The city just screwed over my client (vent post ahead)

[Nik Moushon]

A little bit of venting:

Some pretext: Our office (I'm an architect) has been working on a 84 unit apartment complex in our city. Our city is DESPERATELY short on housing as a whole and even worse off when it come to affordable housing (not section 8 style affordable just avg person housing). We did a pre-app meeting with the city in October last year and came away with them basically pleading with our clients to build this and get it done yesterday. We have discussed and submitted various thing since then. So they have been well aware of our design and proposal since then. We went through the planned development zoning code in the city that basically allows us to do things out of the norm in certain zones that meet certain criteria. i.e. allow greater density in a low density zone.

The problem: Two weeks ago we got notice that a public hearing date for approval got pushed back a MONTH, was suppose to be yesterday. Long story there of the city dropping the ball. Clients pissed, understandably so, but it is what it is. Then last Monday (a week later) they call out principal and tell him that our angled on street parking (that we proposed dedicating to the city as public parking) is only allowed through a special ordinance with the city council which will take ANOTHER month to get approval. So now we are pushed back 2 months. Clients are really pissed now.

Fast forward to this Monday, they call back again asking for another meeting for Tuesday(yesterday). This time involving the city public works department since they are the ones controlling on-street parking. The engineers basically say we don't want your 18 angled parking spaces(even if we decided to go through the city council approval) because its not the norm and are forcing us to go with 8 parallel parking spaces instead. We protest as this is a major part of our "public benefit" since this city is also short on this and it also messes with our parking count, which is already below the min. They basically said they didnt care and to take care of the now lack luster public benefit we (the client) could just cut them a check for X amount. WHAT THE BLOODY ************!!!!!!!!! They are literally holding our clients for ransom! Everyone pissed off beyond belief now. Oh and to top it off we have till Friday to decide on what we are doing and make the changes and submit the changes or we lose our currently scheduled public hearing date in 3 weeks.

The city is letting engineers make the deciding decisions on how we design our project to meet the code. To meet the specifics of the panned development standards that are purposefully designed to go against the norm. But since its not what they normally do they don't want us to do it. Nothing has cemented in my mind the government causes more problems than they solve than this right here.

Words (other than a tirade of four letter words) cannot describe how pissed everyone is. especially since I've been working 12-17 hour days the last two weeks to get this done.

Thanks for reading my rant. Had to vent somewhere.