PAUL J LORENZ

USE MY LOT

YSoA Urbanism Studio with Keller Easterling
Collaboration with Lucas Boyd
Nominated for publication in Retrospecta 39

One of the prevailing and problematic issues facing the city of Bridgeport, Connecticut is stasis. Every action that the city needs to move through must proceed through an economic and spatial environment that has, for decades, been left in a state of stagnation. As a result, a nothing-happens economy has left the city with a depressed urban development culture, and perhaps more devastating; it has left the city with an image of low expectations. From outside the city, Bridgeport is perceived as this post-industrial wasteland that has failed to re-invent itself within the context of a 21st century economy. It is a place that Connecticut would love to forget, but – to the benefit of Bridgeport – the city’s location on the coast of the Long Island Sound and as a major stop on the Northeast Rail Corridor continues to project its image, insistently, into the vision of thousands of its neighbors. The city insists on not being forgotten. Nothing happens here that is not witnessed by a broad range of these rail commuters.

City bureaucracy, coupled with Bridgeport’s current iteration of zoning regulations, effectively ensures that almost no development will occur. Moving a project through the city’s various departments in order to attain a multitude of approvals and sign offs presents a significant barrier to many types of development. The time and money required by this process increases the soft development costs in any scale of development. In large scale, highly capitalized development projects, these often fixed costs represent a small fraction of the project’s overall cost. However, large scale projects are not going to come to the city in the foreseeable future. For moderately scaled developments, bureaucratically driven costs become a significant part of the project’s budget. Truly small scale developments would are never considered as a possibility, since these fixed costs place far too much of a financial and scheduling burden on the project. Such developments would never be financed, would never become profitable, and would never be fiscally tenable.

Three outcomes result from the high threshold for successful development caused by a lack of money and a burdensome permitting process.
1: Due to a lack of local access to capital, large scale projects requiring multi-million-dollar budgets will not occur in Bridgeport.
2: The financial and spatial value in the city’s open land never reaches its potential and remains undeveloped and unimproved.
3: Finally, small scale developments that are affordable to a broad range of people in Bridgeport will not become financially feasible from the developer’s perspective and will not occur, therefore leaving large segments of the population without the ability to participate homeownership.
This proposal seeks ways to lower the bureaucratic and financial threshold for development and allow variously-scaled developments to benefit the people and the economy of Bridgeport.

Odd Lot Protocol

The history of Bridgeport can be seen in the collision between its many grids. The intersection of grids has produced block structures that inherently lead to irregularly shaped and oddly sized parcels. While many of the area's two and three unit buildings would fit comfortably within 0.1 acre sites, the city’s parcels range from 0.05 to 0.4 acres.

This has left the city of Bridgeport with many opportunities for densification. While there is room to build somewhat smaller residential structures within these residential areas, the city’s current zoning code effectively forbids any actual development. The UseMyLot app can be used in these situations in the exact way it is used to subdivide large, speculatively owned parcels of land. In Bridgeport’s residential zones, the current restriction on new parcels smaller than 9000 square feet must be amended. Not only are such parcels spatially impossible, they are also neither needed nor desired by the currently possible scale of development. The market can support the introduction of small residential units. Small units have no use for 9000 square foot parcels.

FUTURE HISTORY
This hypothetical history of house at 57 Rosedale Street and its hypothetical owners, Terrence and Renita Smith, will demonstrate the opportunities for development that are made possible through the machination of the UseMyLot app.

2018
Terrence and Renita Smith have owned the duplex at 57 Rosedale Street for decades. They continue to live in the first floor and rent out the second floor. This rental income generally pays for the monthly mortgage and covers typical maintenance for the building. Their own children have moved out years ago. The swingset in their triangle-shaped back yard has nearly rusted to nothing.

2019
The Smiths’ only granddaughter is about to graduate from Roosevelt High School. She has been accepted into a great college, and Terrence and Renita want to financially support her education. Terrence’s neighbor has told him about UseMyLot, a website that can help sell unused portions of land. The Smiths find that their awkwardly triangular lot can be subdivided to create a small, empty, sellable parcel.

2020
The Smiths have connected with Vinh Lanh Nguyen, a developer interested in building modestly scaled homes in Bridgeport. Through UseMyLot, they have set up a meeting with Cynthia Thomas and Ade Afolayan (a lawyer and a surveyor working with UseMyLot). They carefully review both the proposed lot subdivision and the sale contract. The Smiths and Nguyen agree to a parcel split that includes a small easement that would allow the Smiths continued access to their garage from the street. The money from the sale helps their granddaughter to continue her education, and Terrence and Renita have less lawn to mow.

2021
David Kovac and his two children become a new neighbor of the Smiths when Kovac purchases a new small home at 59 Rosedale Street.

Large Lot Protocol

Many empty parcels within the medium and high density areas of Bridgeport are all that remain of the large industrial structures that once populated the periphery city in the nineteenth century. In the city’s post-industrial present, redevelopment has yet to rebuild structures on these parcels. Most of these pieces of land exist in a holding pattern. The owners compile these parcels into speculative real estate investment portfolios and simply wait for an opportunity to re-sell the unimproved lot at a profit. As part of this speculation scheme, large parcels of land are used as parking space, bulk material storage areas, or self-storage facilities. Income from these uses covers a part of the property’s tax exposure and maintenance costs. In Bridgeport’s current real-estate development environment, these parcels will remain undeveloped for an indeterminate period of time.

In these scenarios, the city of Bridgeport is dealt a significant opportunity loss. The small amount of property tax income does little to offset the drain caused by these utterly banal open places.

The UseMyLot app, coupled with specific zoning changes, can begin to loosen the real-estate gridlock seen in Bridgeport. One aim in this proposal is focused on enabling smaller scaled developments to occur in a place that lacks the market and the capital that can support large scale development. Small-scale retail and mixed-use projects may require a mere 0.1 acre site. Many such sites can be carved out of any given derelict parcel, but the amount of effort required to subdivide a parcel makes such an activity entirely unfeasible. In the current situation, a land owner/real-estate speculator may need to raise liquid capital in order to pursue another project, pay for much needed maintenance, pay taxes, etc. They may have a significant of value trapped in ownership of a large parcel, but do not need nor wish to sell the entire parcel to raise a small amount of capital. In this case, they wish to subdivide the parcel and sell a small part of it. However, the costs associated with the subdivision of land are so high that creating and selling a small parcel does not make any fiscal sense. The city’s implementation of the UseMyLot interface, along with a change to NCVD (and similar) zones that decreases the minimum lot size to 1,500 square feet create a new pathway to transform this dormant lot into a series of developments.

Merge Protocol

A considerable amount of buildable land is currently tied up in parcels that already are occupied by structures. Zoning codes require side yard, front yard and rear yard setbacks that effectively eliminate the possibility of densification within each parcel. This is especially apparent within the city’s two-family and three-family residential zones. In many cases, an existing building footprint will only occupy one quarter of the parcel. WHile open space is, of course, critically important in any urban center, the required amount of, and the distribution of open space in these zones goes far beyond the requirements of fire separating daylighting, and natural ventilation.

Allowance for increased density will do much to enrich the experience of the city. The space of the street, for example, can shift from its current field condition to being a volumetric space defined by an increasingly continuous building frontage. To accomplish this, new infill construction must be allowed to take place within the space now taken up by the required side yard setback.

In this case, the scope of our project does not propose the reduction or elimination of side lot setbacks in thEse residential zones. Instead, the project takes advantage of the UseMyLot application to make parcel mergers simple and inexpensive. In the same way that the parcel subdivision process was modified, the UseMyLot application will streamline bureaucratic process as well as acting like a clearinghouse for development opportunities.

The problem of undevelopable side yards is simply bypassed by transforming two side yards into one empty space at the center of one larger parcel, since this open space is no longer within the minimum distance from a lot line, it has become buildable. This space can either be developed by the current owner of the existing parcels or by a development firm. The UseMyLot application will contain a listing of any paired parcels within the city that are both geographically adjacent and are owned by the same person or company.

Easy Co-op Protocol

The UseMyLot application can be used not only as a catalyst for new development. It can also be utilized to transform existing buildings from legal property definitions specifically formulated for a rental market into property definitions that support small scaled home ownership. Specifically, that UseMyLot spp streamlines the process of transforming multi-unit buildings with one owner into condominiums and co-ops with many owners.

FUTURE HISTORY

2018
Maria Ramirez-Cardenal and Jose Cardenal, along with their two children, have been living in a rental apartment in Bridgeport for several years. Maria’s aging parents, Augusto and Gloria Ramirez, have owned a single family home in a nearby city. They are becoming less capable of independent living as the continue to are. The entire extended family would like to live together under one roof, but the cost of an appropriately sized home makes this impossible. A member of Ms. Ramirez’s volunteer group tells her aout an app that can find great, if not atypical real estate opportunities. She installs the app and finds that, using the app’s streamlined process, a triplex large enough for her extended family can be transformed into a housing cooperative. Each of the two households can buy enough shares in the co-op to own the property.

2019
Through the app, the family finds an appropriate property located at 287 Benham Avenue, near a cluster of highly diverse groceries and community organizations. The current owner is willing to transform the property into a co-op using the UseMyLot app, with the free assistance of Cynthia Thomas (a lawyer working with UseMyLot). Once the property’s legal definition has changed, Maria Ramirez-Cardenal and Jose Cardenal are able to buy a 50% share in the co-op. Next, Augusto and Gloria Ramirez purchase the remaining 50% share. Each family occupies a floor of the building. The third floor is rented as office space to the newly started Design Fugitives firm. Rent from this deal pays for maintenance and improvements to the co-op.