1. Adjacent land …. the St. Marks church has put a bid for $150k to use it as a parking lot. We would have to beat this price and soon. Is it worth it.? It is the top right corner “Carmen’s parcel” 1.49 acres. This would allow us to add up to 8 additional houses here. See later with the financial discussions as to how this would change our financial picture.
Just a wild idea, what if we got Carmen’s parcel and sold Charlie’s parcel to the church for their parking and fellowship needs? Except I want to keep the barn 🙂
2. The jungle (back part of the big house) is almost cleared out to find our good trees. It will be finished on Tuesday.
3 Notes from my conversations with Roger Grunke.
The comprehensive long range plan for our property is Residential 6. This means that if we increase the density of our project to 6 units per acre, we don’t have to get a change in the plan. We still need to either rezone or do a PD (Planned Development) to increase the current zoning density.
We don’t want to rezone. With standard zoning rules, we will have to put in streets with curbs and sidewalks, minimum lot sizes like in other traditional neighborhood. Just rezoning would have us selling lots in a subdivision, but not creating the community we want.
We do want to do a PD. To create a pedestrian friendly community, we need a PD, where we can tell them what kinds of streets and arrangement of housing units we want. We need to stop talking about lots in our neighborhood and reframe it as housing units. We are creating much more than vacant lots in a nice neighborhood.
A PD takes about 6 months to get thru the planning department. All rezoning and PDs are political. We will have to address making friends in the neighborhood and county commission and planning department.
We need a legal entity, probably an LLC, for the world to have an entity to talk to, besides me and a trustee. This is not hard to do.
We need to decide on the form of development we will use. Probably a Condominium is best… there are looser land use requirements and everyone understands what the concept is. Each member would own their individual unit and a proportional share of the common land (including driveways and pathways)
Part of the survey is the tree survey. Certainly grand oaks we want to keep. They live more than 100 years and are great to have. Many of the trees we have are either laurel oaks or water oaks, both of which are a liability. They live 25 years before dropping branches or splitting in two frequently. These trees are better to remove and replant with better trees. This would also give more flexibility on the placement of housing units.
With a PD we don’t have to have traditional driveways. We do need access to every housing unit that is load bearing (for firetrucks and ambulances), but we can plan parking centralized and not necessarily at each housing unit. We will need multiple golf carts to provide access on the long distances.
We need to decide on 3? or 4? housing units, based on a modular sizing, to build as reasonably as possible and to standardize our units. It will save lots of money and build unity. On the left is a photo I took of a display board with modular units designed by Roger for the Tampa Cohousing. From the picture on the left, I extracted 2 of the models so you can see them more clearly. They are the two photos of units on the right. These are not OUR designs, but are an example of modular housing units.
Roger: Taken from the photo on the left. 1 BR/ 1 BA with porch 890 sf total
Roger: Studio with 1 BA and porch 787 sf total
Roger very much wants to participate in this project and work hand-in-hand with us. He will charge, but I will do as much as I can to help him.
4. Questions I’m following up on… (Please jump in and volunteer to help any time):
talk to Pamela-Jo Hatley regarding legal issues, non-profit corporation
will a condominium or any sort of group organization allow us any discounts on impact or water hook up fees?
get the survey going… surveyors are busy but this is holding us up now.
Costs I don’t know about yet: application to tie into force main, cost of force main, hookup to TECO, Wi-FI, Cable,
Sue Mitchel is beginning Mission / Vision statement
Is Monday at 12 OK for zoom? Suggest other times… Not Fridays at noon, not 3:30 daily, not Tuesday nights…. These are my thoughts in 4 days… can you imagine what it would be like to skip 2 weeks?
5. Financial Statements: Income and expenses of Joint Venture. All accounting documents are located in the password protected Files folder. The Accounting link opens a google doc that is edited daily. Click on the link and open the doc on your computer.
6. Financial Property Development Costs This link leads to the google doc where we keep track of anticipated and actual expenses so we can make decisions about the viability of the project.
7. Now the Fun stuff:
Harmony Terrace of Tampa Bay 