Preview of May 1, 2018 P&Z Meeting
The May P&Z meeting has a number of interesting issues on the docket, including a proposal that may meet the current development standards, but should not be allowed as it is not a quality project. In addition, there is a residential development that meets current standards, even when those standards are shortsighted.
The first significant item is the site plan for the proposed medical office at the intersection of FM549 and Horizon Road. The design of the development is poor and the tree plan is lacking as well. These issues point to how the City of Heath development standards need to be revised.
The proposed landscape plan shows a number of the deficiencies of the design.
From this excerpt, it is immediately obvious that the plan is not pedestrian friendly. The plan provides no shade coverage for pedestrians. There is no shade on any of the perimeter sidewalks. The parking lot contains four, just four, 3" caliper trees — the minimum size required by zoning.
The landscaping plan also shows how the design is further deficient. The application contains no information about how the design will relate to other developments along Horizon. There is not a consistent look or setback. This is a simple strip mall development isolated in a sea of parking. Heath has low quality development standards and applications like this reflect that fact. If you have low requirements, that is exactly what developers will seek to reach.
The design of the building further illustrates the low quality of the application.
The best description I can give the building is a concrete box with fake modular brick and the minimum amount of windows necessary to meet the glazing code requirements. It is an unattractive building designed to meet the minimum code requirements for the cheapest price possible. There is no attempt to show that the building matches or complements other surrounding buildings. There is no shade provided for pedestrians with awnings or porches.
The application even includes an “inspirational building” that is more attractive and has more design elements than the proposed design.
The aspirational building contains multiple frontage elevations, a much larger percentage of windows, and more use of the so-called accent materials.
There can be little doubt that this building, if approved, will be dated within a decade, and be a continual reminder of what poor development standards bring you.
This should not be approved. Heath’s commercial zoning standards need a massive upgrade, and should probably adopt the more stringent requirements in the revised Town Center Overlay that are currently being reviewed.
The next item is the plat for the building discussed above. There is little remaining interesting information except for a better map showing the relationship of the building to the intersections.
The next item is a request to combine two lots to create a single 3.4 acre estate lot. This can only be seen as a positive development and requires no further comment.
The next request is the final plan to divide the former Galaxy Farms property along Crisp and Terry Lane into several large lots in excess of 5 acres. This again is a positive development.
This can only be seen as a positive development and requires no further comment.
Disclosure: I own property across the street from the proposed rezoned property.
The application is for the proposed development The Arbor located on Terry Lane.
The proposal calls for 18 lots on approximately 18 acres of property. It is not a low quality development, but does have a few particular issues that should be addressed and shows why a slavish adherence to one acres lots is not in the best interest of the future development of the city.
The lot layout is as follows:
There are a number of lots with odd aspect ratios that are deep and narrow. These types of lots minimize the privacy afforded to the owner of a lot by crowding homes closely together more tightly than what a one home per acre requirement would suggest. There are a number of lots that are between 115' and 130' in width. There will not be very much separation between the houses, and the lot owners will still be taxed on their extremely deep backyards.
This is another development with no park land. This development shows that a clustering approach would have been more productive. If the developer had divided the property into 18 half acres lots, the remaining land could have been combined around the existing ponds to create a lovely multi-acre park for the community and still adhered to the one house per acre rule. It is a shame that this type of development has yet to be offered in Heath. In replacement, the developer will be required to make a $18,000 donation to the park fund which will purchase minimal amount of land.
The current residential standards include a number of elements that discourage developers from providing such developments. One of these is the ridiculous road width requirements for new developments. It is currently at 31'. Look at how wide the road for just 18 houses on the site plan. When the road consumes a significant width of the property, it makes creative development more difficult and costly. The size of the turnarounds mandated by the DPS are also laughable. The largest turn around is has a 72' radius.
A 144' diameter is wider than the majority of the lots. That is a concrete circle over an acre in size. Even if the entire turnaround will not be paved, that is an obscene waste of space. And there are two turnarounds in this single subdivision. Instead of having a nice community park, we are requiring a concrete circle larger than any lot in the subdivision. Kids in the development will not play on grass, but on a giant concrete circle because of inane street requirements. In a city where we will have to fight for every inch of open space in 10 years, we cannot afford to waste land needlessly like this.
Disclosure: The turnaround requirements are ostensibly to allow a fire engine to turn around; however, a single strip of concrete could allow a three point turn by the fire engine and require 1/4 of the concrete covered area.
The street width requirements are also short-sighted. In twenty years, when the city has to rebuild the streets, all of these too-wide streets will be more expensive to replace and repair. Wider streets also create more storm water runoff. There is the potential that cities will be required to treat storm water runoff in the future for environmental reasons, and expense that would be needlessly increased by the wider streets requirement. As a final not of comparison, Terry Lane as currently constructed is a mere 20' feet wide, so the subdivision street will be required to be 50% wider than the public street that it connects to.
As a side note, the street construction details provided by the developer do not meet best practices for paving.
The proposed streets have no shoulder reinforcement. Streets typically fail along seams where water intrusion occurs or along the shoulder. This is related to the flow of stress as the concrete forms a bow wave ahead of a moving vehicle. If the edge of the street is not reinforced, the edge of the street will compress the material underlying the edge of the street, lose contact with the concrete, and eventually fail when no longer support by the underlayment. The next time you drive along older streets in Dallas, observe where the failure occurs first and most often, along the shoulders and where the water department has cut into the street for repairs. Perhaps the city requires a shoulder reinforcement, but from the illustration above it does not appear so. This is a future failure point.
The current street requirements need to be revisited, and the amount of concrete we are requiring to be pored needs to be reduced. Every square foot of hard surface pored increases the amount of runoff water that needs to be dealt with.
Another flaw in the plan is that it fails to provide for interconnection to adjacent properties. Only one side of the property has been developed, yet there are no provisions to connect the streets or sidewalks within the development to adjacent properties once they are developed. Heath has no such requirements even though they are clearly necessary. Without them all traffic, foot, cycle and car will all be sent to the same location, our already busy streets. If we do not require such measure now, every development will be an island onto itself. There will be no alternative paths shielded from traffic. Who wants to walk their toddler or dog separated from traffic by a three foot wide strip of grass?
As a final note, the developer is only donating 5' wide sidewalks. That is all they are required to do. But the preferred trail is 10'. Terry Lane will be the access point for the new proposed city center and parks and we are only being provided with a 5' sidewalk. I would much rather have a 10' sidewalk and narrower subdivision streets. However, the developer should provide a 10' path. And once again, there are no trees shown for shading the sidewalk along Terry or within the subdivision itself. That may be addressed in a separate landscaping plan that I have not seen.
