Hi, so we can get started there'll probably be people coming along as we're going. I just want to introduce the topic this is zoning demystified and the idea for this came from a bunch of conversations I've had with people where they admitted that they found zoning really confusing. They know that there's controversy and they're often in meetings where people know a lot about zoning, and, and they feel that they just don't have the background and so I thought it would be important to connect to some people who knew a lot and to see what we can learn tonight. We won't learn everything about zoning it's a very complicated process, but, but we'll try to get our the beginning of it. So I just want to talk about the agenda. A couple more minutes for the ground rules and introduction. So this is a informational session. There's lots and lots of opportunity now in the future to talk about your views on the warrant articles and zoning changes or not not changes in particular. So this is an opportunity for us to learn about zoning and get some pretty basic questions answered. So we are going to be. There isn't going to be conversation but we are going to be answering questions that people are raising so if you have a question, you can put into the chat at any point. So, so what we're trying to do is get real real questions like you know I'm confused about this or I don't know the difference between this and this, rather than sort of more discussion of which is really an important thing to do but it but we do have other opportunities for that. So then we're going to go into an introduction and overview about what zoning is what it does for us what it doesn't do for us a little bit of the history. I'm going to talk about this by Laura Weiner and Amy Dean I'm going to talk about the participants very shortly. Then, sort of a bunch of maps, many of you probably have seen them of the Arlington's land use policies or zoning maps. And that's to be presented by Jenny rate and Rachel Zembury. And then a Alex Bagnell and Steve Revillac are going to do a stroll down Mass Ave, which is just sort of looking at different buildings and Mass Ave that we're familiar with, and talking about the zoning restrictions and to what extent is conforming or not conforming. Then, lots and lots of time for questions and I'm sure if we need, you know, five minutes more we can do that. So, let me introduce the people. So they're back to that quarter Alex bagnell is a town meeting member from precinct nine. He's a member of the vision on to standing committee and also the remote participation study group. And he is going to be involved in the stroll down Mass Ave. Amy Dane is an outside consultant we're really lucky to have her. She has done tons of work and in the last bunch of years. She has done both policy research and specifically about zoning and multifamily and accessory dwelling units and, and her work is. There's a lot but it's really easy to understand it's really well written and I enjoy it. Jennifer rate, I'm sure many of you know is director planning community development for the town of Arlington, and we're thankful to have her here. She's a member of the zoning reconfiguration working group and the on to redevelopment board. He was also a member of the ZBA prior and he's telling me member precinct one. Laura Weiner is an urban planner she's worked with him Arlington and city of Watertown and she's on the board of the housing corporation Arlington. She and Amy are going to be presenting sort of the introduction big overview of what what is zoning. And Rachel Zimbrie I'm sure many people know as well is the chair of the on to redevelopment board.  Good evening everyone thank you for coming on behalf of a vision Arlington welcome to not tonight's forum on zoning. It isn't easy. It can be hard to read hard to understand and hard to visualize how the words on the page look when implemented to build tonight I'm going to introduce some concepts and some vocabulary related to zoning. Zoning divides a town into zones or districts and then establishes regulations and standards for each district. There are two kinds of standards uses and dimensions uses first zoning determines what uses can go where which explains why we have neighborhoods that are commercial and areas that are primarily commercial. Early zoning was first established in the early 1900s to separate the noxious industrial uses from residential uses. There are three general use categories residential uses both single family and multifamily IE apartment buildings, commercial uses, meaning retail restaurants and offices, and industrial uses. This is generally where things are made, and that category includes research and development such as lab buildings, most vehicular uses auto body and auto repair breweries and distilleries and other types of manufacturing. If the use is not allowed in a district that is a final no, there's no appealing it no variances or special permits to allow a use that is not allowed. The question is that 40 is for a 40 B comprehensive permit that allows residential in any zone with the inclusion of affordable housing and you'll be hearing more about that later. However, there are also uses that are allowed only by special permit. That means that in order to open a restaurant, you must be in a commercial zone and in most cases you will need to apply to one of the 10s to boards, either the CBA for a special permit where your plans will be reviewed according to set criteria. So it's an allowed use with review. The alternative is called by right or as of right which means only only a building permit is required no review by any special boards. The second set of standards is called dimensional standards and this includes height setbacks meaning the number of feet from each lot line that can be built upon frontage, which is the minimum width of the property along the street and the minimum size of a lot that can be built on in most residential areas, the minimum lot size is 6000 square feet. Dimensional standards also include parking requirements and these standards taken together determine how large appeal a building can be based on the lot is built on an owner can apply to appeal one of these standards and that is called a variance variance, the zoning board of appeals and are reviewed by a strict set of standards. It is much harder to get a variance than a special permit because variances are for things that are not allowed where special permits are for things that are allowed, but with a public review. Here there are zone zoning changes proposed for 10 the town meaning warrant times change uses change technology changes and the law changes. One example of this is that environmental movement has resulted in new requirements for energy conservation wetlands protection bike accommodation and general sustainability and building practices. I tried to lay out a framework for understanding what zoning is and how it works and introduce some zoning vocabulary.  The next speaker is Amy Dane who will talk about the evolution of zoning particularly in a suburban setting. Thank you, Laura and Jennifer and envision Arlington for the opportunity to present. I'm going to share my screen and do a PowerPoint. And I would recommend if anyone's just listening you might want to look at the screen because it'll be hard to understand the visuals. The screen often looks like hundreds of pages of this. It can seem impenetrable, but in truth actually it can get tied up in a lot of knots, but a lot of it's also easy to understand and today I'm going to unpackage some basics. So that's a quick agenda for my talk. I'm going to be talking about zones and districts uses allow dimensional requirements by rate zoning special permits legislative approval of projects overly districts 40 be pre existing non conforming buildings and value capture. Don't let me lose you now I haven't started yet. It should go to shouldn't be too hard. And zoning divides a town into zones or districts Arlington you have a lot of zones each different color here is a different zone. Zoning maps come with legends so you see here on the left. Our districts are for residences be districts are for businesses, and I district is for industry. Here's another zoning map just as an example this one's Hamilton, Massachusetts a smaller town. It has fewer districts see the legend there are in the districts, almost the whole town and Hamilton is zoned for single family houses. There's a zone for single family houses on half acre lots zone for single family houses on one acre lots and a zone for single family houses on two acre lots.  It's very small that's the business district. Here's a neighborhood built to the zoning and Hamilton. Next up I'm going to talk about uses. This year's a table of uses in Arlington. Most zoning ordinances and bylaws have tables of uses and just FYI bylaws are for towns and ordinances are what you have in cities. It is a use a house is a use the column on the left lists possible residential uses so single family detached dwellings three family dwellings apartment buildings, group homes, etc. See the dark blue ribbon at the top it lists the residential districts are zero or one or two or three or four or five or six or seven. So these correspond with the zones on the map. Then see the arrow at the top that I put there points to single family homes, the church shows they are allowed in each residential district, that's the yes, the why is for yes. And then the second and third arrows pointing at three family dwellings and apartment buildings, they're allowed in certain districts, the SP indicates special permit is needed. I'm going to explain what special permits are later I'll look back to it. First up is dimensional requirements. Most zoning bylaws and ordinances have tables of dimensional requirements they vary the requirements vary by zoning district. Here we usually find minimum lot area minute frontage also setback sometimes parking requirements are in the chart sometimes in a different section. And those are requirements for each use allowed in each district. So zoning. In the early days of zoning say from the 1920s through the 1950s most development was happening through as a bright zoning. What is the as a bright zoning. It's also called by right zoning. This is predictable non discretionary zoning. Here's how it works. Imagine you own an acre of land, the land fronts the public road. Single family houses are allowed on one acre lots. You read the zoning. You know you can build a house on your land. It's your right. The building inspector does not have discretion to deny you a permit to build on that one acre lot. If your lot and plan meets all the specified requirements. Note that a town can't simply zone private property as open space or prohibit all economically viable uses without compensating the landowners it would be a taking also the law in general needs to be predictable. So for those reasons as I understand it something economically viable should be allowed as of right predictably on all privately owned unrestricted land and practice that's something is most often single family houses on relatively large lots. The largest relative to where where your community is in greater Boston as a bright zoning is fully built out to the capacity allowed in really most places in Arlington's table of uses. We see the why for yes, means single family detached dwellings are allowed as of right in every residential district. You can see there are no districts where every use is by special permit. So you know that by looking at, like if you pick the district are oh and look down like a column, you'll see a why and SP, why and SP the special permit but if you look down for every district something is going to be allowed as of right. Special permits are then scaffolded on top of as of right predictable zoning special permits are just our discretionary zoning system. The zoning law by law ordinance designates the planning board or zoning board of appeals or city council is the special permit granting authority. I understand in Arlington it's the ARB or the zoning board of appeals are special permit granting authorities. Now the landowner is not only going to the building inspector for a permit, but has to get approval from the special permit granting authority if if the use that they're getting permitted for it requires the special permit. With a special permit there's no guarantee of approval even if the project appears to meet all of the zoning specifications. So if you want to build a three family house in Arlington in a district where three family houses are allowed. I have a like circle the districts there you can look up our three or four or five. You would have to apply for discretionary permit. According to my research, most multi family housing projects across greater Boston have needed to get special permits about 60% of multi family units that special permits from 2015 to 2017. But that for small scale developers for startup developers the lack of predictability can make it impossible to operate in Massachusetts it's hard to get to build a business plan for small scale development around special permits it's hard to get loans for risky undertakings. Over the decades, the local zoning approval processes have been getting less predictable more discretionary and more political. The recent trend is not only to move from by right zoning towards special permit zoning, but is towards also legislative approval of projects. So the landowner developers not only going to the building inspector for non discretionary permits, or to the special permit granting authority for discretionary permits, but often has to get approval from city council or town meeting for the specific project. So here's Lexington zoning map as an example of this of the legislative approval of projects. The yellow and future they both look I think light pink here, but the big zones, the biggest zones here are single family districts, the red ones are commercial districts and there's a little strip and like a dark yellow. That's like, yeah very small. That's the two family district in 2013 Lexington voted to take the multifamily housing off the map and handle it through something called floating zoning. So the multifamily district floats over the entire town. The multifamily district is not mapped the town meeting can pin the district down to specific parcels by approving projects. This project with 30 units in Lexington got deliberated at two town meetings before it got approval and it was built. Another big term in zoning right now is overlay district. Here's an example in Bedford, Massachusetts if your vision is good. Overlay districts can cover part of existing zones or cross zones, the underlying zones and rules generally stay in place. Sometimes the overlay rules. I don't want to supersede that but in general, though you could do overlay districts are offered developers an opportunity to either use the rules and overlay or to go by the rules and underlying district. Overlay districts can be used for different purposes. They're often used for allowing more housing in certain areas. So the developer might choose to build under the overlay rules if they want to build more than what they could do otherwise. This is often an easier surgical way to relax zoning for the town, then by changing the base zoning. It's not necessarily that one way isn't necessarily better than the other but it's just frequently used because it's just kind of convenient to pick your overlay and come up with those rules and not go back into the bylaw and change everything. In 1969, before I was born, the Massachusetts legislature determined that cities and towns in 1969 were over restricting multifamily housing, the local zoning, it adopted a law called 40 be a mechanism for getting around local zoning for certain projects. First 40 be requires each city and town to make sure that 10% of the homes townwide or citywide are deed restricted as affordable to low and moderate income households. In the cities and towns that have not yet met that goal 10% a developer can get a 40 be permit called a comprehensive permit to build multifamily housing, not allowed by local zoning. At least 20% of the homes and a 40 be development must be deed restricted as affordable and sold and rented at affordable prices. Next topic is pre existing non conforming buildings, you might live in one. In Belmont's general residence district single family houses are allowed by right and two family houses are allowed by special permit three family houses are not allowed. The zoning says that you need a minimum of 5000 square feet of land to build a single family house, and you need a minimum of 7000 square feet to build a two family house. So if you see these two family houses in the picture that's from that district, and those two family houses are on lots that are 4500 square feet, they're really not big enough for single family or two family house in the district. Most of the district is built out with two family houses on such small lots. They were built between 1915 and 1925 I think, before zoning I assume, and they're pre existing non conforming houses. And we can zoom out to see that area of Belmont this is near Waverly Square. At the bottom of the screen there's a little bit of water town in there. Nobody's building subdivisions here it's already subdivided more densely than the zoning would allow if it were a big meadow getting subdivided for the first time. The zoning does not allow incremental increases in density. In theory, a single family house on a lot of 7000 square feet could be converted to a two family house that would be like an incremental increase in density by special permit that in theory is allowed, but the single family houses in the district are a lot smaller than that. So, Boston is largely built out to a greater capacity actually then allowed in the zoning by right. So to build anything either incrementally, or significantly denser builders need to apply for discretionary permits and most places, or sometimes they need to undertake a very political process of getting project approval from town meeting or city council, like the case I told you about in Lexington. Most neighborhoods building incrementally or significantly denser is prohibited altogether. What it all has added up to for the entire region is a housing shortage. It's estimated that the region needs hundreds of thousands of more homes to meet demand for housing. The shortage means we have escalating prices, budgetary stress on households, housing instability and homelessness. And one last topic, let's wonky before I get to my conclusion. The escalating prices mean that in some cases, in some places, especially the most affluent suburbs like Newton where I live and Wellesley or Weston, new houses sell for more than the cost of construction, and the cost of construction is very high right sales prices are even higher in certain places. Through the regulatory process, municipalities sometimes capture some or all of that value the delta between the construction cost and the sales price or rents. Value capture happens in so many different ways. Sometimes it's codified as a part of by right zoning or negotiated as a part of a special permit or negotiated through the legislative approval process. Value capture is done illegally. There are ways to do it legally and ways to do it illegally. Sometimes so it is done legally. Captured value can go towards designation of affordable dwelling units and projects via inclusionary zoning, or it could involve the commitment of funds from the developer for art installations like public art or infrastructure upgrades or other municipal priorities. It could involve an upgrade of facade materials to have a better looking building for the public to enjoy. It could involve building of a bike lane or about bus shelter, it could involve setting up a shuttle system. We had one of those negotiated with a project in Newton that hasn't been built yet, but was approved value captures highly controversial it drives up the price of development which will make some or many projects unviable. It's not easy to implement, but it's also a pragmatic way to accomplish some things people care a lot about. So that's just an item to think about that zoning is used for it, really tricky area, really interesting policy area. So now to my conclusion, I'll conclude with a little story and anecdote. Here's my favorite story book from childhood, The Little House. I read it once upon a time, there was a little house way out in the country. And this is what happened. Do you see the sad house. Manhattan swallowed it, which reminds me of an article I read in the Boston Globe in 2005 when I was working on my first zoning study. It was about a proposed 56 unit senior housing complex in Carlisle. And in the article Carlisle resident was quoted to us. This is Manhattan come to Carlisle. Eight years later, eight years in 2013 the complex finally got permitted and built with 26 units as a red barn. It was Carlisle's first rental development in 30 years. In fighting this imagined risk, we have created other problems at this kind of scale. The region's been experiencing population for pressures, not for the first time. So Wayland's 1962 master plan says as population pressure has heightened the planning board and the town meeting have reappraised Wayland's position within the western section of the metropolitan area and have increased the lot area and frontage requirements for residential districts and maintain the single family residence requirement. We're saying we have more people who want to move here. So we're going to reduce our ability to build more housing. The response to population pressure in cities and towns across the region to down zone to use zoning to stop diverse growth to use zoning to delay projects for years leaves us with a housing shortage. So I think our task is to revise zoning to allow for some homes to be built in some places so that all people can have homes and housing stability. Thank you. Thank you very much Amy. That was a lot. Yeah. Our next speakers are represent the ARB and the planning board Rachel Zembray and Jennifer rate. Thank you very much. I'm Rachel Zembray. I'm the chair of the Arlington redevelopment board and Jenny and I Jenny rate who's the director of planning and community development. She and I are going to take you through the Arlington zoning maps and district so this is going to be just a really high level overview of how are all the different parcels in our town are divided and the different zones. These if you go to the next page please. You can see here this is this is the ground area of our our town with all of our streets overlaid. And what we, what we look at when we look at the zoning map are how each one of these different parcels are interconnected together through their classification into into either residential business or industrial zones. Or in some cases, special overlay districts, as Amy mentioned before. The next slide. So again, as I just mentioned, these are these are the parcels. The other items that are classified on our zoning maps are the water and open space that we that we enjoy here in our town. So the first, the first group of of zoning districts that I'd like to cover the residential zoning districts. And I'll say that both the residential, well all of the different zoning districts. What you see here in the map is meant to be used together with the together with the zoning use tables which identifies further what specific uses are allowed without a special hearing through either the redevelopment board or the zoning board of appeals. So what can be built as of right and what can be built with additional approval within town and what can't be built at all in those individual districts. So three are three of the our districts are zero or one in our to start here with our zero are our residential districts that are primarily single family and two family districts. So our zero is the large lot single family districts. These are generally served by local streets, and typically single family homes. So we could go to our one. This is the single family district and as you can see it takes up a significant portion of the land we have here in Arlington. Again these are primarily single family dwellings in our public lands and buildings. So many of our schools much of our open space is also within this was in this district. Thank you. The R2 district is the two family district. So again, predominantly two family homes or duplexes. There are also quite a few single family homes. These are served by local streets but they're largely walkable to some of our major quarters such as Mass Ave and Broadway. And these are again very pedestrian oriented and a little bit denser neighborhoods and our R1 and our R0 neighborhoods. Next slide. So the next two districts are our two of our multi family districts the R3 is the three family district. Although there are very limited parcels as you can see here devoted to the R3 district. I'll talk a little bit more about why some of these districts are so disconnected as we get through this. If you could go to the next slide. The R4 is the townhouse district. So these are typically conversions of older homes into apartments and townhouse construction that allows for a bit more density within these districts. Next slide. The next three districts are our apartment districts in town. So the R5 districts are excuse me R5 district is our low density apartment district. The next one please. R6 which is our medium density apartment district. So these are apartments up to four stories high in offices at a smaller scale. And R7 is our high density apartment district. So these are apartments of up to five stories high. You can go to the next slide. So you can see as I mentioned the R0, R1 and R2 districts which are our single family and two family homes and duplexes take up the majority of the land we have here in Arlington. Next slide please. And the R3 through R7 our multi-family districts tend to be again along our major, major quarters within the town. So these are all of our residential districts together. So next we'll move to our business district. So these govern where we are able to locate businesses in town. The first is the B1 neighborhood office district, which really encourages small scale uses. There are also a mix of one and two family homes within this, within this district and small scale mixed use without retail. So mixed use with offices typically on the ground floor. The B2 neighborhood districts very widely distributed within town is the neighborhood business district. This neighborhood business district is small scale retail and service. So this is primarily along Mass Ave and Broadway as you can see. Our next business district is the B2A, which is major business districts. So these tend to be residential and service areas to serve a larger neighborhood. The B2 district may be more toward walkability. These are really for car oriented developments. So these have a little bit higher density than the mixed use you might find in the B1 or B2. So the B3 are our village business districts. So these are pedestrian oriented. Really, most of us would know these as the Arlington Heights or the East Arlington Capital Square business district. And then there is a smattering as well near the center. The next is our vehicular oriented business district, B4. So these are larger parcels of lands that are vehicle oriented. Some of our automotive sales and automotive repair uses are in the B4 district, although the town in the zoning bylaws has identified that a conversion to other retail or service or restaurant uses is desired in the future. And the B5 district is our central business district. So this is the small area of Arlington Center that when combined with the B3 parcels makes up the total of Arlington Center. So if we look at what the business districts in the next slide look like together, you might think this looks a bit like Swiss cheese and a bit chaotic. And there's not a lot of consistency. So one of the things that we're currently looking at is how to bring some continuity to these business districts. The way that this map was developed was back in the 70s. And we had a very different approach to zoning. It was, there was an effort called down zoning. So what the town did is they looked at what type of building was on each lot. And they basically created a zoning district and a zoning designation for that parcel for basically what was what was there. So that's where we get some of the loss of continuity that we currently have in our business districts. And it is a goal of the redevelopment board to take a look at these business districts and see if there might be some opportunity to to reintroduce some of the continuity that we're currently lacking. And I'll turn it over to Jenny. Thank you Rachel. I'm going to talk about the other districts. And this will be short because there aren't that many other districts. The first one is the industrial district, which is, you know, also very small, relatively speaking. And even though it's called the industrial district, it actually does not have that much industrial use space. As we realized after doing an economic analysis of the industrial zoning districts last year. So the industrial district is intended for manufacturing assembly uses flexible office space light industrial. And you can also have mixed use. We had an initially that was mixed use without residential but now residential includes only artisan live workspace. The recent updates that we made to the industrial uses last year added, you know, a number of uses but also added some new standards to the industrial zoning district. There is no minimum lot size in this zone. And in general, all of the residential uses except for the artists and live workspace are allowed. The next district. There's actually three that are all on this map that what the first one I'm going to talk about is the transportation district. And you can barely see it because it is essentially a line, it is the bike way, the minute man bike way is one of the primary elements of the transportation district, along with what we call the bus terminal in our zoning by law which is actually the bus turnaround, and then open space uses. This zone is not a meaningful zone but it does have some special permit uses, and it does have some, you know, requirements in terms of any development along the bike way, which relates back to the Arlington redevelopment boards authority of permitting specifically uses along the bike way. You can see the multi use, which is actually limited to one property, which used to be the Sims hospital that was turned into the Arlington 360 parcel. And in that particular zone, it was meant to be for larger scale development through that would be only permitted through an urban renewal planned plan again relating back to the only the one superpower of the Arlington redevelopment is to create an urban renewal plan of course as adopted by town meeting with a lot of parameters and then approved by the Department of Housing and Community Development, and usually spanning a period of time, typically 20 years. So that parcel is completely Kevin's multiple parcels but it's covered by an urban renewal plan, and it's only tied to that one zoning district and that that is the only area in town with that special classification. And then you can see in the lower right hand corner in East Arlington, the planned unit development district. And this district is technically for large scale multi use development. The minimum lot area for this particular district is 200,000 square feet so you'd really have to have something pretty grand in order to make something work in this particular zone. That said, single and two family homes are allowed by right in the planned unit development district. And then lastly, oops, well it's not displayed here but lastly, actually we have another district which is the open space district I think that it was shown earlier on in this set of slides. And that is basically limited to all of the open space parcels that are governed under the jurisdiction of the Parks and Rec Commission, the Conservation Commission, the Department of Conservation and Recreation at the state level, and the mass, the MBTA. So with that, I think I'm going to hand it back to Laura. Yes, okay. That is, then the last or last speakers are Alex Bagnell and Steve Revlak we're going to take us on a stroll through Arlington. Hey Laura, Steve and I would like to take some of these sometimes abstract discussion items and make them a little more concrete, if you will, oriented along a stroll down Mass Ave we're going to pretend, taken the family out to a movie. So if we head out down Mass Ave. We're going to come down to the Capitol Theater I think a building that we all like it anchors one end of our arts district, it has a number of delightful local businesses on the ground floor. It includes a couple of places to eat. It's a public assembly space, making for one mixed use and then there are rental apartments above that seem relatively affordable. I do note that it does not seem to have much parking. And so I put to Steve, how likely would this project be to get built today, something that anchors an entire area brings people to the neighborhood drives business and gives people a place to live. Okay, so hello Alex. Hi, I'm Steve Revlak. So this is an example of a pre existing non conforming building, I believe it was built in the 19 teens. Arlington did not adopt zoning until the 20s. So, you know, it was, it was at a time when the rules were simply different than what we have today. So on the left I've got a little table. And you'll see this on each of the you'll see this a couple of times but just to go over what some of the things in these are. So, there is a row for district. This corresponds to the map that the maps that we saw earlier. There is a row for lot area. It's simply the area of the lot in this case this this parcel would not have a minimum lot area but you know it's it's actually 21,000 and 810 square feet. There is a row for floor area that's basically the floor space the total floor space inside of the building subject to some rules but you know the amount of its floor space. And the F this FAR it stands for floor area ratio, but it's basically the ratio of the floor area to the lot area so in this case divide 39,408 by 21,810. And the number you get is basically indicates how big a building is smaller numbers are smaller bigger ones are bigger. And then there are the last three are the number of parking spaces, open space, which is sort of a term of art, it means that space on a parcel that doesn't have a building on it, and it's not used for parking or traffic. That's open space so our bylaw requires some of that. And then there's also I put a row for rear yard setbacks just because some of the property some of the buildings we're looking at they don't have, you know, they have rear yard setbacks and nothing else so it's just a something something we could look at. So in this case the building is a little bit bigger than we'd allow it today. It doesn't have any open space. The biggest difference I think between you know what you know what the rules were then and what the rules were now is today we would require a lot more parking. So the just between the theater and the apartments in the building. Our zoning would ask for 300 use bases. They have five. So it's, you know, it's, it's slightly under parked by today's standards, although there are provisions for, you know, an applicant can ask for a reduction. So in this case they might be able to go down to 75. If it's in the common interest and if the, you know, the, the special permitting granting special permit granting authority in this case the ARB chose to allow it. So there's also a requirement would today, there would be a requirement for a rear yard, which, you know, was really, really doesn't you really don't have in this in this configuration. So the, if under, you know, under today's rules it would be, you know, it would have to be we would need a smaller building and we'd have to figure out something with the parking. If we had to build 278 parking spaces on that lot. What would that look like. Well, I happened I was kind of curious to one of the number surprised me so I spent a little time just trying to figure out, you know, how you would lay out a parking lot. It would have to be at least two stories. So I guess you could go into the ground and have a two story underground garage, or you could maybe do like a story underground and then a, you know, like ground level parking and then the business is above that or, you know, put everything above, although if you tried to put everything above, we'd run into a height limit. Because in, in this case you could only three is. So the stories row here has a five and a three, and that just represents that, you know, for a lot of our business districts, if you're near one of the single or two family zones you have, you can do less stories, but if you're farther away you can do more stories. In this case, you know, they have three stories and three would be, you know, the practical limit because of, you know, the two family district located right next to them. So it seems unlikely this building would get permitted in its current form. I think, I think that's correct. We, I don't believe the bylaw lets us grant a reduction to five parking spaces for this, for this use. Okay, so it turns out I ran out of cash, and I need to go a little further down mass of to a building that from a pedestrian perspective, kind of feels similar. It's got three stories to it. So it seems to have a decent amount of commercial space in it, but it seems much more recent. So, so could we build this one today. This one, I, this one, I think so it's, it's pretty close. So in this case, it is a, you know, three stories and again we have the same five versus three restriction. It's smaller than the maximum that we allowed. This is the floor area ratio. And, you know, they do have fewer parking spaces for this office. I, you know, I tried working the numbers out I got 53 spaces, based on, you know, the, you know, in an office building you need so many square feet or one parking space per so many square feet. It's possible. Again, they might, you know, one might be able to get a parking reduction or be granted a parking reduction. They actually have 35 spaces. And if you were to look at the, like in the map, you could see, you know, it's difficult to, you wouldn't tell this be necessarily be able to see this from the street but there is a fairly substantial parking lot in the back where these 35 spaces are little, the little white sections are like little landscaped areas. That's where the open space comes from. This I think would be a little under but there are, you know, there are exceptions that, you know, this might have been okay. And the rear yard, rear, they've got, you know, more than enough rear yard. So I think this, this one would be, you know, it's very close to being conforming. Okay. Great. Okay, so now let's stroll back up and enjoy a bite to eat over at Town Tavern. Now here looks like a single story building. Surely this is a very minor use and we could build this. Well, it would be, if we built it today, this would be different. So this is one of our older properties. And I'm guessing I don't know this for sure, but I'm guessing this was built at a time before we had off street parking requirements and perhaps open space requirements. So from the map, you could see that the, you know, the building, it's outlined in yellow. It covers pretty much the entire parcel.  I don't think it has any open space. It's a little bit difficult to tell exactly where the line is on the map.  Now for a restaurant, we normally require a parking space for every four seats, I think. In this kit without going into the restaurant and counting seats, I just sort of used another, you know, another parking requirement measurement in our, another set of parking requirements and our by lodges to sort of as a proxy, proxy measurement, but if you built a restaurant in a hotel, it would be one space for 400 square feet. So on the basis of, you know, that I think this would come out to about nine spaces.  And given how small that lot is that might make that building almost an economic. Already kind of a small restaurant. It is a small, yes. I mean, this is one of the, this is one of the challenges of one of the challenges and one of the things I admire architects for their, for the bill for their ability to do is you have to take some of these constraints where in this case we need some buildings parking, we need some open space. So how do we fit that in and still fit the building and make it all work. But I think it would be safe to say that it would look, it would look different than it does today. Okay. Okay, well now we've had a nice meal or feeling false or going to have to walk this off and maybe go check on my progress up with the high school but on our way there we're going to pass everybody's favorite Walgreens. There's a massive parking lot in the front that I've never seen even half full except maybe when they're selling Christmas trees. Seems quite pedestrian unfriendly it's set well back on the lot. Not aligned with any of the neighbor and buildings. So we're going to make our way across three or four rows of parking here to pick some things up now is this the sort of thing that our zoning is encouraging. There's there's some caveats but it's generally conforming.  It is a big lot. It's you know not quite an acre and a half. It's a one story building where we allow three it's got a very low floor area ratio. They do have plenty of parking for this store we would require 51 spaces based on the square footage. The parking lot has 84 assuming I counted correctly it has plenty of open space you know mostly in the form of you know little landscaped areas around the perimeter and also some of the sidewalk area up front the one place where it would be you know run into a challenge today is it doesn't have enough of a rear yard. So today this would need a rear yard of about 18 feet and change and this one looks between it's between eight and nine feet. If we scooched this thing 10 feet further away from the bike path. It would be fully conforming. I think it would be fully conforming. I believe that you know there is there's still an out of discretionary approval step. So, currently we encourage parking in the side or rear of buildings rather than the front. So, you know, there would need to be, you know, you'd need to get I believe you would need to get permission to put the parking lot in front. Okay. Okay, we still haven't worked off that dinner. So we're going to keep headed up toward Mass Ave and now across from the high school. There seems to be a nice older looking apartment building. And I think I even understand that some high school teachers live there. And that seems awfully convenient to have a nice apartment building within walking distance of a large employer and on a good transit route. So how about this one.  So this is a four story building, you know, although the bottom story is partially, you know, below grade I through at least walking up to it. I think there's enough above grade that it, you know, we can call it a story. I think this one would actually be a story too tall. So this gets back to those, you know, two tiered height restrictions where if you're near a single or two family zone you have a lower a lower story limit. So this one I think would be limited to three stories, although it is for the floor area ratio is a little higher than normal but there are some, you know, the rules for figuring that out. Involve actually knowing how the different interior spaces are used. And it's not information you can get from a property card, which is where I managed to, you know, put, put, pull this stuff together. So it's probably okay with the floor area ratio. It's got plenty of open space. You know, definitely meets a requirement there. Again, the rear yards a little bit short, and we're short on parking, I believe. So because there's, you know, I took a walk behind this building and there's like a few parking spaces right up against the apartments. And there's a few on the other side, which I can't quite tell which go with which building. So I'm guessing this one has three or give or take. But, you know, for the number of apartments they have, it's 26 apartments. I believe I'm assuming 16 of them are one bedroom and 10 or two bedrooms. The property card said it's got 36 bedrooms. I think they would need 33 spaces. Again, they could someone trying to build this today could ask for a reduction.  Because I mean, one of the nice things about this one is, you know, it's got it's got a really nice front lawn. Parking would be a bit of a challenge.  So do you think our parking requirements are and set would be incentivizing this if this was coming up today to turn some of that lawn into parking. Yeah, I mean, it's because they're overrun open space, but under on parking. Yeah, the other, you know, the other thing you have to, I think that would come into the picture is that, you know, we prefer to have parking, you know, not readily visible from the street. So, you know, basically not parking in the front yard. So you would might there's probably there might be room to put a parking lot in there but you might also have to reorient the building in order to do it. Okay, so it's kind of on to it's sort of L shaped on two sides. You might have to go with, you know, the L shape on two different sides and then have the space behind it. I haven't actually tried to do this but you know that would be one way of trying to think through it. Okay. So just a little just a little further down Mass Ave there's the recently renovated Brookline Bank building. Again this this putting parking right on the street, which as you say we're not that in favor of but this is a another single story on building on Mass Ave with parking on the front, and that's it that again feels a little pedestrian unfriendly and we're designed for access by cars than walking up to. That's it. So this, this looks, except for the parking in front this looks fairly straightforward. This one I think is fairly straightforward. It is a one story building. It's well under the floor area ratio and they have enough parking. And as you can see like these little, I guess it looks like little mulched planting areas and there's one near the parking lot there's another one by the shrub. They've got plenty of open space. You know there's enough of a rear yard and you know I think this one I think this one would work now the parcel behind this is owned by the same entity and some there's some rules that can come into play there but I don't know how that rear parcel is actually used so I didn't sort of I didn't consider it for the sake of the slide but yeah I think you could build this one today. Okay, I think it would be conforming. Okay, well thank you very much. Okay, right. Back to you Laura, you're muted. Thank you both very much that was quite interesting I thought so anyway. We are now open for questions. If you have a question please put it in the chat if you if you want to ask it to someone in particular please let us know that otherwise we will direct the questions as as it seems to make sense to us. And if we don't have any questions then you can go home. Well you're probably already home but you can go about your business. We'll give it a few minutes to see if anybody wants to throw anything into the chat comments. There were there was a question in the chat. I received it I'm not sure if anyone else did but asking for a clear explanation or an example of an overlay district. Just to try to understand what the differences between the base zoning and then an overlay zoning. Amy, did you want to try to take that because I think that you had brought that up in your presentation. I think it most often is used where you might want to allow like a mixed use district or an area where you have slightly denser housing, where you want it to cover sort of part of a downtown but not necessarily aligning with the existing downtown zone. A business district, but if if you wanted to change the zoning neatly with the business district you wouldn't need an overlay, but you might decide that half of the business district should get these special requirements or or allowances. So you just create an overlay instead of cutting up the old district like that would be to do it without an overlay would be to cut cut it up into two districts. An overlay would just be and then the overlay might extend for example from a business district, a block back into the residential district. Or it could be often it's used an overlay might be used for like open space residential design cluster zoning where say like in a place like Hamilton, where you have a residential district where you have one acre a lot size requirements and a residential district two acre a lot size requirements, you might put an overlay that sort of goes around both those areas saying that if you do residential subdivision you can cluster the units and protect some of the district is open space, but you're not just like rewrite it might be through parts of those, instead of exactly with it. Thank you. We have we have a question from Jennifer Latowski about the process for changing zoning and I wonder Rachel if you would take that since the air be is very key in that process. Sure, I'm actually going to defer that one to Jennifer rate because she works with a lot of members of the of the public when they have questions such as this whether it's in a small way or in a larger way as well. Just simply how to go about the process. Yes, that was the question. I mean, the process varies. Some people are participating in town committees, you know where we're actively talking about zoning or master planning or some element of community development that's happening. So they're, they're more actively engaged and they might have a proposal they might talk about it with the committee. Other people who are citizen petitioners, sometimes have their own ideas and, you know, want to develop a proposal and shop it around to their neighbors or other people. There are a lot of different ways that zoning can be proposed for amendments, including of course, of course also by the redevelopment board itself as part of, you know, to implement our master plan or other plans that we have in place. The board actually has on the town's website a whole process that outlines, you know, sort of when we like to be part of those different processes whether it's coming through citizen petition, or even through the rail, the redevelopment board. And typically we want to work with petitioners as early as possible. You know, so the town meeting that we're about to have later this month, and it will end at some point in May. We start thinking about the next season of planning for town meeting soon thereafter. So if you start to have an idea about a zoning amendment we'd like to start talking with you about it or talking with people about it either at our board meetings, or into that town meeting so that people can be ready to file warrant articles which is always the last Friday of a January before the town meeting in that following annual town meeting in April. So the process can be varied but, and it might come from, you know, different places. Typically it starts with a conversation with staff or the board, but it could also be independent of those two. But eventually it does go to the redevelopment board goes through a public hearing process where we actually just wrapped up our public hearings for the zoning warrant articles for annual town meeting but Thursday night we're having more critical hearings for special town meeting so if you feel like you were left out of that process you can still attend on Thursday night for special town meeting but I guess in conclusion there's a lot of ways to get involved if you want to propose a zoning amendment or talk with staff or talk with the board or talk with your neighbors about it. And I think all of those work equally well and efficiently. But again the board does have sort of a process timeline to orient people and we can maybe I know that materials will eventually be posted for this forum and as well as the presentations and so we can also make sure that that process timeline is posted and shared. If that works Laura. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Grant Cook asks, how much of the town approximately is actually legal by today's zoning. You know, do you have any idea Jenny. Not off the top of my head I'm sorry no. Not how many non conforming parcels we have a movie have done studies of some residential parcels but across all zoning districts I'm not sure I have the number right off the top of my head maybe either Steve or Kelly. A little bit of a, you know, best guess, potentially. Steve, and I apologize. Zoom seems to think it's I don't know if I'm still sharing my screen zoom thinks it does and I am not. Okay, and of course I'm not seeing any of you but the it's actually the term is pre existing non conforming with basically that means there was something that was built in the past when the rules were different.  In terms of the number of pre existing non conforming buildings. You know, one, it would be difficult to put a percentage on it but simply based on the, you know, the fact that most of, most of our parcels are single and two family homes. We have a 6000 square foot minimum lot size and a lot of lots, you know, particularly in certain areas of town are smaller than that. I suspect it's less than half but there are, I think there are a significant number of pre existing non conforming buildings in town. Thank you. That you know it's easier to measure this for the R zero or the R one zoning district or the R two zoning district. It's much more difficult to measure this for the business district where you have much a very much more variable dimensional requirements for zoning. You know that I think a roughly just under 20% of parcels in the art in the R zero zoning district are non conforming, and then about 40 to 45% of parcels in the R ones district are non conforming and that that's really just based on a lot so it's the buildings on them that's just a lot is large enough to comply with the minimum lot size and if the frontage is sufficient for the zoning dimensional requirements, but it does vary depending on the zoning district. Elizabeth Dray has a question about an affordable housing overlay. I keep hearing that Cambridge has one but I'm unclear on what that means or if it is something to consider here. Anything about that Amy. I yeah so that allows development multi family housing by right in areas where you otherwise wouldn't be allowed to do it as long as the units are affordable. So it gives kind of an advantage to affordable housing developers to be able to do that whereas it allowed multi family house any time you expecting a delivery. Please thank you. The type of multi family housing development. Then, like often private sector developments like market rate developers would be able to outbid the affordable housing developers so it gives the affordable housing developers an advantage and a lot of people have been concerned that housing coming in is so expensive. That is allowing really specifically targeted affordable housing to be built in areas where it had never been allowed. Thank you. And I have they actually passed that you know if they have they adopted that or they're just still considering it. Yeah, that has been adopted has been adopted. Interesting. Okay. And then has a question or a comment. The capital block is frequently used as as an example of a much loved structure that couldn't be built today if the plans for new mixed use buildings were designed with the style and flair and great materials and detailing of the capital block. People might feel differently about them. Instead we get bland generic designs that would fit into mold and center or really any place at all. Excuse me just one second. Ruth Ellen jake of this can the town zoning board stop a homeowner or developer from tearing down a small house or replacing it with a bigger one. Jenny do you want to talk about that. There's not necessarily. No, and typically not at all. Usually that type of development and construction is allowed by right, but it also kind of depends upon what they're trying to do with the new the newly constructed dwelling. If that newly constructed dwelling is expanding a non conformity or the lot itself has non conformities, then it might need to be have a special permit through the zoning board of appeals, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it gets stopped. It means that it goes through a public review process as I think Laura you were noting, you know, by right versus special permit. So I think that with that type of construction that happens in Arlington happens by right which means that somebody can go to the inspectional services department and pull a building permit, as opposed to needing a building permit and a special permit. Thank you. Jennifer Latowski has a follow up question from her original question about zoning changes and she's asking do all zoning changes then go to town meeting for approval or only certain types. And the answer to that is, they all go to town meeting, any zoning change needs to go to town meeting. Christopher Wilbur has asked how would you describe a typical negotiation process with zoning board to get something approved that doesn't meet regulations exactly. I can talk a little bit to that if specifically to the way that that works with the redevelopment board which are the larger developments and the developments in the business district so we work very closely well I would say that first, the developer or any applicant who has a has a has a project that they are looking to propose it does not meet the current regulations works very closely with the planning department. And they work to help them identify strategies in order to bring their property into compliance or to develop a property that meets the goals of the intent of the zoning bylaw as well as our master plan. And then comes in front of the redevelopment board, and we work with them, there are there are several different items built into the zoning bylaw that allow us to make exceptions to certain regulations in exchange for public amenities or other types of elements that a developer or property owner might be able to bring to bring to their property, and that's again in the business districts or in the industrial districts. So for example, Steve talked a little bit about parking requirements. And owner feels that they do not have the space on their site for what the bylaw requires in terms of parking. There are strategies that we can use that help mitigate traffic that we can suggest that a project owner use in exchange for reduction of parking just as one example. And Steve, perhaps you could talk a little bit about how the zoning board of appeals works together with applicants for residential properties. Well, for a lot of the, you know, I was a former zoning board of appeals member. A lot of the cases that come before the ZBA are for special permits are generally because someone owns a non conforming property, and wants to do something with it. A common example is putting a front porch on that extends into the, you know, what would normally be the front yard or adding a dormer on a property without open space. So there is a set of, you know, criteria. If you go to inspectional services, there is a, you know, basically a questionnaire in the form of a special permit application where it's a set of qualitative things that you need to do. Some portions of the bylaw are more specific about the criteria. But basically what we, you know, what we do, what the ZBA does is similar in the sense that, you know, there are allowances or not allowances it's there's criteria for issuing a special permit, or for making a decision. And, you know, you try to read the, read the criteria and apply it to the case that's before you. Thank you. We have a question here from Robin Bergman how would Arlington be required to build near transit hubs and where this this question I think refers to the new state law known as housing choice, which requires communities that are served by the MBTA to have a certain increased density near transit hubs. I wonder if you Jenny might be able to explain where the town is in terms of those in relation to that the housing choice legislation. Thanks, Laura. The MBTA communities requirement that is that you're referencing is currently being the guidelines are being developed by the department, the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development. They issued draft guidelines and the comment period for those guidelines actually closed on March 31. And they will be eventually finalizing those guidelines and issuing them. And so we're evaluating what it means we have evaluated what that might mean for Arlington we've also made a presentation to the redevelopment board, and to the select board, sort of outlining our understanding of the draft guidelines and the requirements and what it might look like in Arlington and so anybody who is interested in viewing those presentations we, we can actually again, I think maybe send something around as a follow up to this, because I won't make people go into the agenda so forget that to, to navigate and find the presentation but we are looking at it we're trying to understand it it the most important part is, it's a requirement, but the guidelines are being developed so we're still learning what it might mean and what it might look like. And our best understanding is that it probably will will mostly apply to the area around alewife, but may also depending upon the acreage and the expansiveness of it might also apply to other areas as well so that we can basically reach the capacity goals. And again that's that's under the current draft guidelines so we're still sort of evaluating what that might mean. When we do know what the actual guidelines will look like then we will be having a very broad public engagement process to fully vet it and fully understand what it might mean and get community input along the way so we're learning. There is a presentation more to come. Thanks. Thank you. I know it's it's complicated and there's a lot of unknowns there. Michelle Nathan asks the question what is the history up to today, how residents feel think act regarding zoning. I'm not sure I understand that question entirely. Does anybody want to take a crack at that maybe Amy, Amy, do you have any thoughts. How Arlington residents feel about zoning. Yes, I believe, well, I believe that would be the question. To say that zoning is a tool for managing growth in the community and in a region. I feel that it's often used just to suppress growth, and then also to like manage it very tightly in certain areas. I would like to see it used a little bit more proactively to think that we need as a region to build more housing to be thinking about where should we allow that and to revise the zoning to create some space capacity for for more building to happen in a predictable way. So even if the zoning is by right, the community can have the input to say about like, where that is how we prepare for it and what kind of things we'd like to see in terms of a site plan review and development that we feel like fits in with the community and to write the regulations in a way that you would sort of get your preferable type of development as the easiest path, the path of least resistance for developers. Interesting answer. Steve, I'm going to give you this question. Beth Milafcic asks, why is non conforming bad. And I think also maybe she's getting at what does it mean, you know, for the community, if there's a lot of non conforming properties. So non conforming isn't necessarily bad. It just means that, you know, some something got built at one point in time, and sometime later, the rules changed. One example that, you know, comes up, it came up often in my tenure on the zoning Board of Appeals was, you know, that were things that involved open space. So prior to 1975, the there were no open space requirements in our zoning bylaw and in 1975 we added them. So, due to the nature of that requirement, you know, all those build it, you know, any parcel without open space is non conforming any parcel that's on a lot that's too small is non conforming any lot that's on a parcel with or any house that's on a parcel without enough frontage is conforming. So what the non can the state zoning act has a set of provisions called vested rights that basically, you know, kind of preserves your right to, you know, maintain the building and maintain how you're using it. But if you need to change it. There's, you know, there's, there's basically a, there's basically extra stuff involved in the form of a special permit hearing. Yeah. I have a question from Celia Kent, given that zoning regulations do not necessarily result in buildings that we view as attractive or contributing to the pedestrian experience does the town have design guidelines or provide design advisory services for renovation or new development projects. Jenny, could you answer that. So, well, we actually do for for the single and two families that get built in town there's it's it is an advisory process that was a good word to use, because it is basically design guidelines and their residential design guidelines, which was actually a project led by Kelly line here on the zoom. That project basically resulted in the set of very excellent design guidelines that basically say these are things that were we would prefer based upon the neighborhood that you know property might be located in and these are things that we might discourage. They were introduced by town staff, the inspect including the inspection services department, and then of course, the zoning Board of Appeals who predominantly reviews that type of dwelling and use the single and two families for other types of projects, subject to the development boards review they all undergo design review by the redevelopment board. And there are also a set of design standards that we currently have that were developed in 2015. During the Arlington master plan process. Those design standards however we have found to be a little out of step with the type of development that we've actually seen. We're hoping that we'll be able to update those design standards to apply much more directly to the commercial corridors. Those design standards are actually for the commercial corridors, the bike way, and the Millbrook corridor. So it's a little, it's a little more expansive than just commercial areas. Since last year we also developed design standards for in the industrial zones. We're now much more focused on the commercial area so basically we have some design guidelines for single and two families. For commercial design standards, we're looking to update them and we also have standards for the industrial zone so we're pretty well covered and everything else is covered by the redevelopment board. For Amy Dane, Mark Rosenthal has a question. Could you explain the different categories of affordable housing and why are affordable units built under 40 being not required to be permanently affordable. There are many different programs for building affordable housing and different rules on different programs and there are certain rules if you're going to build the development under 40 what the affordable units need to be like affordable to people at what levels of income and every program or even if you're just an affordable housing developer who wants to build deed restricted affordable housing under without a like specific guideline you can make decisions about how long is it deed restricted as an affordable housing with perpetuity is it 30 years. Is it affordable to people making 30% of area median income or your units to 60% of area median income affordable or 100% of area median income. All sorts of decision points on affordable housing. And that's also decision points for people writing inclusionary zoning by last what you're going to require. So affordable units with 40 be it says that I think 20% of the units need to be affordable to people making 60% of area median income I believe but then if you're or you could do 25% of the units a quarter of your units affordable at 80% of area median income so that the rents are just like a little bit higher on those. So they're just sort of all sorts of factors and considerations considering what the program is. And I know it is an issue for units that were built with like a 30 year deuter restriction, you know in the 70s and 80s and then we lose affordable housing in the region I need to like pay the owners to extend that. And if that answers your question and that 40 be is just one sort of root towards development of affordable housing. Thank you. I think we'll just take one or two more. Okay, so on May 30. Select Board Member Len Diggins asks about what percentage of underutilized lots are there, especially in the business district. In other words, where we could be building more more stories or greater lot coverage. Let's see. Do you, Jenny or Kelly have a have a. I'll just start by saying I think underutilized is a little bit in the eye of the beholder. I'll start there you know I think I'm not. I, if underutilized means is it is, is it built out to its current zoning. I think many of our parcels are necessarily built out completely to their current zoning or as we just walked through the maps and the use table and everything else we learned that a lot of things are actually non conforming and you can't really build them the way that they look today. If you were to rebuild them again. So underutilized I think is sort of an interesting word to used. I think, really, most of the properties in Arlington along the main corridors are what we considered to be in the area for redevelopment. And that is under the purview and jurisdiction of the Arlington redevelopment board just for that reason. It doesn't mean that they're underutilized in their current use or status it just means that those are areas that would be redeveloped because they're already developed with something else. That said, the before district the zoning district that has a lot of automotive oriented uses is probably the district that has the most underutilized parcels. And so there's basically I think you could probably count up 1520 parcels that are in that particular zoning district, and they span mass have Broadway. I think maybe that's it. Just looking back in my thinking about that map that let that particular layer. So it's not that many parcels are necessarily underutilized. But again, it's in the eye of the beholder there might be other types of properties that are just a parking lot. And somebody might say well that might be, you know, a good opportunity for redevelopment, but there's nothing actually developed there right now. So underutilized I think is an interesting way of looking at it, but along the main corridors we think of that area as being the area for redevelopment. It could be something different it could be something that could be built out differently. And then there could be the parcels that only have parking on them, which would be considered I would think underutilized specifically for for the final question there's a couple of people who offered opinions and questions about the appearance of what's built today. And I think I think what they're saying is, even though we have design guidelines even though we have this board review process. Why are the, why are the buildings coming out, either looking very similar or very boxy or for whatever reason, not like the capital block let's just say, and I wonder if Rachel or Jennifer or anyone else can offer an opinion about what, what are the options of what the town can do in terms of what what a development looks like. I can start and then maybe Jenny can chime in I think that this is a challenging question, or it's a challenging process for us as a board and the planning department as well often we're working together with with project owners and because we do not have any binding design guidelines. It is a challenge for the redevelopment board to specify a particular architectural style or materials, because they are not currently required by the town for any specific district or block or building typology. And we work very hard to ensure that each project is improved to the best of the ability that the board. How far we, we work very hard to understand how far we're able to push the, the means, and the, the ability of the developer to, to work within their, their budget, their, their design teams ability, and the, the bounds of the project so obviously a budgetary. There are budgetary elements in terms of ensuring that a project can can go forward that we need to take into account. There are elements of conforming with the zoning requirements that we need to take into account. We work a lot with trying to provide precedent examples that we think would be helpful for the project development team to, to reference, but we don't design their buildings for them. So there's, there's a limit to what we can, how far we can push them short of literally taking pen to paper and creating a new design for the team. Jenny, I'm not sure if you have anything further to add to that. I would say that, you know, the, as part of the redevelopment board, and even the zoning board of appeals review processes for the special permit which is a discretionary review. And each board has, you know, members who have designed backgrounds and often bring that background as part to the review process staff also have capabilities with design. We do our very best, I would say, but because those are discretionary special permitting processes that include public hearings, there are actually occasions where we hear from neighbors or other people who live in Arlington who have actually provided very good design suggestions and ideas and so that, that is one bonus of a public hearing process is getting to hear the, the positive constructive suggestions to improve design. One, one thing comes to mind in a, in a current special permit that is being reviewed, where some suggestions for different facades, different types of materials were suggested as part of, you know, commentary and those are the things that the board can, consider and think about, and also potentially suggest to the applicant to make changes so that I think it's a, the other part to it is it's an iterative process, meaning that we often see things in one shape or form and, you know, slowly try to work with an applicant to make it better and get as to Rachel's point as far as we possibly can in that process. So. Thank you. And just also to, to make the point that zoning is not a design process really it's it's a set of guidelines and if you fit into those guidelines then you basically can build. I want to thank everyone for coming and hanging in I think I think at one point I saw that there are about 90 people on this on this zoom, which is pretty impressive on such an interesting topic. And I really want to thank all of the speakers Alex Bagnell Amy Dane, Jennifer rate, Steve revelac and Rachel's embryo for sharing their wisdom with us and I hope you found this interesting and helpful in some way. Have a nice evening. Just want to add that if you have additional questions there's a few places that you can send them. Rachel's embryo or anybody on the ARB is available to answer questions. They're busy but but they've they've offered. Anybody on the ZBA and I'm actually I'm going to Christian Klein I saw on here so I'm going to call he's the chair of the ZBA, but but you can send if they spent about an individual property you can send something there. But the planning department is also available. Steve revelac has kindly because he's worn paths, both at ARB and at ZBA has kindly offered to be maybe the first line of questions. If you have them so I know zoning is really complicated I hope we've done a good job at, at somewhat just demystifying it but but but I know that this is a really complicated thing and so you might come up with a question later that you, you didn't think about it tonight so I encourage you to use those resources. And again, thank you everyone for your, your help.


Good evening, folks. Welcome to Adaford Chantel. My name is Melissa and tonight I will be hosting. We're gonna go ahead and Start out with Erin Hello So I have a pretty fun project today It is getting to be festival season and I have gone ahead and put lights in my festival coat Let me flip it around so we can kind of see What's going on here? So this coat has a couple different systems in it, and I've just launched a tutorial Showing how they both work This system that's lighting up right now is actually a 2d matrix It's made out of seed pixels that I sewed inside the coat And then if we watch for a little bit and there's another system that lights up the fun for trim So there's another strand of seed pixels that goes just through the trim around the neck and then the sleeves and everything like that and I am controlling this with W LED which is Probably my favorite software program right now. The way that works is I have kind of an app right here It works from over Wi-Fi. So from any web-enabled browser I can control this thing and I can just select You know plays presets or playlists that I've set up. It lets you choose your effects. It lets you choose your colors it's pretty cool and I Managed to get both working at once. So I've got an LED strip That's lighting up here running one animation and then my LED matrix is running another animation And this whole project it was a little bit complicated I'm using mapping on the LEDs so that this is not a square matrix But I'm still able to run matrix like square animation So that's kind of what the guide goes into I've done I don't know seven or eight guides on W LED now and if you haven't used it before it's rad It's like free open-source pixel controlling software that doesn't require any coding It just does it all for yet, and there's so many I haven't I haven't reached the bottom of it yet after seven tutorials so I'm having a lot of fun with this and I'm gonna head out to see those solar eclipse this week and maybe I'll light up my coat and When totality happens, let's see That's pretty cool. Um, are you able to get it to do any kind of like scrolling text or anything like that? There is a scrolling text effect on here. Let me see if I can find it real quick I'm I haven't Yeah, it's kind of neat. Let me see where it's under s. I say home And there's so many there are so many so many of presets that I'm scrolling and scrolling and scrolling It's really a lot of cool stuff on here Let's see It's really Scrolling text there it is so I'm scrolling text now you can kind of see Yeah, it's cool. Um, I haven't Accords though. Can you reverse the direction? I I don't know. Um, I you know, or it I don't think it looks backwards to me I think that my webcam might be flipped. Oh, that makes sense. Okay. Yeah, but I also have not Delved into this and figured out how to make it say anything other than the default text yet So I'm not sure how that's gonna work, but this is just running on an esp 32 It wouldn't be too hard to hook it up to you know, something that was that was You know running some matrix code from some of the other projects that we've that we've published. Um, so yeah Yeah, pretty nice. Thank you for coming by and showing that up. Thanks so much And next we are going to have scott Hi, melissa Hi Thanks for having me. Thanks for hosting Uh, today I wanted to I think this is part three of usb host featherwink Stuff I did figure out my issue from last week and it was that I had My like I had debugging uart in and out setup But I didn't have the the input connected to anything so it was like generating all that junk characters That caused my demo to fail last week. So I'm here with a new demo. I've got The usb host feathering, but this time it's plugged into one of the esps. I don't even know which one Um, so that's what the debug output on the right hand side is and then on the left hand side I'm gonna it's trying to list all the usb Uh devices that it finds so I'm just going to plug in my keyboard They use for my testing and hopefully It will list that we have a usb keyboard. Hey It shows up there. I don't know why it was flickering a little bit, but I'm seeing it And I think I can actually control see it from the keyboard And then of course because the user code stops the keyboard actually doesn't work anymore But if I hit control d again, it should be able to find it again, which it didn't for a while But yeah, it works on esp now I'm I'm taking a look at atmel samd and rp2040 before I make a pr for this, but Made a lot of progress after I wrestled free r-toss to do my bidding For the esp usb host keyboard, so work Do you know if it's going to be able to do like serial communications over usb? Like Yeah, I like to be plugged in a 3d printer and you you can control it or something like that Yeah, so the usb host api for circuit python is pretty low level. It's like reading and writing endpoints So we would need to or you would need to make a Library to do the higher level class stuff Okay And in fact, I was thinking about this because like pie cereals really common, right? So I was thinking we should make a pie cereal circuit python library that kind of does that middle layer between what is effectively pie usb Um, so that's our our host api matches What pie usb does on linux computers? And then we could build that like pie cereal on top of pie usb Pretty cool Yeah, so not yet, but um, there there's example code for hid keyboards mini keyboards and What was the other one mass storage, but there's some bugs in the mass storage one as well, but um, yeah It's early days, so Awesome. It's really good. Thanks for coming back Yeah And next up we have jet Hi there, so last week I was showing a project where I'm creating I've got these old 8 bit z80 computers And last week I did a project where um, you can hook that up to a modern hdmi display This week I am replacing the keyboards so that you'll be able to just type on it With a modern usb keyboard. This one's flodja tech, but anything works And this here is a photo of the wiring so here on the portmarked keyboard Is it just takes eight bits in and then uh That's that's one through eight here And then the ninth is a strobe to say there's a key ready to be Received and then the cpm computer or the the firmware on the z80 Has to notice that signal coming in and grab the key And uh, you know do whatever it does with it But this was all really well documented in the old Manuals because computers in that in those days were very well documented So i'll just grab tab over here. This is the Live view captured through an hdmi converter of this computer so I can type into it And we can for instance Get a hex dump of some of the firmware code That's running there inside the computer and The main thing that I still need is a floppy disk drive so I can boot because if you hit a to boot It just says disk error because there's nothing attached to the disk yet That's coming up soon sometime in the next couple weeks. I've designed a circuit board for it, but uh, yeah Uh, this has been a lot of fun Read off sd cards or anything like that So there is this product called go tech And it it comes in various form factors But this one has the floppy drive the 34 pin floppy connector and it's the size of a three and a half inch floppy I haven't used it yet So the thing that i'm working on the circuit board I designed just adapts from this to the specific Connector which I don't know if you could see it in that photo. No, there's a 37 or 39 pin d style connector That's just a little bit away from the the keyboard So that's the next project, but uh, yeah, I was going to show you just a little bit of the code I did this one in arduino because I did a related project with cpm emulating sometime last year And that would convert the usb Messages into an ascii code and then send it over a serial connection at ur And this one just has to um Do Translate the key, you know pull out each of those individual eight bits And then notify the computer that the code or you know that that there's a new key code to read So like the total amount of code I had to write to change it was Really not very much uh because I had this existing example example Which is on the 80 fruit learning system So I hope to like make a little 3d printed enclosure because the wiring The wiring here is kind of not great Uh, it's good enough to test That it works, but I want a little enclosure that just you know acts like a dongle converter from usb to this computer Yeah, I've been having fun with this and I think I will probably write it up as another guide even though it's You know really on the one hand, it's very specific on the other hand It just gives the idea of here's stuff that you can do once you can Convert from usb to whatever and kind of connect into the older computing world if that's what you're into Yeah People can adapt it to their specific needs if it happens to be related Yep, I mean I can envision that you could make a an adapter to a classic macintosh or other classic pcs that had external keyboards Exactly kind of whatever you would imagine so Yeah, keep an eye out on learn because maybe in the next week or two that guide will be written But like air and I will be headed out to see the eclipse this weekend So Yeah, anyway, that's what I got for you tonight. Thanks for hosting melissa Oh, you're welcome. Thank you for stopping by showing me off your project See you around I could see it And last we have nanograms here Hello, can you hear me? Okay Uh a little bit quiet. Could you a little bit quiet here? I can try talking right into it. Is that better? I'll be a much better Okay, cool. Uh, so we are not in our workshop today. Uh, we are at the university of washington friday harbour labs It's a really cool marine biology lab Um up here in kind of the very north part of washington in the middle of the pugic sound We're just uh on an island right now surrounded by water We have here a tabletop sem This is a joll neoscope from about 2007. It was made to be really easy for japanese high schools to run Um, it's a really cool microscope Really robust Um, it's downside is or one of the downsides of it is it has a rather It has a 2007 era digital image acquisition system resolutions a little bit limited So we are installing our open beam interface on it Um, so we've cut some of the cables inside here that carry the scan signals And uh, we've attached some bnc's to that And so we put a little relay in that lets us flip between the internal scan generator and the external scan generator And then we're going to kind of put all these connectors on this back port or this back panel right here So that we can just kind of plug all our cables in here And then we'll just have our board on this and they'll be able to take much higher resolution pictures with it They uh, they do some wall prints already some of their sem micrographs And uh, we're going to be able to uh make bigger prints now because we can take a higher resolution pictures Uh, so i'm going to take you all around here to the lab a little bit Can you all still hear me okay? Yes Excellent. Okay, cool. Uh, let me know if I drop out here because i'm going to be walking around a little bit Okay, so uh, this is the microscope the neoscope Uh, so you can see the very uh, tiny little sem column right there. Uh, it's maybe Two and a half inches three inches in diameter. So that's pretty small We've got our relay board right there We have a wall of fish specimens Um, so we have uh many fish and jars here because this is a marine biology lab Um, we have a uh ct scanner So you you take a fish you stick it inside of this machine and it spins it around a whole bunch And it takes a bunch of pictures of it with x-rays and so you can do 3d reconstructions of the fish So here's a uh, a fish that they've uh, 3d printed after and I might not be I'm not sure if that's a fish or not That's something they've 3d printed after reconstructing it from the ct scan We've got a fluorescence microscope right here So it has a uv light source so it can um So it can uh, is my camera still working? It is cool. Uh, we've got a uv light source so it can uh, Fluoresse proteins that they tag in the fish so they can see what's going on And then this is what makes this life so unique is that you walk right out here And there's a bunch of tanks And so they can put whatever they want in the tanks As we are Right on the Through all the plumbing You make the floor or through the drain in the floor so we have a bunch of students in here Uh, do research on So we got something. So yeah, that's uh, friday harbor labs. Uh, we're really having fun Microscope I'm with this thing Oh what your microphone keeps cutting in and out. Oh, okay. I should I should be a closer to my laptop now again So we should be okay So, yeah So that's a friday harbor labs Cool, thank you for showing that out Yeah, thank you. Thank you for hosting. It's been great. Are you welcome? And uh, see you again, I guess. Thanks. Yeah, well, uh We'll see you again probably from a workshop next time. Uh, we're going to be heading out of here next week But uh, we uh, hope to see them take some really cool, uh fish pictures with it. So Cool Look forward to that Bye everyone And that is it for uh show and tell and then about 15 minutes will be ask an engineer So stick around for that