 62nd Court. In connection with the proposed development and the special exception request and waiver request, The applicant is proposing the development of a first-class horizontal mixed-use development encompassing a six-story, 81,910 square foot medical office building fronting on Southwest 62nd Avenue. This is an as-of-right use permitted under the transit supportive development area. Towards the west of the property, fronting on Southwest 62nd Court, the applicant is proposing eight two-story townhome units on the western perimeter of the property line, fronting on Southwest 62nd Court, which will serve to provide an appropriate height transition and buffer between the medical office building and the residential homes across Southwest 62nd Court. It is a housing typology that will serve to strengthen the character and quiet enjoyment of the neighborhood. The proposed medical office building will encompass an internalized dedicated patient drop-off pickup area to prevent any offloading on city network or the streets. The medical office building will include four levels of garage parking, a project element that is in the best interest of the city, and will office floor plates on the fifth and sixth floors of the building. Additionally, there's 10,900 square feet of ground floor uses in the building. The overall project will also provide off-street parking spaces well in excess of the city code. to accommodate the project's operational demand. Where the city requires 153 parking spaces, this project will provide 353 parking spaces, so a surplus of 200 parking spaces. Again, this project is intended to be medical office in nature. The project will also provide ample lush landscaping to not only complement the proposed project, but to further enhance the surrounding area and provide sufficient buffers where appropriate. Now, as part of this analysis and process, the applicant conducted a traffic study to analyze the existing and proposed impacts to the area. As shown in the traffic study, the overall level of service for all intersections currently operate and will continue to operate within the city's level of standards. Furthermore, we're recommending signal timing modifications on the northbound and southbound approaches of the Southwest 62nd Avenue and 72nd Street intersection. and the intersection capacity analysis indicates all project driveways are projected to operate at an acceptable level of service. Lastly, this project is uniquely situated in an area currently served by public transportation. More specifically, it's located within walking distance to the South Miami Metro Rail Station. The project is also located in an area that is conducive for pedestrian and bicycle activities. Ample sidewalks, crosswalks, shared roadways, and its proximity to the MPath encourage and facilitate pedestrian activity to nearby retail, restaurants, and recreational facilities. We anticipate that these conditions will encourage the use of other modes of transportation, therefore reducing vehicular impacts on the roadway network. Now the mission of the applicant and this project is to bring life to healthcare real estate by enhancing the patient-tenant experience, from the quality of care received, to the work environment, to the common gathering spaces. As such, the applicant has built world-class medical office spaces incorporating beautiful architecture, urban design elements, and high-end materials, such as these illustrated here, with several more in the pipeline. MedSquare Health, located near Baptist Hospital on Southwest 87th Avenue, is considered to be one of the largest non-hospital-affiliated medical office buildings in the Tri-County area. Now similar to the built environment of those buildings, the proposed MedSquare South Miami project will continue its mission to transform and enhance this community. On the screen are a few renderings of the proposed project. This is an eastern facing view from the townhomes looking towards the medical office building. The parking garage will also be screened with a landscape liner. Project rendering again, the view from the townhomes facing the office building. We also have some of the amenities included in the rear of the townhomes. This is a view from 62nd Avenue, the front facing of the medical office building. And one of the corners on 62nd Avenue of the building with the architectural elements incorporated therein. Now, as stated in staff's favorable recommendation, the proposed application is consistent with the TSDD requirements and adheres to the intent of the zoning district. Additionally, and as staff has recognized, the TSDD recognizes that office development of six stories or less may require larger horizontal dimensions, including floor plate areas. As such, a waiver is being requested as it relates to the maximum floor plates allowed above the fourth floor. As the code reads today, only 20,000 square feet are allowed from the fourth story and up. In this particular project, because we're incorporating four levels of parking, we will need the larger floor plates on floors five and six where the actual office development will take place. So we'll have 10,900 square feet of ground floor space, and on floors five and six, we'll have 35,475 feet on each respective floor. Now pursuant to this request, staff has determined that the waiver does not contribute to or cause a building that's out of scale with the intents of the TSDD. The office floor plates are no larger than the garage and the ground floor plates below. and serves to provide the surplus parking throughout floors one through four, which provides a benefit and necessitates consolidation of office space on two of the same floor plates as the garage floor plates below. As stated in the May 2025 staff review comments, this application adheres to the intent of the TSDD zoning district with a proposal that meets all requirements and are supportive of the required waivers. With that, we thank you for your time and we request your favorable recommendation of this item. Along with the design professionals present this evening, I'm available to answer any questions you may have. Thank you.

Thank you. Mark?

Thank you. Again, Mark Alvarez with the Corradino Group as a staff zoning consultant. We have reviewed this project. We've worked with this applicant for several months, actually. We've gone through a number of iterations refining this project because we recognize that, one, this is one of the first projects that we're really having in the TSTD. It's also one that is, we are very sensitive to, this is one of our transitional blocks. So the block between 68th and 69th and 62nd Avenue and 62nd Court was something that we looked at very carefully when we were doing the zoning on this and we divided that block. So it would have the main use, which is a commercial use, and then in the zoning we required a townhouse transition. One of the things I want to note on that is that when we were doing this at the zoning, and this is fully consistent with that zoning, But when you look at the map it shows along the property line there's a division between TSDA and TSNA. TSDA being the main transit supportive development area and TSNA being the neighborhood area where we intend for lower scale development in the townhouses. It is not along the property line. We put into the text of the code that it will be a 75 foot buffer. So you'll see on the site plan that it doesn't go along the old property lines. This is a unified property, and that's completely consistent. We recognized that we needed to give some relief for that. And I will say that this is something that we feel very strongly does create the reality of the intent of the TSDD. We really looked at these transition areas and thought about them carefully when we were doing the zoning. I know we all worked on it for months. So it's entirely consistent. As far as the residential uses, we have eight town homes on the back that is under the density that's required, that's allowed. They would be allowed 14 units an acre. They have, what is it, 4.92 units an acre. And again, originally we looked at more. We knew we could fit 12. They decided to become more compatible with the neighborhood and scale it down a little bit when this went through a redesign. As far as the non-residential goes, it is completely consistent with the uses in the TSDDA 20-8.5. It's a medical office that's a primitive use, and it's a use that we certainly intended to have in this area. As for parking, it exceeds all of the requirements of the TSDA. I'm sorry, did I say that? Yes, of the TSDA. Our requirement would require 137 spaces for the medical offices. They are providing about 380. Did I read that right? No. There are about 200 spaces, about 330. Again, we recognize going into the code, and I want to discuss some of these things because one of the great opportunities now is we're really looking at the code a second time. We wanted, we want to create, we didn't want parking lots all over the city, so we wanted to keep our parking requirements very low. We expected developments to come in with more parking in some cases. That's fine. We accept it. We look forward to it. They know what they need, and I know for medical offices, and I've heard it might even be children's offices, you need a lot of parking. We'd rather have that than the parking going into the neighborhood. Again, we have a lot of sensitivity to not create any impacts on the neighborhood to the west. There are no bonuses here, so that's not required. We have reviewed the traffic study. We had comments. All the comments have been resolved. I want to talk a little bit about the street hierarchy plan. One of the things that's in the TSDD is that we have a street hierarchy, and we require certain things of every property that develops into the downtown. One of those things was that we got rid of setbacks, and we required... build two lines and that there will be dedications of what used to be a five foot setback, we would require a dedication. I want to point this out because this also comes in, although it's the first project we're really doing, it has an unusual circumstance that we recognize and it's something we'll probably correct in the code in the future. This is a county road. So if they were to dedicate that five feet, it goes to the county and we lose control of it. So we felt that in the spirit of what we wanted to accomplish for the TSD, we would allow this to be a setback and they will have, I lost the word, they will allow public use of it. What was the word I wanted?

Do you mean easement rights?

Thank you. That they would have an easement. We have an 11-foot sidewalk. We have the landscaping on the curbside where we wanted it. So we got everything we wanted, but we realized we had to do it a different way because it's the county's road and we don't want to lose control of what goes on in the sidewalk. We also never intended to change curb lines in any of the downtown. This project has a four-foot bike lane in front of it. Again, it's a county road. We can't change that without asking them to change the curb line and the drainage and so forth. So those two things have been accepted. They don't require any further approvals. We just accept it because we realize we have a different situation on a county road. And again, I may be coming back before you in a few months to try to correct some of these things. Street hierarchy plan. So the last thing really was about the waiver. Again, when we were working with the code, we decided, and again, I know you all remember, we had a lot of issues about how to limit for the entire downtown, how to limit the bulk of buildings, and we came up with a floor plate. This is one of the issues where we said, this is perfectly acceptable, we have a building, they are not exceeding the size of the building in terms of the floor plates, the habitable floor plates, they are simply sitting on top of the parking garage. So we do find that it's compatible, it doesn't affect the neighborhood anymore, it has no, incompatibilities with it, it has no adverse impacts to the neighborhood. We know that this project in the drawings and we looked at it in the reports, there are sight lines, there are shadow studies. This has minimal impact on the neighborhood because They did what we wanted. We wanted townhouses on the back. We wanted the residential street to have residential uses across from it. And those residential uses become the buffer. And the people who live there will be self-selecting. They will think it's acceptable and purchase or rent there, and they'll live next to an office building. That's fine. So this is everything that we intended for the district. It's the first one. We are going through a lot of problems with it, trying to get everything to work just right, partly because we didn't write everything correctly. So we do recommend approval for this project. And if you have any questions, I can answer all the details.

All right, thank you. We're gonna open it up to public comment Those present here, and then we'll go to any public comment online. Those who wish to speak from the public, please approach the podium. State your name and address.

It takes me five minutes to put my name in as well.

We won't start the clock until you finish. Can we take the presentation off the screen, Marcus, so we can see what's online? Thank you.

My name's Christopher Cookey Arbora. I'm a 43-year resident of the neighborhood right behind this project. I've seen this street, 62nd Avenue, go through various changes, and these properties have sat there vacant for the longest time. Something is going to happen there. It was inevitable, but I have some questions about this project. The amount of parking that's required that they're asking for, which requires the floor plates to go be sitting on top of the lower floor plates, I find that argument is ridiculous. I'm sorry. You can't just say, well, it's the same floor plate, but it's sitting on top of the the floor plates below. No, it's not the same thing. There's a reason the floor plates were called out for the size that they were to be above the fifth and sixth floor, and just to say it's the same floor plate on top of something below it is absurd, especially if you're asking for more than double the amount of parking. Reduce the parking, reduce the floor plates. The townhouses, I just want to confirm that those are two stories and not three stories. Some of the plans I saw that looked as if they were three stories. The entrance to the neighborhood on 68th Street across from community newspapers, I've been talking with people about that entrance for 35 years. That entrance looks very commercial. Anyone who drives through there can see it's double wide, triple wide entrance into a residential area. On 69th Street, it pinches down. That entrance to the neighborhood pinches down right at the change of the zoning into residential. 68th Street should be pinched down, too. I've spoken to Steve Kaye about this. I've spoken to the mayor about this. They both say, yeah, that seems like a good idea, but let's just wait. Well, I'm looking at the drawings that they show here, and even on the drawings that are shown here, you can see on 69th Street, The entrance to the neighborhood is pinched down. On 68th Street, it should be the same. That seems like a simple thing to do. We need to reinforce our neighborhood to the west, which is undergoing a tremendous, tremendous transformation at the moment. So please consider that. This project, however it's configured, will set the precedent for the west side of 62nd Avenue. If this goes through, you can best be sure that all the other properties on the west side of 62nd Avenue will ask for the same thing. So be very careful what you allow here and be careful and recognize that it will impact the entire street. And I ask any of you, any of you who are looking at this, have you driven through that neighborhood to the west? Are you familiar with that neighborhood to the west? Have you driven the streets of that neighborhood to the west? Because this building is going to affect our neighborhood. So please keep that in mind. And I think it can be modified and reduced in size.

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. If anyone showed up late and they weren't sworn in, you need to get sworn in. So I just want to make sure. Were you here when people?

No.

You were not?

Okay.

Sir, would you? Perfect. Raise your right hand. Do you still want to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? I do. Thank you.

Good afternoon, members of the board. My name is Luigi Vitalini. I'm an architect. I was on the planning board for several years here in South Miami. I mediated the original... I was involved in the mediation between the original lawsuit between the former owner of this property and the city. I had developed a plan between the... the developer so that he would uh um would sign up and to cancel the lawsuit at the time at the time what what was agreed upon was the three stories townhouses on on um on 62nd avenue um i live right behind right in front of the townhouses i have one story house um and my objections to this proposal is um Well, my main position is that if you passed what we were just shown, a transit-oriented district, I think the purpose of that zoning is to maximize the use of transit. I think that's why we're giving them such bonuses. Now, I think if you exceed by 200 parking spaces, Well, they are required to do that. I think you're completely negating that transit zoning. Who's going to use a transit when they can easily park in the parking garage? None of the staff will use that. They're going to have 350 parking spaces, which is going to create an incredible amount of traffic also for the neighborhood. And that's where my main objection to the project is that they have four stories of parking. Now, I'm an architect and I've done some quick studies and I can share with you of the massing. With having just like a ground floor parking that they have in one floor, they would exceed what they're required by the code, which is fine. But then they would have like a two-story building with two upper stories. And that would be like something that would impact the neighborhood a lot less. It would be a four-story building. It would give them all whatever they're looking for. And even the floor plate, I mean, I think that would be like one of the least of the evils, even though I think 40,000 square foot floor plate doesn't exist, not even in Brico. I mean, it's gigantic. But I think the scale, the problem with the building is the massiveness. It occupies the size from side to side. And I completely disagree with the fact that it won't impact our neighborhood in the back. An eight-story building will not let me have, like, sunlight in the morning until, like, 10 o'clock. It bores, you know, if I can show you this.

I need you to wrap up, please.

Can I show you these?

Your time is up, sir.

Okay. All right. Thank you.

I'm going to take time writing my name, too.

Sure, no problem. Yeah, she was.

She was here. I was sworn in.

Yes. We just want to make sure.

You want my address here as well?

Yes, please.

First time. My name is Mahayana Landown. My parents live at 6926 Southwest 62nd Court and I grew up there as well. We've lived there since 1975. They are in their 80s and we care very much about the neighborhood and the plants of the neighborhood and I too agree about the parking. Lifting a building up, four extra flights in order to have this parking. We have a lot of parking lots, other places in the neighborhood, and it seems excessive. I also wonder what mixed-use medical means, if it's 24-hour, what kinds of things are going through there. We already have all the hospital stuff that we hear all the time. And just the impact on the neighborhood. We are two houses away from where this will be, and we're in a one-story building. So the neighborhood, we know change is coming, but to really respect the nature, the plants, the peacefulness of this neighborhood, I think it's important to... take that in. I know a lot of townhouses have come into South Miami in these years, but they tend to do a lot of nature, and I know that the trees are protected, and I just know that the difference of this building on that block, and yes, what it will precedent for the others, but really, transit supportive development, I don't understand. how four levels of garage would be helpful in that. I think that's the notes I have. I thank you for hearing us and for giving us time to speak out about what will be such a profound effect on people's lives. Thank you.

Thank you. I want to make sure there's any other public comments from the audience. Are there anyone online that wants to speak? From the public? Okay, being no one else that wants to speak, you want to respond to some of the comments? Yes, sir. Thank you.

So I just want to respond to the notion that the six stories is required because of the parking. The applicant specializes in medical health care product types. The requirements of the city, of the county are three parking spaces per thousand for medical office. However, he's developed so many of these projects, and I think we can all attest to the fact that whenever you go to a doctor, there's typically issues with parking. So it's not that we're... The height is, as of right, six stories. Now, instead of actually taking up floor three, floor two as additional office square footage, which we can based on the parking ratio, he understands the needs of the product type. And rather than create more square footage, which would be more profitable, he's actually offering to provide more parking based on his specialty, his expertise within this field. So that's really the reason here. It's not that we are getting any type of bonus in height. It can still be a six-story building. We can have more office square footage. Now, what we're doing is because of the nature of this building and in order to adequately parking, and again, the main intent from the very beginning was to internalize all impacts. We've internalized the parking, the loading, the partial delivery, trash pickup, even car share services to reduce any impacts to the neighborhood. The notion that it's going to go from side to side, remember, we've created the residential buffer, the townhomes, that split it down almost the middle of the site to provide that buffering to the neighborhood. But I just want to make it clear that as the height perspective goes, it's not that we are... that we need the six stories because of the parking, we're actually choosing to reduce office square footage in order to park it adequately. This can still be a six-story building.

There was a comment made with regards to use, because it doesn't say, it could be 24 hours a day, what is the intended hours of operation?

Correct, as part of the TSTD, there is a list of permitted uses within office, There is medical uses. This is not intended to be a hospital use. There is no 24-plus hour use within this. This is truly medical professional office, medical uses, and ancillary uses that accompany medical. If you have a small cafeteria on the ground floor or a small store on the ground floor for patients that are waiting there, but this will be your standard medical office use.

Thank you. Okay. Being no other public comments, want to open up to the board? Comments? Online, any comments from board members online?

I have one comment for probably Mark. The issue here, I mean, this complies with our TS, whatever it is, TSDA and TSNA on all factors with the exception of the floor plate size on the top two stories. Is that right? And we're comfortable with that because... That's correct.

It does comply with every part of the TSDD. We did include a waiver process for design issues like this. As far as the floor plate, so I think that... And what the applicant is suggesting too, and we thought about this as well, if we were, first of all the waiver, we went through all the criteria of the waiver and we can see no realistic impacts other than a visual impact, which is something that will happen as the area grows anyway. One of the things would be that I think They are suggesting they could actually build more office. They could divide it into two towers. We considered all that and we thought that, well, it would be nice to have two towers. But in reality, what we're getting here is we're getting more parking. And again, because we are in a new code, because we are right at a neighborhood, we were really sensitive. about the parking, so we welcomed more parking. And the parking isn't really the reason for the waiver. The waiver is because of using the fifth and sixth floors efficiently. There's three floors of parking, and the bottom floor is also mostly commercial retail offices.

Got it. Thanks. I have a question with regards to the 20,000 square foot mark. To the limit on the floor plate of 20,000 square feet. So that's regardless of the size of the property. Above the fourth floor, it's limited to 20,000.

Correct. When we created the code, we had a lot of problems with this issue about massing on the towers and how to control it. We wanted to control it. We put in the floor plate limit. And around the same time, we decided to put in the waiver process because we knew it would not fit every circumstance very well. We have a number. I shouldn't really get into that. It's quasi-judicial. But we know that that would be used mostly for floor plates. So we now... have a process where we consider each time whether that larger floor plate makes sense whether it makes it a better product a project excuse me um and this all the things we went through we looked at the compatibility with the neighborhood does it make it doesn't go above six stories the building is actually under the height so we looked at all the criteria it doesn't make this any worse than any other part of the code It doesn't have an impact on the neighborhood in particular. They said they're still entitled to six floors. So with all those considerations, we looked at the floor plates and, well, it makes sense. It makes their project work for them. It allows them to have more parking. We do realize that doctors' offices have a great parking need. Again, going back to the code, we like to follow the code, but we also know the difference between a children's dentist and an adult dentist has vastly different needs on parking because they have different peaks. So medical office is a very, very difficult thing to control, and we do know that most developers of medical office will provide the amount of parking that they need. So again, we kind of accepted that knowledge. It's above our requirements. We don't like to see a lot of parking for TSDD, but again, we don't like to see parking overflow into the neighborhood even more. So that was why we had all these considerations. And rather than force this project into two towers of 20,000 square feet, which may cause a shortage of the parking, or maybe they would not have a shortage of parking, but they would have less parking, we might have overflow into the neighborhood. And again, as we went through this process, there was an earlier iteration of this design on the townhouses where the townhouse frontage was too large. And we said, you need to cut it down. So we looked at the townhouses as part of the transition. It's not only the height of them. And theirs are two stories, not three. But we made them cut those up as well so that we would impact the neighborhood as little as we can, at least from the street. Our goal was to have a street that was residential on both sides and felt residential. And for that, we accepted all of those considerations, looked at it very carefully, and said, this is the better option. This is the option that we want to see development in the edges. It's going to be the hardest area to... develop because we're on the edge of neighborhoods this block and the one to the south or the two hardest ones, and this was a project that we felt had gone to great extents to buffer the parking. The screening on the parking is very complete. There's landscaping. We have the townhouses. We have landscape coverage that will help with all of those things. So that was all the things we considered. And again, I mean, I know people have made a comment we could have forced it to comply, but we would probably get a worse project.

Thanks. Thank you. I would just make two observations after Mark's discussion, which is one, it's nice to see actually a developer who is thinking about the realities of parking, because we've had more people in front of us saying they won't need any parking at all, don't worry about it, than there has been people forward thinking the realities of a particular building. The other is the townhouse development. We have not had a lot of townhouse development in South Miami. It's one of my pet peeves, actually, which is that we have not really accommodated that particular product type. And so for those of you that have driven around unincorporated Miami-Dade, the High Pines area, and seeing some of the townhouse developments over there, they're first class, and they're nothing but additive to that neighborhood in terms of being a gateway to a neighborhood. It has not diminished the value at all. They get a pretty penny for these townhouses, so far be it from the neighborhood going the wrong way because of some multifamily development. That's just my perspective.

Thank you. So one of the positives is the fact that they could build 12 town homes on the back and they could be three stories high and it would be a solid wall facing the single family homes. The fact that the developer, after meeting with the city, took the initiative of basically almost doing duplexes, doing eight units, two stories high, really helps transition that. that the plus or minus additional 200 parking spaces is going to cost the developer approximately $6 million. $6 million that he doesn't have to invest in parking. But if he doesn't invest, all of us that have gone to medical office buildings for appointments know there's never enough parking. And those open parking lots that are around, they belong to somebody else. They don't belong to this project. So at the end of the day, people are going to go park wherever they can find a space. And so that's one of the other, they could break up the tower, still be six stories. So it doesn't change it. Uh, it falls. They, my concern is where did the 20,000 square feet come from? They explained that that's why they put the waiver process in because all properties are unique. So the developer, by doing what he did, really provided a product that I think will benefit the city, whether it's today, tomorrow, next year. I've been living in South Miami since 1989. 62nd Avenue is going to get developed, one way or the other. It's commercial. It's inevitable. It's going to happen. So I think it's a good project, and I, for one, think I'm supportive of it. Do I have a motion on this item?

I would make a motion to approve as presented.

Do I have a second? Motion to approve as presented as well. Okay, we have a motion and a second. Take a roll call. Marcus?

Yes.

Jay? Yes. Danny? Jose? Yes. Online, Christina?

Yes.

Michelle? No. Daniel? No. Yes. And I vote yes. So the item passes. Okay. Next item, Marcus.

Sure. Would you like to wait for everybody to clear out or do you want me to go to the next one?

We can wait a minute until the room clears. Okay, Marcus, we're ready whenever you are.

Okay. Item number two is PB-2025-008, in ordinance of the Mayor and City Commission of the City of South Miami, Florida, amending Article 8, Transit Support and Development District of the Land Development Code, to provide regulations for student housing within the TSDD, providing for corrections, severability, conflicts, implementation, and an effective date. This item will also be handled by Mr. Alvarez of the Cordino Group. Thank you.

Good evening again, Mark Alvarez of the Cordina Group, acting as planning staff for the City of South Miami. This is an ordinance. We had a meeting of the, there was a discussion item by the City Commission that wanted us to look into providing an ordinance or a change of the ordinance of the TSDD to allow student housing, which we do not explicitly allow student housing at the moment. And the ordinance,

then go forward.

I do have a presentation that doesn't work. Pardon? Can you just flip it to the next slide? There we go. So, the reason for doing this is to address, we have a need for student housing. We've had a number of applicants and property owners and investors come and say that they would like to have student housing in the downtown area. We also recognize that having student housing near the Metro Rail and of course near UM is an ideal situation because we would have students who are more willing to use transit, who are more willing to use alternative mobility, so we would like to place them there. By doing this, we would also place more people who need commerce, who need eateries, who want to go to restaurants and stores into the downtown, and that is one of our main goals. So we would activate the downtown with additional people, and again, young people. We kind of like that. It doesn't have to be all of us old people, or at least me. And also, and as a resident in South Miami, I can tell you, and it's not something that bothers me, but we all recognize that the number of houses in our neighborhoods that are becoming student housing is increasing all the time. And I can... walk with my dog and they see always another house with cars with different license plates. And a lot of people do have some objections to this. We haven't dealt with it because it's very hard to deal with. We think that this is more of a supply side answer to the problem where obviously we have a need for it so we can put students in the downtown and essentially we create the competition so that we don't have so much student housing in our neighborhoods and that would alleviate those problems without having to go through difficult to enforce regulations. Can you flip the slide, please? So what it is, is it's a type of co-housing. We call this co-housing. In other words, we are used to the idea of a housing unit has a family in it. The definition of family is changing in our times, but this would be for something that's not a family. These are typically multi bedrooms. Each bedroom is separate and private and they will share the common spaces. They share bathrooms. Sometimes they don't. They share the kitchen area. They share the living room area. It's very similar to an apartment except that the residents are students and that they are unrelated. Can you flip it please? So we had certain goals to create this ordinance. One of the most important goals was to establish the definition of student housing, which we have to define very carefully because we want to make sure that we have students using this housing and it doesn't become unrelated family, multi-family housing. We would have to establish enforceable criteria to define it. We have to limit the location. That was absolutely critical in our direction from the Commission, that we limit the location to be within walking distance of the metro rail, basically, but also to make sure that it's not within close distance of the edges of the downtown so that we don't impact the neighborhoods and don't have student housing popping up in those locations. We had to figure out how we would establish residential density because it is a residential use and we wanted to regulate parking and this will probably be the one of the bigger issues and finally we wanted to provide additional provisions and requirements for bicycle parking, and we would like to provide, and we did recommend additional provisions for shared use, mobility, or shared bicycle parking within these buildings.

Change of slide, please.

So our definition came down to this. It would be a residential land use, and it's always important for us to define whether it's residential or not. It is a housing only for college students, and it is a multi-student co-housing, as I explained. It's multiple unrelated people. They have one thing in common for each unit, that they're all students, and they all have to be students. that they would have individual bedrooms for each student. The individual, that each unit would be lockable at the door. So this is different from a dorm. So we don't have two students in a room and we don't have kind of open shared housing. It's just, it's an apartment. It's lockable at the door. Whoever's sharing the apartment locks their door. It's just like an apartment with unrelated people. We will define it as requiring unified management and the reason that we'll do that is because we're going to make sure that their students and everybody has to be a current student and that will be something that we can enforce with management to make sure that only students are living there and that the students will be enrolled at least at some time during the year. We're not gonna kick them out if they drop out for half a semester but they need to be enrolled for some part of the year. And that the leases, and this is also very important, the leases are not by the unit, they're by the bedroom. So that allows it, again, to be different from multifamily. We want to make this very distinct from the rest of multifamily definitions. Next slide, please. So as far as the location, the easiest way to do this and the most reliable and tractable way is to limit it to what we call the TODA sub-district or the transit-oriented development area. That would be the magenta, the dark pink area. which is our most intense and our most liberal area for uses. And we would limit it only to that area. That, of course, places all of it within walking distance to the metro rail. We didn't want to do circles and do things that we have to measure because it gets difficult. We made sub-districts for a reason, and we're going to use that. Next slide, please. In defining the residential use, again, I went through a lot of all this, but we would have a continuous, we would have hallways, we have a lockable door. As far as density goes, we are going to count each unit, each dwelling unit. So if there's four bedrooms in the unit, that's a unit, and that'll count as one for residential density. That's more of an issue for us that we just have to keep track of what our density is. That the maximum number of bedrooms will be established, and we used four. And then each bedroom would be limited to one student. So again, this is not a dorm, one student per bedroom. And finally, that each bedroom, we established a minimum of 180 square feet. We're open to any changes on that, but that comes out to about 13 and a half feet square. It's about what a bedroom would be with a closet. It's actually a little small if you include the closet these days. So we didn't want to have extremely small rooms. Next slide, please. Parking. So this is something that we spent a lot of time on and probably did our best to have a conclusive answer. When we look at parking studies from around the country for student parking, one of the problems is if you look in IT parking generation, or if you look at all the studies, most colleges control parking. So it's not a free parking system. So the data is not easily comparable across cities, across places. We decided to look at one quarter space per bedroom, which comes out to about one space per unit. We do know that There's a lot of self-selection for the students. I mean, if they come to live here and they don't have a space for a car, or we don't mind if they want to charge a fee for it, they will bring their car. They'll leave it at home in Michigan or New York or wherever. We want this to be for students who are going to use the metro, use a shared scooter or bicycle to go to the campus. We don't want people taking their cars as much as possible. But we do also need to provide the space for those who do. And then we provide a little incentive to allow, typically in the downtown and the TSDD, we've allowed a 5% of the parking spaces, can be two wheeled spaces. It's kind of giving allowance because we see so many scooters, I'm talking about the scooters that are gas scooters. around town and they take up less space and we encourage that, we're allowing 10% of those spaces to be scooter spaces. So again, it's a little bit of an incentive and we're trying to hit that number the right way. But again, the comparables are very difficult because they're all from controlled situations. Every college controls their parking with price. When they don't have enough parking, they raise the price. You know how it works. So we started with a quarter space per unit, or per bedroom, excuse me. Oh, next slide please. We went too many. There's one last slide, that's it. So we also would like mobility options. This is all about providing people who are more likely to use different mobility options and to use those mobility options. We understand from the student housing that's already in the downtown, the county building, Again, this is just what the management has told us that many of the students do not use cars. Not so many, maybe like 10% they think are using the metro, but most are getting around some other way. And we're fine with that. We would like to support the metro rail, but we also want to support some of the other ways of getting around. So one of the requirements that we put in is that we have bicycle dock space or shared bicycle dock space on the premises, one per 15 bedrooms. One, and that could be an outside vendor, and again, we're trying to also provide support for these kinds of mobility options to locate in downtown, because we're creating a market for them. We would require one outdoor bicycle rack per 15 dwelling units, per 15 units, not bedrooms, and then one indoor storage space for every four bedrooms, allowing the students who live there to also be able to put their bicycles, because they're not gonna fit in the 180-square-foot bedroom. So we want to have a secure place to put all the bicycles. We want students to use these other ways of getting around town and going to school. And that's it. So the ordinance is before you. I've covered all the things that are in there. If you want to ask questions, I'm completely open to that.

And I do believe we have... Do you have a presentation?

Okay, okay. All right, we don't have a presentation, so...

Do we have any public comments on this item?

I do, but I'm going to wait until after they've talked.

I'll be brief, Javier Avignon with the law firm of Bills and Sundberg, joined by my colleague Alex Simo, 1450 Bercow Avenue, joined together today by our client, Alta Development. We wanna first start off by thanking the commission for working or asking staff to go through and identify this use and define it more clearly. We think it's very well done, so thank you to staff. for doing that. Today we're just proposing one friendly amendment. It has to do with one of the items that Mark had in his presentation, which is the number of bedrooms, the maximum number of bedrooms. Based on our data, having done this throughout many other communities, throughout the country of a similar scale. Five bedrooms is really, there's at least a subset or a need to have up to five bedrooms. So what we've proposed here is a very small change that would allow up to a maximum of 10% of the total units so that it's not the entire building that would go up to five bedrooms or be allowed to go to five bedrooms. but a very small percentage. That'll give you a balance to allow for two bedroom types, three bedroom types, four bedroom types, and up to five bedroom types. That obviously changes the price per bedroom. These are leased on a per bedroom basis, and that's how the regulations are crafted. So it will allow for those five bedroom units to be more moderately priced than, for instance, a two bedroom unit. and folks can choose based on what their preferred use is. It doesn't change any of the other criteria. So the parking requirements would be applicable to a five-bedroom at the same rate that a four-bedroom is, so you're not reducing the parking or reducing any of the other requirements items like the way that unit sizes are calculated. So nothing else changes other than a small request to go to up to five bedroom which again will allow for some additional flexibility. We've already presented this in advance to the city attorney as well as to staff. We understand that there might be some tweaks that maybe could be made between your recommendation to the commission and first and second reading of commission and we're open to that. but we wanted to propose a friendly amendment. So with that, unless you have questions for us, we will bring it back to you.

I think we have questions for staff. Okay. I have a question. I just want to make sure there's no one online. Is there anyone online that wants to speak on this side or from the public? Okay, there being none, I'm going to close public comment, open it up to the board. Board members?

How did you arrive at the original four-bedroom per unit maximum?

We actually just wanted to establish a maximum. So when we had looked around at various... I did a lot of research in other places that have these. I saw that four was kind of a... The high number, I will admit, while I was preparing the presentation, I saw one, I don't recall where it was, it had five. So what was more important to us was that we establish a maximum, a reasonable maximum. It wasn't necessarily a four head to the other.

Right, but it sounds like it wasn't based on some study. It was just kind of a... looking around what else is available that's similar.

Right, and it's a fairly new, it's growing very rapidly, but it's a fairly new type of use that's coming into the market. Sure. So there's no formal studies that we know of.

Sure, and forgive me, I didn't catch your name, but the gentleman had mentioned that you would have the same number of parking spaces per bedroom, right? That would just carry over from a four unit to a five unit. But some of the bicycle requirements were based on units, not bedrooms. So would that be affected if you had a higher density of bedrooms per unit?

No, the bicycles switched, so there was a requirement for the bicycles owned by students, the indoor bicycle storage, was by the bedroom. The ones for visitors that were outside the building or for shared use were by the unit. Okay, so they were per bedroom.

Yeah. And then if you have a minimum bedroom size of 180 square feet, if you had more bedrooms per unit, would that adversely affect the common area? Are there minimums for... kitchen, living room, bathrooms, or would those just gradually get smaller because we have to fit another 180 square foot bedroom?

So the same concern, and the important thing was that we wanted to establish a minimum. If it was... We ended up after the first reading and the second reading at a minimum of 150 or a minimum of 200. It's kind of big, but that would be fine. What was most important was to establish a minimum. What we don't want is like a sleeping closet. Right.

No, I understand that, but what I'm asking is are there minimum protections for the areas of the apartment that are not bettered?

No, no. In other words, a minimum apartment size or an amount per bedroom.

Common area, so dining room, kitchen, that kind of thing.

We could take that suggestion and amend the ordinance with a common area. That would go some amount per bedroom.

Right, because if we're taking a bunch of four-bedroom apartments and chopping them up and turning them into five-bedroom apartments without making them bigger, I think that would have an adverse effect.

I think, to JR's point, I think you also need to look at that from the two, three, four, all the way up. So does the common area support larger numbers of bedrooms and stay the same, or does the common area bigger with the two, and so I don't want to be overly restrictive. I know this has been a successful model. I think the thesis operates this way down not far from here, and I don't know if you guys had your hands in that, I'm curious, Mark, in your studies, have you looked at the thesis, which I think is a direct comparable to what you're talking about here, and what they're doing and how they're doing it?

Is the thesis an FIU one?

No, no, it's right across the street from University of Miami. And they also, they don't specifically have the lockout bedroom feature built into it. My understanding is you only get in there by subleasing one of the two bedrooms that comes available each year, so nobody actually ever rents the full unit again. And so this is where this comes from, which is you can rent each one individually and keep the roommates from fighting each other when they break up.

We are requiring that they rent each one individually. Yeah, I understand.

I'm just curious whether you've looked at them all from a model because they've got the same common area issues and it's almost 100% student housing is my understanding and observation.

And again, a key consideration is we want to keep it as 100% student housing. Like I said, I mean, the language of the ordinance has that student has to be enrolled for some part of the year of that lease again consider that sometimes people leave or they take a break or we don't want to kick people out like at the end of the month so there is a requirement and we put into the code that we would be those records will be available for us to inspect from the management that to make sure that it's all students As far as the thesis goes, I'll check that. These are relatively new inventions that we're working with here, so I'm open to all suggestions.

Do other cities have this particular piece of an ordinance drafted for this eventuality? Like, for instance, if the Gables have something like this?

There are other cities that either have drafted something or are drafting it. And there are a number of cities that permit it. I haven't gone into to really look if they're specifying it as something different. However, our direction from the commission, and I would agree, is that we want this to be something separate from multifamily residential. Otherwise, we will not be able to control this so easily. If it gets mixed in with multifamily residential, we have no way to keep it within the TODA area.

So our concern as a city is that you get you know, two people per bedroom, you know, so instead of being a four-person, four-bedroom unit, you end up with eight people in four bedrooms and you have no way to regulate that.

Right, and that's part of why we consider the idea, one, that the leases are by the bedroom and we can inspect the leases so we can see this is a five-bedroom unit, there should be five leases or less, and so forth.

Does this also serve to consolidate student housing, to try to get it all in one area, one building, as opposed to all over the place?

That's where we want to go with it. This was brought up because there was demand, but I know as residents of the city, we all know that it would be a great way to try to consolidate student housing and not have it spread out into the neighborhoods as it is right now. Plus, fun for students.

The other thing that JR mentioned I thought was interesting is you've got a number of places referred to it by the unit and by the bedroom. I would urge you to make sure those are consistent. I would stick with one or the other. That's just my opinion, but. And it doesn't seem like you're requiring a boatload of bicycle racks and things like that in there. If you were to look at them on a per-bedroom basis, I think one bicycle rack per 15 bedrooms or something. Yeah, it doesn't seem like that. They better damn well ride their bike more than that.

I'm decades removed from being a student, but I do feel like one parking spot for a four or five bedroom apartment and then minimal bike space does seem kind of prohibitive. And I get that we're trying to attract the right kind of people, but in Miami, a city that to me would be really tough to live in without a car, is that realistic? I mean, again, it was a long time since I was a student, but that wouldn't have flown with me back in the day.

Yeah, I know. For us, this kind of student housing didn't exist, right?

And we still only have a one-line metro rail.

And that's what I was going to say. We are in a very fortunate position that we are near a metro rail stop.

Nobody knows where I want to go is. That's my issue. So to JR's point. I'm very skeptical you go with one. So I would suggest you add, whether you do it by the unit or whatever, but you need to add some additional parking to anticipate, because otherwise, where are they gonna park? So let's just say you go with one, and I would be surprised if the developers wouldn't feel somewhat the same way, except for the cost involved in the parking spots, is how do you deal with the second student out of four, or out of five now, because we're talking about the ones that have a car, they're gonna park in all our abundant garages right now?

Especially considering that UM is relatively affluent, I would expect our students to have a car.

I used to go to UM and I have colleagues and friends that are professors at UM and I know there is a need for this type of housing. So overall, I agree that we should have some kind of solution to get. I know there's students that are like currently at hotel rooms and things like that because they don't have adequate housing at UM. But I just want to. you know, I agree with the other board members. I think the parking is an issue. I used to go to UM. I mean, it was difficult to find parking as a student there. So I can only imagine like those cars have to go somewhere once they have to go home. So I do think that maybe that's too, you know, we need more parking. And then the other thing I wanted to ask, and I don't know if it's something that should go into this, the code or not, but You know, I have family members that are currently in college and they have a similar setup where they rent out rooms. And then I had one family member that was trying to sublease their room. So is, I don't know if that's something that should be managed, you know, through the, I guess, the management company that's overseeing these leases, or if it's something that should be in the code in terms of restricting who they sublease or even being able to sublet their apartments. to someone else?

The main reason for the leases by the room is part of distinguishing it as something as an entirely different type of residential from all other multifamily residential. It's a difficult thing, because to monitor it, of course, we would have to inspect records. But it's the only way that we can make student housing something different than multifamily housing. Otherwise, I mean, they don't look exactly the same, but they look similar. I mean, a multifamily unit and a student unit, for all practical purposes, are about the same thing. There's a common area, there's a common kitchen, maybe a shared bathroom, maybe private ensuite bathrooms. They are more or less the same thing, but they are marketed and operated differently. So that's the only thing we can rely on to distinguish it. Otherwise, we would open up to allowing student housing to be almost anywhere where we have multifamily, and we're trying to not do that.

Mark, I think you left out also you're requiring in the proposed code proof of enrollment.

Right, yeah, and that goes with the lease, and that would be on the management company's requirement. And again, the proof of enrollment would not be for the exact current time, but sometime during that school year.

Sure, like what my dad used to ask me for, of limited quality. I'm all for this. I think the parking piece needs to be addressed. So if this was multifamily non-student, how many spaces would we require for something that was going to have that amount of occupancy? So, Christina, any more comments?

Any comments from other board members online?

Pardon, through the chair, I've had my hand up for a little bit.

Yeah, I see that. That's why I'm asking.

Sorry, Jay.

Appreciate that. Jay was just taking control of the floor. We've got to control him.

Thank you. Thank you. I apologize if my audio or visual is limited. I'm 7 hours ahead of y'all. So I'm just trying to chime in and participate. So, the Carmen, the common area question, I wouldn't be too concerned about. I think it does come down to the per room conversation. I think we have this happening all around us. Unfortunately, I have it happening in my neighborhood. In single family homes, and I would like to stop seeing that. So providing a solution for this. I think it adds a value. So, I think the parking conversation is something that we all need to get used to. It is changing. It's evolving drastically. My daughter is a good example. We live 2 and a half blocks from UM, and she must have a car when she was going to UM and it was unreasonable because she really didn't need it. So, I think we can adapt to the parking requirement. We can adapt to the per room requirement. And I think it's a valuable thing because it's happening all around us, all around our city, it's happening. So why don't we just have it happen in our city and stop having it happen in our neighborhoods, which is what we're seeing. We have three, four houses in my neighborhood that rent rooms and nobody's doing anything about it. So let's provide that solution. I think this is a great opportunity.

Thank you, Dana.

I have a silly question. Go ahead. Can we even restrict who's able to rent in a building or not?

Yes. If it's student housing, we can control it. If somebody applies for a permit that says...

I prefaced it by saying it's a silly question.

It's not a silly question. There are multiple laws that we have to comply with, but we do believe that student housing is something that we can regulate, yes. There's lots of forms of housing restrictions that are not permitted, but this isn't one of them. We can do this. Thank you.

So being an architect, I actually had a client that was going to do a student housing project near FIU because the parking requirements were so lenient. They can only require one parking space for every two beds. During the course of him doing his due diligence on the property, the city of Sweetwater changed the zoning to make it one bedroom for every bed a parking space. Why? Because people were parking All over the place, this fantasy that students don't have cars. Is a fantasy, so if this moves forward, I'm going to build a parking garage for all the students that are going to have parking and make money that way.

Through the chair, I would say that it's a fantasy if you're 10 miles or 5 miles from your. School, but if you're a mile from your school, it's happening. Because my daughter had a car and she would not take her car to school. Yeah, so it's, it's, it's real.

Yeah, but I think it's different than your, your daughter's living.

So, Matt, Matt, I didn't interrupt.

I'm saying the proximity of this property to the university is relevant.

I didn't interrupt you when you were speaking. So I would appreciate the same courtesy. Thank you.

No, agreed. I wanted to put that in there.

Thank you. Okay. And these are buildings across the street from FIU. So it's not like they're having to go very far. So parking, to me, is a concern. And if we're basing, whether you have 100 four-bedroom units or 200 two-bedroom units, it's 400 beds. I don't understand why we're doing density based on units. The density should be based on number of beds. you can say the maximum bedroom size would be four, but let the developer who knows the mix that works well financially decide whether he wants one bedroom units, two bedroom units, three bedroom units, or four bedroom units to kind of force him to have a five bedroom unit so then he can have two bedroom units It's illogical, in my opinion. If everything is tied to beds, parking requirements are tied to beds, right? One parking for every four beds. It doesn't matter if it's two bedrooms or one four-bedroom. It's tied to beds. I think the density should be tied to the number of beds and not to the number of units. At the end of the day, it's the same number.

Right. Well, the density is tied to the unit because that's how we normally do it for multifamily.

This is not multifamily. But this is not multifamily.

We will get to a very... We're tying the bicycles parking to the number of beds.

We're tying the number of parking spaces to the number of beds. The only thing that we're not tying to the number of beds is the density.

Why? Well, for every place else, how we define density is by the unit. And unraveling that may be a difficult spot to put ourselves in. Because then we could easily have a development with, say, 200 units with a density of 1,000. No, no, no.

I'm telling you, if you're limited to 400 beds based on your lot size, it doesn't matter whether it's 200 beds that are being done in, let's say 400 beds. Whether you have 400 beds in 100 units or 400 beds in 200 units, it's 400 beds. It doesn't matter. What I'm saying is why are you restricting and saying you have to have a maximum of four so that now you're telling them you've got to have four bedrooms. The market may say we want to have more two bedrooms because that's what rents better. So now they're forced to have less beds because you're tying the density to the units. So if I can only do 100 units.

I understand what you're saying.

If I can only do 100 units but the market says people want two bedroom units and I do 50 units of two bedrooms and 50 units of four bedrooms, I just gave up rentable space because I'm tied to the unit, not to the bed.

Understood. But I would counter because we count density in terms of everything else. And for state requirements, we count density as a unit. And we accept an average for this area of about 2.5 people per unit. That's how we count density.

But that's, again, you use multifamily as your example for density. This is not multifamily, this is student housing.

Chairman, I don't know the answer to the question you're posing, but to Mark's last point, it was a point I wanted to make. There's a lot of state law and state regulation that all tie density to development per unit. And so I don't know the answer. I don't know that that's a must or a may, but that's just generally the way it's done in the state law and in most every municipality, every government I know. So I mean, we could research that, see if it's a possibility. I don't know the answers to why it's done that way, but that's the way it's been done.

And that's why they're asking for the five bedrooms so that they can have different size units so that they're not tied. Remember, they want to maximize the number of beds. Right. So, and again, going back to the bedrooms, I'm sorry.

That was Christina bedroom as a unit because I see that it's the unit is the, the whole. I guess apartment, right? And then there's 4 beds in it. And you can't define unit differently.

The unit will be the number of beds behind a lockable door that includes common space. We want to have some kind of maximum number of bedrooms. If it's 5 or 4. that's not as important as just have a maximum, because here's the problem. And I don't think it'll happen based on the market that we have to think of all kinds of possibilities that we could have from 100 years ago, the kind of place where you just have 10 beds in a row. We don't want that in a corridor. So we have to provide some limits. There's not a lot to go on here. Like I said at the beginning, whether it's four or five, it doesn't matter. We just want to have a maximum. We want to make sure we have a reasonable living standard, a minimum size room, a maximum number of bedrooms per unit. At the recommendation of this board, we can change those numbers, but we really feel strongly about having those maximums and minimums.

I understand now the issue with regards to density and state law and all that fun stuff, but I would like to give the ultimate flexibility to the people that are going to be building these units so that they can get rented out. Because if you're telling them, you know, four bedrooms, they're going to build them all four bedrooms because that's the maximum number of beds they're going to get. But they may have a market that says they want two bedroom units. And basically they're going to lose density at that point. Not density, beds. And you're renting and you're leasing by bed, not by unit.

Right before our impacts, it would be the same as a studio.

What I would recommend is that the maximum size could be six beds. That gives them more flexibility to have smaller units. That would be my recommendation.

We can see how many are an average beehive.

I mean, we're getting down to kind of the number. If the board wants to recommend six, we will carry that forward. We just want to have some kind of maximum.

No, I understand the density issue and state law and all that, but I'm trying to provide the maximum flexibility to the people that are going to be building these units. that are rentable. They know the market. They know whether it should be two bedrooms or four bedrooms. And so if we're tying the density to the number of units, that's given the ultimate flexibility. I doubt there's a market for six bedroom units. Who knows, maybe there is, I don't know. But they're asking for five so that they have flexibility now where they can do a three and a two, right? So that's why they're using because they understand the market better than we do. So that's something that I'm recommending that we should consider. The parking definitely is gonna be an issue at one space for every four beds. I don't think it works.

I mean, based on- Through the chair? Yeah. Thank you for acknowledging. Um, I, I'm confused because I thought the concern was the parking and I, I, I tend to agree with your, your, your analysis. On the number of beds or rooms. So, I wanted to understand how does that correlate back to the previous conversation of the, of the, of the parking concern.

The parking is irrelevant whether it's a four bedroom unit, a two bedroom unit, a six bedroom unit. The parking is tied to one parking space or four beds. So if you have two two bedroom units, it's one parking space. If you have one four bedroom unit, it's one parking space. So the beds and the parking don't change. I'm just trying to give more flexibility to the developer and not losing beds because we're tying the density to a four bedroom unit. And every time he does a two bedroom unit, he loses two beds. That's all I'm saying.

I just want to understand this correctly. Because right now what's in here is we've tied the parking to the beds. Yes. And it comes out more or less about the same as the parking requirement for that TOTA sub-district. But you were recommending that we would tie it to the units.

No, no, no. I'm not saying that. I'm answering his question. The other way. The parking's tied to the beds, right? Right. So if you have two two-bedroom units and one four-bedroom units, you still have one parking space, right? It doesn't matter. It's all tied to the beds. That's what I was trying to explain to him.

That doesn't sound even remotely reasonable when you think about it. So you're going to have one two-bedroom unit you can rent with a parking space and one without. That's based on your description. That'll be marketable in Miami. You could theoretically do that. It seems like there's a few things that need to get reworked here.

I don't think we're there yet.

I think I'm understanding your concern but remember that we count fractions of density, right? Don't we in our town? So could we do a two bedroom unit counts as half a unit for density purposes? Could we do that in our code?

So I think what Mr. Miller was suggesting is that the way it's written right now, let's say you had a building that had two units and there was two bedrooms in each unit, you could have one parking space and that would be one for only one unit because the way it's written, you could average it. We can change that so that there's at least one per unit, and then we can still meter in the bedrooms.

Or one per two beds. I mean, this goes back to the earlier comment, which is we're bouncing between beds and units, and I think you've got to kind of use one totality, right, and just stick with it.

We could do it the same way we do multifamily. And we could just right now for that sub-district, multifamily is a studio is 3 quarters of a space. So one bedroom would be the worst possible situation for the developer, 3 quarter of a space. For one bedroom, it's also three quarters of the space. For two bedrooms, we require one space or half per bedroom. And then for three bedrooms, we require one space. Remember, we're in that district that's the most liberal on parking. We could just do it that way. We could just say for... I just think it has to be reworked.

I don't think it's realistic to think, and I appreciate what Mr. Guerra was saying about what his daughter uses going to and from campus, but Miami is more than going to and from campus. And so if you look at the hordes of people driving to and from University of Miami to elsewhere, uh in the city or the county it's a lot and so i'm very skeptical the one space for every four beds is going to get the job done that's the right and my ultimate goal is that we come up with an ordinance that promotes students wanting to rent here

To get them out of our neighborhoods because I have had them, thank God, that finally the house was sold. But for the longest time, I had neighbors next door that I got tired of calling the police. So I want to make sure that what we do encourages students to rent, encourages developers to build. I don't want to... I think there's a lot more discussion that needs to be had with developers on this item with regards to realistic parking, realistic unit mixes, so that we can maximize the density, maximize the number of rooms, maximize the number of parking so that it works. I, for one, am not supportive of this item today. We're gonna take a vote, but I think there's a lot. I love the idea, because it gets in our neighborhoods, we need to go back and revisit it so that it makes sense that it encourages developers to build and encourages students to rent. That's what we want. Okay. So any other comments or questions?

Through the chair? Yes, sir. If you don't believe this is fully cooked, should we defer this item instead of voting it down?

Or they can withdraw it. Marcus, can it be withdrawn? Or do we have to vote it down?

Your mic.

Is it going to go to the board anyway?

It's going to go to the commission anyway. My advice would be if you have constructive advice, give that advice so that the commission can consider it.

My recommendation to the commission would be to vote it down.

And that's my worry is that it seems like the consensus is to vote it down. And with that said, should we defer it so that maybe the commission defers it?

Correct. You can defer it for further consideration at your next meeting. Do I have a motion to come back with some ideas?

Do I have a motion on the floor for this item, one way or the other?

Through the chair, I'd ask for the legal counsel to tell us what would be the best course of action, because I see it voting down, so should we just defer it to let the counsel decide?

So I was gonna add that Assistant City Attorney Edward Martos is correct. If you vote it down, it goes with a recommendation and it goes to commission. If you approve it, it goes to commission. If you defer it, you have a chance to request whatever changes you want made. There is a time clock that starts though. I believe it starts, and you have 45 days to review it, and if no motion or result comes from that, then it automatically goes to commission after that 45-day period.

It seems to me if we deferred it, can you within 30 days to the next meeting, because I don't want to keep kicking this thing down the road. That's not the goal. because I think we all agree that we have a need for something like this. It's just how it's drafted. Can you get it back to us based on our comments, make some adjustments to something you think we can recommend or at least put on the floor?

Yes. Most of your comments are fairly straightforward. It's just how we measure and being more consistent. The parking, we'll just have to research and we'll probably still debate it.

Okay.

we have a comment from the with that said that i make a motion to defer

Hang on, Danny, we got one more public comment. We have one more public comment? Yeah, it's the same guy that only asked for one more unit, so.

I'll take the six that the chair was proposing. Just for what it's worth, and you're probably not gonna love hearing this information, but just for the record, we are working with a development partner that's done over 100,000 student housing units throughout the country, right? And so we have a fair amount of in-house data points And just from a data perspective, I know that everybody believes Miami is extremely different than every other market, but based on all of these other data points, the parking that's actually proposed, which is fairly in line with what multifamily already requires, is actually much higher than what their data shows is required. And even more so, when you're located within a distance from a university that you're targeting. So based on that point, I will tell you that the data shows that much less parking is actually required. I think to Mr. Miller's point, there is an opportunity to put in more bicycle parking. That is probably a lower ask than what is there. In fact, what we modeled out now for a particular site in South Miami shows a much higher amount of bicycle and scooter parking, but the actual residential parking is much less.

That's weird because the student housing is directly across the street from FIU, and the city changes parking requirements.

I think FIU's a little bit of a different market, perhaps, as far as it is a much more suburban area as far as connectivity. There is no metro component there. that you don't have the same sort of urban centers that you have in close proximity in South Miami. South Miami is connected via metro very, very easily to Brickell, downtown, et cetera. It's not the same as FIU. So I understand your point. I agree with you. FIU is a different area. It is a much more suburban, spread out area where the need for a student to have a car is probably much higher than it is in an area like South Miami.

I mean, like I say, my concern is that we approve a product that then People don't want to rent a parking.

Trust me, from a developer's perspective, why would they want to build something that's going to have these deficiencies? Just another data point, there's a rental component to renting a parking space just like there is in many residential buildings, and so there's value to the parking space. I'm not here to argue that they wouldn't collect dollars from the parking space, but they can't collect them if they can't rent them. It doesn't serve them to have empty parking spaces. I know that a lot of folks don't want to hear that, but these developments that are built with more parking, an empty parking doesn't produce any dollars ultimately for the development.

And I'm going to defer because I believe in the fact that they are doing this, but one of the things we have at UM is we have very affluent students who can afford to have really nice cars.

Yeah.

They also can afford the other modes of transportation like Ubers and Lyfts and everything else that other of us may measure ourselves with where they perhaps have a higher budget for those uses. I think some of those folks are also coming, some of those affluent students that at University of Miami are also coming from other communities where they're accustomed. to using other modes of transportation and less accustomed to using cars. So to Mr. Guerra's point, I think that might not be what we all are accustomed to. My gray beard clearly shows that I am not in that phase, but I do have a college-age student that doesn't have a car where he's located. So that is the market, so I can only give you guys that market data point. I say that because I know you're asking the planning staff to review the parking, and candidly, this was higher already than what, that's why we didn't push to reduce it, but it's already higher than our data reviews.

Is the experience with the housing they're talking about, is it on campus or off campus?

I'm sorry?

On campus or off campus?

It's off campus. All off campus. Yeah, it's off campus housing. Yeah, usually within a very specific radius from those, you know, from those centers.

And in those settings, is there available parking beyond that? Because this is a very urban site, right? So if you don't have parking here, there's no parking anywhere else, unless there's a parking garage. But if you're in a rural site, more like let's say an FIU, whether you have other options, people end up parking in the street. Right? So again, I just want to make sure that we have a product that people are going to want to build and that people are going to want to rent.

No, I understood. And that's ultimately our goal as well. Those units will not, or those bedrooms, however we choose to ultimately define them, will not get rented if the market requires for there to be parking associated with them.

We don't need another confident enough that we don't need another sunset place. Understood we don't need something that at the end of the day. It's not going to work because there's not enough parking.

Understood and that's not our, our goal either, but we also don't want an empty sunset place because it doesn't work. Right? So it's, you know.

Okay. All right. Through the chair, if I, if I could. Um, so I, I think the conversation is is 2 fold, right? Is is we have a. A restriction within our zoning that limits the parking garages to 4 floors. Uh, which limits what is capable or not on on properties. Um, and and so if we don't want to. Deviate from that and making a property viable and then we also don't want to deviate from reducing parking as. Automation of automated cars and Uber and other things are happening. Um, you know, we need to, we need to think this through. So. since i don't believe we can reach an impasse here or or bridge an impasse uh i would say that we should defer this uh for further so i would make a motion to defer okay there's a motion second second roll call christina yes michelle yes daniel i second it yes

Oh, yes. Yes. And yes, so this has been deferred. So what I'm gonna ask is at the next presentation, I would love to see data on student housing in urban centers and the parking ratio on those and the unit mix, if it's two bedroom, three bedroom, four bedroom. I want us to make an intelligent decision with an intelligent recommendation so that we have a successful project in our community. That's the goal. We want you guys to make money, we want to get all the students out of our neighborhoods, and we want them to be somewhere else.

Make no mistake, we support this kind of, I mean, here amongst us, we support this. We're skeptical that a city that relies on one single line of metro rail to count as mass transit. I love mass transit. I'm probably the only person that rides it from here in my age to Brickell City Center to go out to dinner or whatever and wishes it would go other places. It doesn't, and it won't for any time very soon. And so we want to see some samples on the parking issue that aren't urban New York, urban Chicago, urban D.C., where they have much better situations than we do from a mass transit standpoint, that also are not rural. So your challenge is to find good comparables that shows that this will hold up.

Through the chair?

Yes.

Thank you for acknowledging, um, I would say to that as well is that we have to consider that then if there's a viable option to develop a property. And it needs an additional floor or 2 further from our zoning to make it viable because of the parking requirement. That may be something we have to consider. So I just, I leave that for food for thought because if we're going to restrict the parking. Uh, because of the density, we, we may have to consider increasing the parking because we want to make sure people can get to Kendall date and and derail and everyone else.

Understood. Okay.

Chairman, I just want to clarify for the record that, uh, the deferral is to the next meeting. Yes.

So the next board meeting that is, um. Tuesday, October 14th, for the record, that's when we'll do it. Thank you. Okay. Do I have a motion for approval of the meeting minutes of August 12th?

Motion to approve.

Second.

Second. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any nays? No. Meeting is adjourned. Actually, hold on.

Marcus, do you have any other items? We had a section called Public Comment, New Business. Okay, I'm sorry.

I just wanted to make a quick comment about the parking issue that we're discussing right now. I mean, I think that... The planning theory is about transit-oriented districts, and the reason why some of the parking percentages are so low is because the intent of it is to limit the parking and maximize the use of transit. Now I understand that we all want to be very comfortable in our parking, and I understand that, but I'm just saying when we set up a transit-oriented district, most zoning codes do not allow you to go beyond what the minimum allowed. So I think that's what forces the students, I was on the metro today, there were like a million students, like a million, because there's the two places right now that have the things. So I think that while you do wanna satisfy the developer to what they wanna do, my point is that I think with all the projects you have coming up, you should limit the parking to what the maximum is allowed in the code. Because that's what the planning theory, and this is not my thinking. This is what planning theory is. You allow the transit districts to be very, very high, very dense, and you limit the parking because then you facilitate the public transit.

We're all in agreement, but Jay said it, we're very limited on our public transit. It's not like we're in Chicago, New York, Boston, DC, where there actually is mass transit. We have one line.

I know, but we have that, and it's completely underused. So I'm saying to you, that was my point about the other project, is that I think it's... I know that developers would like to... Of course, it's much better to rent. They get more money for spaces that have more value, but I think it's counterproductive to what you have been setting up here, which is a dense downtown, which is going to be... Otherwise, you're going to have too much traffic, and it's going to be, like, very... It's going to be just, you know, gridlocked.

I think that... To the Chair's point, we want to make it so that we're not looking so far ahead that the near term has them still parking 10 cars on a residential lot, turning a single family home into a dorm, which you don't have to get very far beyond the TODD to find houses that are having to happen right now. And so we don't want to be the guys that make that worse near term.

No, I understand. I meant the general agreement. No, no. Yeah.

It's right on. We're on agreement. Totally. Yeah, we're on agreement. But what we don't want is another sunset place, another white elephant where we build something and there's not enough parking and nobody wants to rent there.

I also think it's important to distinguish that... a four-bedroom apartment that's occupied by a family, on average, is gonna have less potential drivers than a four-bedroom apartment occupied by people who aren't related.

Oh, I agree. There's more probability of...

So to compare, oh, well, it's the same as a regular multifamily apartment in the district, I don't think is a fair comparison. No, I would agree.

We want it to be successful.

Most students use Uber. I mean, just because I see it in front of my house, the two buildings that are students... You know, they all use Uber over there.

Not the ones that were renting the house next to me. There were four of them living there. There were four cars. I wish it was only four cars. Sometimes there were six or seven cars. So thank you very much. Okay, with that being said, the meeting is adjourned.