April 14, 2005

Builders buying Catholic church land

By Robert Mihalek

Builders Jonathan Brown and Cathy Phillips plan to purchase the Catholic church property on King Street and develop a mixture of homes on the land.

The local residents, who operate Phillips-Brown Homes, want to build a variety of homes of different sizes and prices that are highly energy efficient.

They also have asked Village Council to let them purchase one acre of the Glass Farm for the development and are talking with Yellow Springs Home, Inc., about possibly providing the affordable housing organization with several lots somewhere within the new neighborhood.

Phillips-Brown Homes’ plan is to “provide homes that will be a neighborhood and part of the adjacent neighborhood,” on King Street and Kingsfield, said Brown, who has also built Park Meadows and the Kingsfield neighborhood and with Phillips is currently constructing a house for Home, Inc., at Dayton and High Streets.

They do not know yet how many houses they will build or how large the structures will be, though Brown said that the homes will be both large and small. The key is not to design a development from a perspective of costs or square footage, he said, “but from the idea of making a variety of houses for people who want to live in this town.”

They want to build “housing that can be as affordable as we can conceive of it,” Brown said.

Phillips said they will close on the deal for the 8.25-acre property, which is owned by St. Paul Catholic Church and has been on the market for a number of years, at the end of the month. They have a contract with the church to buy the land and the old farmhouse on the property for $375,000, Phillips and Brown said in a letter to Village Council.

The Glass Farm adjacent to the Catholic church property has 110 feet of frontage on King Street, is 400 feet deep and extends to the creek that runs through both the church property and the Glass Farm.

The builders have offered the Village $25,000 for the acre of land, which, they said in their letter, is the fair market value, and what they say they are paying per acre for the church property, after the value of the house and its quarter-acre property is taken into account.

Having the Glass Farm land would aid the flow of traffic from the new development and the Kingsfield neighborhood and allow Phillips-Brown to build more homes at a lower cost, Brown said. They would build an access street into their development across from Kingsfield Drive, which, Brown and Phillips said in their letter, would be “safer for travelers and less invasive to current residents of the street.”

In an interview, Brown said placing the new road across from the existing street is “good planning.”

If they can work out a deal with Council, they would build homes on both sides of the new road, on both the church property side and on the Glass Farm property, Brown said. Being able to divide their costs for roads and utilities among more houses would “keep the cost of the houses down,” Brown said. They would construct the homes on the Glass Farm behind the row of trees that borders the church property, Brown said.

Council discussed the request during an executive session, which was not open to the public, at its meeting April 4. Council did not make a statement after the hour-long executive session.

All five Council members participated in the executive session, including Denise Swinger, who lives on King Street, within view of the Glass Farm and across the street from the Catholic church property.

After the meeting, Council president Tony Arnett said in an interview that Council members have questions for Brown and Phillips about their offer. Arnett would not discuss what Council members said in the private session, though he did say that “nothing was resolved” during the discussion.

He stressed that Council members have not yet decided whether they will sell the acre of land, and he said that the Village was not negotiating with Brown and Phillips.

“We want to hear more but we haven’t even decided if we even want to sell it yet,” he said.

The offer to purchase part of the Glass Farm comes less than a month after Council released the results of two surveys the Village organized asking questions of Yellow Springers about their support for development and cutting Village services, among other things. The surveys, which were conducted at the end of 2004 and earlier this year, also asked local residents about their support for selling the Glass Farm.

In a mail survey, which was distributed to every household in Yellow Springs, 64 percent of respondents said they supported selling part of the Glass Farm for development, while 30 percent opposed the idea.

In the other survey, which was conducted by phone and included 309 households, 45 percent of respondents opposed selling part of the farm, while 40.5 percent said they supported this suggestion.

Selling the Glass Farm is a political decision as much as an economic one for Council. In the last 10 years, two unsuccessful attempts were made to build affordable housing on the Glass Farm, including a referendum in 2002 in which Yellow Springs voters overwhelmingly rejected an affordable housing project.

When it was pointed out that Council has a goal to support housing construction, Arnett noted that Council also has a goal to promote the preservation of green space. “A number of people in the community,” as shown in the surveys, “feel strongly about it being green space,” Arnett said of the Glass Farm.

Asked how significant purchasing the Glass Farm land is to the builders’ development plan, Brown said they “have to have it in order to have a great plan. We don’t need it to have a good plan.”

Phillips-Brown Homes and Home, Inc., are discussing a possible agreement through which the builders would sell Home, Inc., parcels in the development, though Stan Bernstein, president of the Home, Inc., board, said that the two organizations do not have a written agreement at this time.

“We would like to work with him,” Bernstein said of Brown.

Home, Inc., would use funds from a state grant the organization received last year to purchase the lots in the new development, Bernstein said. The group received a grant that totaled almost $400,000 to help it build 10 moderately priced homes. Currently, Home, Inc., has three homes under construction and plans to start a fourth, Bernstein said.

“We are in the market for six more buildable lots,” he said.

Brown and Phillips plan to seek to rezone the property under the Village’s new Planned Unit Development ordinance, which is designed to allow for flexibility and creativity when planning site developments. If all goes well, construction could start by September, Phillips said.

Developing the property under the PUD regulations would allow the builders to cluster the homes. On the eastern side of the property they plan to build single-family homes, some that will stand alone and some that will be attached to others. On the western side they will build “Park Meadows 2,” which Brown said is a working title, a group of houses organized like Park Meadows.

Brown said he has had “so many requests to build Park Meadows-type houses,” which, he said, have a shared maintenance agreement and are “clustered but private” and energy efficient.

They also are considering constructing a common building for the property in which the home owners could share laundry facilities, guest rooms or dining and kitchen space. They also plan to construct a bike and walking path through the neighborhood.