Humanize the Earth!

zoning good news!

May 30, 2006 at 6:55 pm | In housing, co-ops, Chicago |

This is a follow-up to my last post on zoning.  In that post I told you how our architect was going to put the average ceiling height on the drawings to address the legal-floor-area issue (Zoning says 6′9″ is legal so if we’re below that, we’re increasing floor area, which is an issue - Permits says legal has to be 7′6″ which is why we’re in this mess to begin with).  Peter (the architect) did that and it still wasn’t good enough.  He then produced a sort of inverted topographical map of the ceiling which today was accepted!

What does this mean?

We got our denial today.  This means we can finally file an appeal.  The denial lists 4 issues so we’re asking for 4 variations to the zoning ordinance.

1. Reduce the required rear yard from 30′ to 0′ since that’s where the entire rear building sit anyway.
2. Reduce the northside yard from 4′ to 2′11″ since that’s the amount of passageway we have to the alley right now.
3. Reduce the combined side yard from 10′ to 2′11″ for the same reason as #2 (we have no southside yard b/c we’re on the corner and that’s the sidewalk on that side.
4. Increase allowable floor area by less than 15%.  This is because some (small portion) of the ceiling is less than 6′9″.  If it were more than a 15% increase, we’d have a big problem

So our attorney, Mark Kupiec will now file the appeal and send us a copy and then he’ll send a letter of notification of filing to our neighbors.  Once the appeal application is accepted, we’ll be given public hearing notice signs for our windows and the Zoning Board will send another notification to our neighbors with the date/time of the hearing, most likely sometime in July.