Author: chogan@directresearch.com

In Post #245, I described the surprise that occurred at the most recent Board of Architectural Review (BAR) meeting.   Read that if you need the background.  Briefly: The building that the BAR passed was not the same as the building that the Town Council approved.

I described what happened, I did not talk about how that happened.  And because of that omission, some people got the wrong impression.  Case in point: A reader asked me how the Director of Planning and Zoning could have allowed a mistake like that to occur.

This made me realize that I should just lay out the situation, as I see it, as clearly as possible.  Even if it seems a little rude to some people.  Because that wasn’t a mistake. Continue reading Post #253: Clarification for Post 245, the BAR meeting

See just-prior post for background. For this meeting, I stayed home and watched it via streaming.  My “pirated” copy of the Town’s video is available in this Google Docs directory.  (I recorded it as I streamed it.  The file is about 1.5 gbytes, “2019-04-24 Planning Commission …”)

I’m going to note some times at which various events take place in that recording, in lieu of my usual “index” file for the video recording.

The motion is for extending the MAC moratorium to November 15th.  I had incorrectly said October in my prior posting.

The motion for extending the MAC moratorium passed with little discussion.  For the Sunrise Assisted Living facility, the Planning Commission voted to keep the public hearing open, so that members of the public will have a chance to speak on this topic again at the May 8 2019 meeting of the Planning Commission.  Presumably, the Planning Commission will vote on the Sunrise facility at that time.

Detail follows.

Continue reading Post #252: 4/24/2019 Planning Commission meeting

Tonight at 8 PM in Town Hall, the Planning Commission will hold public hearings on extending the moratorium on new MAC applications through October, and on a proposed Sunrise Assisted Living facility at Maple and Center.

I have decided that I don’t have anything worth saying.  So I will watch this this one at home.  You can see the broadcast live on Cox channel 27 on Cox or Verizon FIOS channel 38, or over the internet at this link (which only works for me with Chrome, but YMMV).

The extension of the moratorium is, I think, strictly pro-forma. Note that this not about what the Town should be doing, about MAC zoning, while the moratorium is in place.  This is just about whether or not to extend the moratorium.  As far as I can tell, this is merely the Town going through the legal motions required to extent the moratorium.  My only comment would be yes, please extend it.  Nobody needs to hear that.

On the Sunrise facility, I thought that the key issue was the 5th floor, and Town staff have pre-emptively made the mezzanine 5th floor legal in this case. Per the staff, it’s OK to separate the mezzanine from the floor below, with a wall, as long as the wall has some windows in it.  And I don’t mean “windows” as in openings, I’m pretty sure I mean “windows” as in “panes of glass set into the wall”.  And so, in Vienna, that constitutes “being open to the floor below”.

In the earlier drawings you could clearly count the five floors, but Sunrise went out of its way partially to disguise that in later drawings.  And they are asking for an extra-tall fence so you largely won’t be able to see the five-floor exteriors of the building.  So … not much value in complaining to the Planning Commission about that, either.  Can’t see it from home.

It’s a fair bet that, by allowing that here, this model will be copied in future buildings.  So builders will be able to use the mezzanine 5th floor for additional dwellings, and this precedent ups the density of future MAC buildings.  Not much point in saying that, though, because Town staff have already declared it to be legal.  Near as I can tell, they can’t un-declare it in this case.  And for the future, they can claim that each future case will have to be decided on its merits.  I don’t need to go there to hear that.

It looks like this facility is going to require deliver trucks to maneuver in the middle of Center street, and to back across the sidewalk into the loading dock. But the Planning Commission gave the OK to 380 Maple West, which has the same middle-of-the-street truck maneuvering.  So what am I supposed to say?  I still wish they wouldn’t do that?  This facility likely will have much more truck traffic than 380 Maple West (as all food/drugs/supplies for 100 residents will arrive by truck), and Center is a much busier street.  I doubt that either argument will much matter.  At least the surrounding street corners here are modern “radius” corners, and so the roadway is set up to deal with delivery trucks.

This one requires putting a gigantic detour into one of the main sewer lines in Town.  As a person who lives uphill of that point, I find that kind of worrying, but I’m not even sure that line serves my neighborhood.  (And, to put it bluntly, everyone who lives downhill of me will serve as a pressure relief valve in case that sewer main fails.)  I’ve never heard of that being done  — putting a big, flat bend in a sewer main … but I guess it’s doable or we wouldn’t be talking about it.  I certainly have no data-based way to question it.  If it worries me enough, I’ll take out the sewer backup rider on my homeowner’s insurance policy. I don’t see the value of taking up the Planning Commission’s time with a comment.

Something non-standard is going to happen to the bus stop that is there. But as far as I can tell, I’m almost the only person involved in any of this that has ever ridden the Maple Avenue Connector bus (Post 225).   FWIW, I liked the bus so much that I routinely take it now to get up and down Maple.  But I realize that, despite all the talk about “multi-modal” transport, nobody involved in this really cares about the bus service.

Otherwise, it’s a standard MAC building, in that it occupies more-or-less every cubic foot allowable under MAC. There’s a “pocket park” on the side, but that’s only there because the sewer right-of-way that has to be maintained so that the Town can drive trucks up to the sewer clean-out.  The back actually sits a few feet further from the lot line than is legally required.

I guess the deciding factors for me are that a) this is squarely in the commercial district and does not adjoin residential property and b) from what I hear about a similarly-situated building in Falls Church, an assisted-living facility really doesn’t much burden the surrounding area. In so many words, it’s a fairly low-key use of the property.  I don’t like the height, I don’t like the size, I don’t like five floors, I don’t think this will fit into the Town of Vienna at all.  But given that big lot-filling buildings are what the current Town Council wants, and has made legal via MAC, given the caveats above, this one is about as un-objectionable as it gets.

Otherwise, ignore all the blather about what a boon this is for the Town.  It’s really just another business.  The Town’s tax take from this facility will be small, in large part because it provides is services and there’s no sales tax on services.  (Falls Church lists assisted living as among the least beneficial land uses from the standpoint of generating additional tax revenues.)  And we have many assisted living options nearby, and more are being built ( post #205).

Best guess, based on the total elderly population of Vienna, at national average use rates, Vienna needs about 40 assisted living beds to serve our entire population.  (We might actually need more because we are much wealthier than average, but I could not find data from which to make a reasoned judgment about how many more we would need.)  And the average tenure in an assisted living facility is well under two years.  So this may be a convenient option, but this one building is hardly make-or-break for quality of life for elderly residents of Vienna.  It is a normal and seemingly reasonable modest addition to our local health-care infrastructure.

 

In my Post #245, I compared the unadorned brick faces of the proposed Marco Polo building, complete with bricked-up windows, to “a Chicago back alley”.

A colleague has taken me to task on that statement. As a former resident of Chicago, he found that to be grossly unfair to Chicago alleyways.  After the Great Chicago Fire, the city was rebuilt, largely using brick.  And the typical Chicago building, he claimed, has much more interesting brickwork than the plain, flat faces of the proposed Marco Polo building.

In fact, owing to Chicago building code, Chicago developed its own, unique brick — Chicago Common.  His argument is that the rough, irregular and multi-colored surface created by Chicago Common is more visually interesting than the uniform, flat brown faces of the proposed building.

You can’t argue about taste.  But you can argue about what is or is not masonry.  Masonry is brick, block or stone, laid up with mortar, by a mason.  Masonry is hand-made and, as such, it will contain irregularities owing to the imperfect skill of the mason. If you look it closely, you can see the small variations in an actual masonry wall.

Much of what you see on new buildings may look like brick, but it isn’t masonry.  It’s pre-cast panels made to simulate masonry.  (Google precast brick panel, or see here, here, here, here or here for examples.)

To me, those panels are always “too perfect” to pass as real masonry.  Nobody, it seems, ever thinks of casting in random imperfections to make these panels pass as actual masonry.  And one of the things I dislike about modern buildings is that they may try to look old — they may try to make something look like a masonry wall — but they don’t even try to disguise the machine-made look of their imitations of traditional construction materials.

The lack of actual, random, real-world variation leads me back to the building in question.  In general, a bricked-up window is a mistake.  It’s an ugly after-the-fact fix for some unique change in situation in the use of a building.  But at least you can say, a genuine bricked-up window shows that a building is old.  At least, it’s old enough that the use of the interior space has changed since it was built.

The bricked-up windows in the illustration above are exactly what I mean by a lack of actual, random real-world variation.  Word is that a bricked-up window gives the impression of age to a building?  Great, each face shall have exactly two such windows, located in exactly the same place.   Built into the pre-cast concrete imitation masonry siding.

I suppose that the precision and regularity of those panels appeal to some people.  Some people just like buildings to look neat and tidy.  And so they actually prefer the imitation of masonry to the real thing.  And prefer that each unit have its precise allocation of exactly two bricked-up windows.

But to me, when I see those precisely placed and perfectly replicated planned irregularities, my only reaction is “surely you could do better than that”.  But maybe my ideas are shaped by actual masonry, and within the context of precast panels — maybe they can’t do any better than that.

I have no idea what the BAR will do, or even can do, with the current plans for Marco Polo.  But any improvements would be appreciated.

I’ve been trying to come up with the right metaphor for what occurred at last Thursday’s meeting of the Board of Architectural Review (Post #245).  I’m an economist, and, at the risk of being a little strained, let me introduce one of my favorite economic concepts:  the bezzle.

The bezzle.  In his book “The Great Crash 1929”, economist JK Galbraith defined the bezzle as the “inventory of undiscovered embezzlement”.  At any one time, it’s the total amount of money in the US economy that has been stolen, but for which the theft has not yet come to light.  (Galbraith’s main point was that the size of the bezzle moves in tandem with the business cycle.  When times get tough (as in the post-1929 period), frauds are uncovered and the bezzle shrinks.)

Galbraith pointed out that the bezzle creates a temporary increase in the total sense of well-being. Both the thief and the victim think that they own the money.  The bezzle allows a sort of double-counting:  thief is pleased to know they’ve stolen it, and the victim is pleased to think that they still own it.  The total perceived well-being exceeds the actual well-being.

When the embezzlement is discovered, that temporary excess sense of well-being collapses. The embezzler’s status is unchanged, but the victim realizes they’ve been had.  Or the embezzler goes to jail, and the victim is made whole.  Either way, there’s some misery involved.

And so, the collapse of the bezzle is the best metaphor I can give for last Thursday’s BAR meeting.  The BAR thought that the Marco Polo site was slated to be filled with a stylish, unique, turn-of-the-century Georgetown stone/brick/wrought-iron building.  Which would have been quite expensive to build.  While, simultaneously, the builders thought that the Marco Polo site was going to be filled with a run-of-the-mill standard-NoVA-sprawl unadorned building.  What I called the “Chicago back-alley” building.  A building that would be much cheaper to build.

The difference in cost between those two buildings is our bezzle.  It’s an amount of money or value that both parties to the transaction thought that they owned.  Until last Thursday, both the BAR and the Builder were happy about the building.  Only, they weren’t talking about the same building.

And that’s why the builders showed up, bricks in hand, last Thursday.  The new owners of the Marco Polo development thought this was a clean, done deal.  From their standpoint, the goal of last Thursday’s meeting was to get on with the formality of having the BAR approve the materials to be used, so that they could start construction.  And, instead, what they got was the BAR’s discovery of the bezzle.  Which is this case is the gulf between the “Georgetown” building that the BAR passed, and the “Chicago alley” building that the builder planned to build.

The collapse of the bezzle is never fun.  One of the two parties here is going to end up being aggrieved by the results.  I can’t even begin to guess how this will be resolved.  But it’s a pretty good guess that it’s going to be unpleasant for somebody.

DISCLAIMER:  I’m not saying that anybody embezzled anything.  Again, this is a metaphor for what happened.  I am saying that there is a big difference between what the Town thought it was getting and what the builder thought they were building.  That difference allowed both parties some undeserved happiness.  And that excess happiness evaporated last Thursday.

Let me boil down last night’s Board of Architectural Review (BAR) meeting regarding the Marco Polo development to two words/two pictures and one question:

Bait: What they told the BAR they were building. This is what the BAR approved.  Georgetown-like red-brick/ironwork turn-of-the-last-century architecture.

Switch:  What they are actually proposing to build.  Chicago alleyway, complete with bricked-in windows.  (Who in their right mind includes bricked-in windows as a design feature in a new building?)

Looking on the bright side, at least the cars were the same.  Even if the building was not.

(In the drawing above, ignore the portion of the building fading off into the distance.  All of the new “switch” building matches what you see facing you.  The parts fading off into the distance are parts of the old “bait” building that they either didn’t bother to, or intentionally failed to, erase.)

This was, apparently, the first time the BAR had been asked to look at the revised plans. They were not pleased.

Church Street, in particular, is more-or-less treated as an alleyway.  Here I have crudely removed the buildings in the background, so you can see the face of this development, as it sits on Church.

It’s no exaggeration to say that if you added a couple of rusty fire escapes and a dumpster, you would not be able to tell it from any alleyway in a large Midwestern city.  My wife’s observation is that “it looks just like the subsidized housing in the City of Alexandria.”

I believe that was not lost on the BAR.   And this is on Church Street — you know, the one where the Town mostly got the redevelopment right.  Until now.

So here’s the question:  Who in our Town government is going to be held responsible for this?  Is anyone going to be held responsible for this?  And what’s to stop this from happening again? 

OK, that’s three questions.  But my bet is, they all have more-or-less the same answer:  Nobody, no, and nothing.

Interestingly, the original developer — the person who managed to achieve the passage of this — just recently sold it to a new developer.  In one of those strange coincidences, yesterday morning was the public announcement that the Marco Polo project had been sold to new owners.  Before this, the sale had merely been a rumor.  You certainly have to applaud his sense of timing.

The new owners clearly did not expect the reaction they got from the BAR. The new owners walked in with samples of bricks and other materials, for the BAR’s approval, so that they could start construction.  But the BAR more-or-less cancelled that.  The BAR deferred approval of anything until this could be straightened out.

I have a lot more to say about this, but I’ll just end by noting who was there, and who was not, to see this through.  For this item, the citizen audience consisted of a half-dozen people.  It was Vienna Citizens for Responsible Development (VCRD) and a handful of their friends.  They were there because they had done their homework.  John Pott — a founding member of VCRD — got up and asked for an investigation — why was this wholesale change only being brought to light now?  Chuck Anderson had spent the last two days compiling the complete history of how this occurred, along with clear “before-and-after” pictures.  On net, the BAR seemed appreciative of the information and clear presentation.

But in the end, it was the BAR itself that caught this.  They knew that what they were seeing was not the building they approved.  And, unsaid but pretty clear from the comments, had this “Chicago back alley” been the building they were shown, it would not have been approved.

At this point, I’m just going to clean up my audio recording and post it, so that you can hear the discussion for yourself, if you choose to do so.  I’ll have the link to that in a separate post.

But the long and short of it is that the building that the BAR passed had almost nothing to do with the building that the Town Council may-or-may-not-have passed.  The BAR was shown plans for a building that evoked turn-of-the-century Georgetown — red brick, ironwork, rounded facades, detailed windows, stone lintels.  It respected the adjacent streets by presenting a house-like facade.  And it would have been expensive as all get-out to build.

But what the Town Council appears to have passed — it’s not clear right now exactly what they were looking at — can best be described as Chicago back alley.  But as they were looking at that, they were also shown pictures of the original, Georgetown-like building.

Apparently both sets of plans — Georgetown turn-of-the-century and Chicago back alley — were presented, in pieces, simultaneously.  This is something I find hard to believe, because when the Planning Commission (PC) was explicitly faced with two sets of plans this year, for 380 Maple West, they literally didn’t know how to deal with it (Post #213).  They had not, within living memory, dealt with two different proposals simultaneously.

The Chair of the BAR rightly rejected any part of the discussion that dealt with how this came to pass, or what other parts of the Town of Vienna government did.  The BAR is not an investigative body.  He focused on what the BAR’s mission is, which is to review the architecture of buildings proposed for the Town of Vienna.

The bottom line is that the BAR deferred any decision on the Marco Polo/Vienna Market development.  They will have a work session to sort out how best to deal with the new plans that have been handed to them.  But it is not their job to ask how this mess came about.

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Completely separately, and not to be forgotten, the BAR accepted Wawa’s gracious offer to build a solid vinyl fence at the back of their property.  If you want the back-story, read, in chronological order:  This post, then this post, then Post 241.   As one BAR member put it, Wawa met them more than halfway.