This commentary is by Evan Gould of Burlington. He is a husband, father, software engineer and housing advocate. He is a member of the Burlington Development Review Board and Vermonters for People Oriented Places, a grassroots organization dedicated to building affordable, resilient communities.
I appreciate Devin Colman’s creative way of fitting a five-story building on the site of the cathedral parking lot in his opinion piece and sympathize with the desire to conserve the landscape architecture.
That said, the Preservation Burlington proposal fails to capture the land use potential of this lot. It does not meet the diocesan demands for deconsecration of their holy site, it’s financially untenable, and it underutilizes the land. To see why it fails I think it’s important to understand it in the context of the zoning rules for this particular location.
The cathedral occupies a block within the form district 6 — the most permissive of any zone in the city. It allows 10-story buildings with ground-floor retail. In the opinion piece it’s claimed that the example building Preservation Burlington designed can accommodate 45-50 one-bedroom units. It’s clear from the aerial view that the cathedral’s lot has enough space to fit a building about the size of the northern CityPlace building. Both are approximately 73,000 square feet.
So how much housing are we losing if we go with this example building? The CityPlace North building plans demonstrate that each residential floor has space for 40 one-bedroom units (including studios), and 5 two-bedroom units. That leads to a total of 405 units, with a mix of types. That means each floor of a full buildout has more units than the entire building Preservation Burlington is proposing, in fact, we’d lose approximately 300-350 units by building this way.
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What about affordability? Preservation Burlington says all 45-50 units will be affordable. In Burlington we have an inclusionary zoning ordinance that requires between 15-25% of new units to be affordable. The CityPlace equivalent building would be required by law to construct 61 to 101 affordable units, and that’s before taking into account the knock-on effects of filtering on affordable housing supply.
The Preservation Burlington proposal results in a 90% reduction in total units, and a 50% reduction in affordable units, compared to what the lot is potentially capable of. This is not a viable solution, or a compromise. It’s an untenable, likely financially nonviable solution that continues the decisions and priorities which led to our current housing crisis.
I have a proposal for how the landscape architecture could be preserved without such a dire reduction in housing. Instead of orienting a new building internally towards a parking lot it could orient the other way and preserve some of the trees as a courtyard. Doing so would remove the parking garage, but would be a creative use of space bordering the transit center, which calls back to the original layout.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Evan Gould: A response to the Preservation Burlington proposal for the cathedral property.