RochesterSubway.com : Filling In: 93 Marsh Street

Filling In: 93 Marsh Street

February 20th, 2014

The following is a guest post submitted by Matthew Denker.
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Imagine you are the new owner of a giant, underutilized parking lot*. What would you do with it? Would you leave it as is? Tear out the pavement and start a community garden? What if there was an apartment building next to it. Would you tear it down and build a skyscraper? These are all excellent ideas. We here at filling in solicited input from a variety of fellow RochesterSubway.com contributors, and it’s clear that we all have different ideas about what to do…

*Disclaimer – I am a new part owner of a giant, underutilized parking lot. This one, in fact.

In no particular order, I’ll lay out my top three most likely ideas:

1. Better Utilized Parking

One of the first ideas is to better utilize the parking. This idea is furthest along (HEY! The lot is already there.), but also one of the least likely to happen. Ignoring any zoning issues, the pavement is roughly 120’ x 60’. A little bit of research will show that a parking spot is about 8’ across and 18’ deep. Anyway, a little smidge here, a little tuck there, the whole thing becomes 30 spaces. SWEET! But wait, 6 need to remain for the apartments. Another 3 need to remain flex, and about 2 will stay taken up by the dumpster. We’re down to 19 spaces. Spots at UofR (the assumed parking payers) vary, but go for between $22 and $47 a month. Don’t worry, there won’t be a pro forma for all three options, but we’re betting we can charge $20 a month per spot. Great! Give me the $380 and let’s call it a day. Not so fast! First, we need to budget for 5% vacancy (in this case 2 spots). Now we’re at $350 a month. Then our management would want 10%. Now we’re at $315 a month. Then our insurance wants almost $200 a month for liability. All of a sudden we’re down to $115 a month, and that’s before we paint the lines every year, advertise, or do the legwork with the city to set the whole thing up. Yikes.

2. Build Another Apartment “House”

Aha! Better you should build another apartment house next door. We at 93 Marsh Street, LLC are actually pretty partial to this idea. We’ve been struggling mightily to find evidence of a house formerly on this lot, but quite honestly, it’d been tough going. This is almost the exact spot that occupies that nebulous area between pages on the plat maps from 1935. Suffice to say, the house at 93 Marsh wasn’t even on the 1935 plat maps, let alone anything on this lot. Color us surprised. Anyway, we are confident a similar house broken into apartments would work nicely here, although the piece of land is rather large, and we’ve considered the idea of jamming a pocket neighborhood style development in here instead of just another house. This could take the form of the front/back multi-family style housing we’ve previously discussed at Filling In.

3. Tear It Down and Build

Ah yes, at long last, it comes to this. Ignoring any expenses associated with emptying out our apartment building and tearing it down, what could we do here? Well, we need 1,000 sqft of property for each 1 or 2 bedroom apartment. The lot is 16,875 square feet, so let’s imagine we build some mix of 16 one and two bedroom apartments. If we build something that’s three floors or so, we’re looking at floor plates of 5,500 square feet or so (assuming we actually build 1,000 square foot apartments). This translates to a building about 90×60. Set towards the street, it gives us ample space for driveway around and parking behind the building (we’ll need 16 spaces). All in all, this could go very well. Based on the school across the street, something about 2.5 stories and by Cary Tamarkin could fit in perfectly.

Moving forward, I hope to do something with the land, although I’d be stretching the truth if I said it would be “pretty soon.”

• • •

About Matthew Denker:

Matthew Denker is a Project Director by day and a fantasy real estate tycoon by night. He has a deep interest in Rochester, NY, as well as the subjects of new urbanism, walkability, mass transit, and land use. Going forward he hopes to combine all of those things to make Rochester a city competitive not only with other small, successful cities, such as Portland and Minneapolis, but even better by leveraging its easy access to the world-class cities of Toronto and New York.

Tags: City of Rochester, development plans, Filling In, Genesee Street, Matthew Denker, Rochester, Rochester NY, vacant lot

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 20th, 2014 at 7:59 am and is filed under Opinion, Reader Submitted Stories, Urban Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

11 Responses to “Filling In: 93 Marsh Street”

C.J. Randall says:

February 20, 2014 at 11:45 am

Let’s talk pocket neighborhoods! What are the zoning hurdles? Minimum parking reqs?
Joel Helfrich says:

February 20, 2014 at 1:13 pm

My suggestion is to keep the building and create a pocket neighborhood. See the example I know best from Ithaca:

http://newearthliving.net/what-we-do/aurora-dwelling-circle/

More information:
http://www.pocket-neighborhoods.net/whatisaPN.html

http://www.pocket-neighborhoods.net/

You could also create an urban ecovillage and either find long-term renters or find undergraduates (from the UofR which is close or from RIT, among others) to live in the new complex of buildings.

But whatever you do, there needs to be more parking — in fact, parking as landscaping.
C.J. Randall says:

February 20, 2014 at 3:59 pm

^Yes, the Aurora St. neighborhood is great. It was a fight, though, since it all comes down to zoning.

^Parking as landscaping is an eyesore. Limit parking to the rear of buildings, limit impervious surfaces.

form > use
Joel Helfrich says:

February 20, 2014 at 8:00 pm

@C.J. Randall: the landscaping/parking comment was a joke.
Matthew Denker says:

February 21, 2014 at 12:12 am

Joel, just for you! http://www.flickr.com/photos/7799907@N05/12669625134/.

That said, I am madly in love with the idea of pocket neighborhoods, but I worry about the efficacy here. From what I can tell about the Aurora build, it looks like it was(is) two 1BR 1007 sqft places and a 1350 sqft 3BR. At the low end of the expected prices, that means $170k for each of the small places and $250k for the larger one. That might be a little steep for this spot. I suppose if there were space for just a little more they could be split into 6 units (2 each) and double what’s on the property. I shudder to think about what kind of zoning variance I’d need to provide none of the 12 required parking spots, though.
Joel Helfrich says:

February 21, 2014 at 2:08 am

I suggest that you reach out to Susan Cosentini in Ithaca. She might be a great resource for suggestions, ways to approach the City, ideas that might translate to your property, etc. Working with the neighborhood residents and community members might also enable you to push such a project through. You should also contact John Curran, an active resident in that part of the City who lives near your property, who might give some suggestions.
Kathy (Bender) Gall says:

February 21, 2014 at 8:23 am

I grew up on the corner of Marsh & Monica St. The back of my house backed up to this site. That 2 1/2 story house on Marsh St.was moved their, It was the rectory for St. Monica’s church, that year they built a new rectory. I have a picture of that move. As I remember, that lot at #93 Marsh was just a field we would play on.
Matthew Denker says:

February 21, 2014 at 10:03 am

@Joel – Thank you for the resources, I will reach out to them as the time comes.

@Kathy – I would love to be able to see those photos if you have some way of digitizing them (or if I can look you up the next time I’m in Rochester).
Adrian says:

February 21, 2014 at 10:36 pm

Why not add on to the existing apartment building and make an L around the edge of the property with a courtyard in the middle? And have that little driveway extend to the back for some parking. Could probably double it to 12 units.

geo.cityofrochester.gov says it’s low density residential. But if you can show increased demand due to the Genesee/Brooks developments, maybe you can get it upzoned? No idea how that stuff works.
Matthew Denker says:

February 22, 2014 at 1:25 pm

I like the idea of an L shaped building, but it is maximally disruptive. Since 4 of the 6 units have some sort of rear exposure, it means some sort of occupancy disruption for 2/3ds of the apartments while construction happens.

Otherwise, this is the sort of creative idea that hadn’t even crossed my mind, and is a nice combo of reuse and new build.
Nathanael says:

March 11, 2014 at 5:25 pm

If you can get the city to agree to the zoning….

Put angle parking along the road, removing much of the underused front lawn and supplying enough parking for the entire development. Put a sidewalk between the new angle parking and the rest of the development.

Build a narrow “L”-shaped building around the edge of the parking lot, facing a new center courtyard (with the existing building facing the same courtyard from the other side). The courtyard will be where the cars are parked in the lot in your picture. Extend the “L” shaped building as far into the existing “back yard” as you think is reasonable.

The center courtyard will be better used than the current “front lawns” and should be designed to be used (big enough to play tennis, y’know).

The angle parking will provide the required 12 spaces, but without any wasted space as it will all be accessed directly from the street.

While I generally like the idea of “parking in the back”, it *eats* space for the driveways or lots; if you can replace it with direct pulloff from the street (effectively street parking), you get the most space-efficient parking. It also buffers people playing at home from the cars driving down the street.

You’d have to get the city to agree to give up the existing parallel street parking spaces in favor of the angle-parking plan, though. Hard.