tv [untitled] October 20, 2012 12:00am-12:30am PDT
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another item, we have had jeff over to the fourth floor on the south side to that large, large patio which you have pictures of. we have had him over twice. once at the pre-application meeting for the first application which was in november of '11 and again in july of '12 when we revised the plan with the large angled setback, okay. at that time jeff told us that an acceptable plan for him -- jeff larson -- was that only build on the west half of that fourth floor patio. so we would expect we would have to take 235 foot frontage and cut it in half and only build on the webster side. we didn't think that was acceptable, okay. so, that was number one. number two is yes we have had code violations. we got a clearance report, by the way. i don't have a copy of it, but it is on file with joe [speaker not understood] with the sfdph, okay, total clearance support.
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we had a certified inspector come out and clear it. okay. and then another -- any other items that i can think of, no. i talked about the compromise, okay. any other questions? i hope i clarified it a little bit about phase 1 and phase ii of this project and where we're going. >> commissioners may have questions for you. okay, great. thank you. >> thank you. dr requester, you have a two-minute rebuttal. i would like you to turn to page 8 of my presentation which shows when we moved the angle of the vertex of the angle back into the center of the bedroom where children play and read, the light -- the angle shall -- the span through which the light enters the room is reduced from 25% to 0% which means no light reaches the center of the room and this is in beyond to the reference revised drawings with the four
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graduated to 8 feet back angle building i would also like to direct you to page 10 where i wanted to make the point that the sponsor has a history demonstrating disregard for regulations has violation codes of building health and public works that the city requires her to remove structures on two occasions and it took her over seven years to comply. there are still permits to revise work that is outstanding, that she has created severe impact on my family and the children in the building which led to the health department issuing a notice of violation. joe [speaker not understood] who was referred to, when i talked to him said usually an inspector comes out in 7 to 10 days. we're getting one out tomorrow because of the egregiousness of. this unfortunately my two-year old son has tested positive for high levels of lead in his blood and i and my unborn baby are expose and had we're waiting until after the birth
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to see the effect on this child. you can imagine the pain of. this there are five children when the baby is born living in the building with three on the other side. and i guess i would simply like to say we have proposed a compromise for a standard bedroom which would be 160 square feet, half the size that she is proposing. she is proposing a 320 square foot bedroom spanning the entire roof. the bedroom we have proposed, it lies on the other neighbor's property where there is already a fence so there would be no light impact to the other neighbor and we are willing to live with the light impact, the proposal would make in our bedroom. it doesn't address concerns of violating code and the health hazards which the neighbors have written about making a reasonable compromise. >> thank you. thank you. project sponsor, you have a rebuttal of two minutes if you'd like. thank you very much. david [speaker not understood], architect. i won't take-two minutes. i'm sure -- i know the commission has seen many, many
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light studies, projects much larger of this sort. but i'll simply point out that using such an approach here would angle -- would be appropriate if one was concerned with view going out of the window or with shadows cast. and i think as you know and is common sense knows and [speaker not understood] light enters in many more ways than simply direct sunlight. such a study is really only relevant to shadow casting and not [speaker not understood] entering a building or luminance [speaker not understood]. >> thank you. the public portion is closed and opening it up to commissioners for comments and questions. commissioner antonini. >> [inaudible]. if i could ask some questions. i'm looking at the plans which i think you have of the proposed report for. what they're doing is adding an additional bedroom to the back which is what the whole discussion is about.
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and you say a normal bedroom that is, you're saying 160 square feet which is a smaller amount. i'm not quite exactly sure what you expect them to do because they have to have a hall to access that bedroom which isedth lightwell is still there and it's expanded. * the they're taking space out of the existing bedroom and bath and creating a hall there which does not move the wall any closer, that section of it. and then that wall stays the same distance from -- i assume it's your building which is over to the left on my plan. and then they tapered the wall back so they have the four-foot separation and at the very back of it they have an eight-foot separation. i'm not quite sure what you're proposing they do to have that bedroom. >> that we're proposing on page 14 of my presentation is that
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they use a space on their roof no more than 12-1/2 feet wide and 10 feet back. we feel that -- i don't know, you know, they may as well make a smaller walk-in closet which you see on the diagram. i don't know how their architect would want to configure t but we recommend and we would request that they fit their bedroom into that space because it has minimal impact on our light and no impact on the neighbor on the other side who already has a tall fence there with them. >> okay, i think i see what you're doing here. this is the past proposal. right. >> i guess the one with the green thing is your proposal there. right. >> it looks to me like you're still actually -- still have that hall entrance where the bath used to be because they're coming in and they'll have a door that would not go -- instead of having the slanted
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area, you would have a setback that's almost a large part of it is eight-foot and it would come into that bedroom. i don't really see the difference here. i guess what you're saying is you're opening up a larger setback instead of 8 feet at the end of it, it's 8 feet all the way along. is that what you're trying to say? >> roughly, roughly, yes. that it would not cross the median of the roof, but that it would allow for light to continue to reach our bedroom which in the current proposal it does not as you saw through the red line [speaker not understood]. >> typically, if i'm reading this correct, staff, correct me if i'm wrong, minimum was four foot and it goes up to an eight foot. because normally when we have buildings, you know, sometimes there are three foot light wells or four foot light wells fairly deep. i'd have to see what the other commissioners have to say. eight-foot lightwell is very
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difficult. -- deep. light comes down, it's not like you can look straight out and see something without a room there, but you get light and it comes into. and the other question i have, there were other dr requesters or other people who were impacted. are they on the other side or they're the same side as you? no, the other ones are on our side. so, they are the lower units in our building that have already had -- at the last dr review, the sponsor mentioned she filled in two lightwells and those units were impacted at that time, and now they feel that this is yet again impacting those same two lightwells that have already been -- so, their flats become much, much darker and those are the ones that i referred to that are in the back of your binder, ben nichols and [speaker not understood] and randy and eleanor roland. so, they feel that -- i can quote from their letters, but they feel that a second round
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of light reduction is quite unfair to them and burdensome. this is our first round. but as i said on page 5 right now it is not a fully enclosed light rail well at our level because our building is higher than the sponsor's building. * lightwell so, there's the three sides and the wall open space. as soon as you put a wall affecting that open space, that's where light gets reduced. >> okay, well, thank you. i think i see what you're saying here. you know, i'm not sure about the previous case and that's not before us. there may have been a problem with that, they may have not matched lightwells. is that what you're saying? they didn't match them? no, what the other two units feel is they have had their light reduced once and now they are having their light reduced again. and that seems to be an excessive burden. to have two rounds -- >> do they have matching
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lightwells the first time around? >> i am not clear. i would assume that there was some attempts, but the way the description at the planning commission reads is fill in two lightwells. >> okay. i'd have to review that. * i might have been on the commission when that occurred, i don't remember. thank you. we'll see what the other -- maybe while i have -- i'll talk to project sponsor a little bit. i guess you've seen what she's proposing. maybe you can comment on that. i see you have, from what i understand, this unit is going to be a four bedroom unit with two bedrooms on the bottom level and then two on the top level. is that correct? that's correct, that's the proposal. that's the intention. >> i guess what, you know, what she's saying is you're cutting -- she wants to you cut off a portion of the back of that bedroom, instead of having it at 45-degree angle it would probably go more or less straight down at 8 feet to some
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point where you'd have the entry from the hall. i think that's what i see as the difference between the two things. i don't know if that's acceptable or how big a bedroom you'd have if you did it that way. >> well, i think that -- i don't know if it's possible to put on the overhead. i'm seeing this frankly for the first time with you or this page. and as an architect, there's problems. one is it's not clear to me, at least immediately, how an access of this bedroom without going into an intermediate room, the bathroom you pointed out there is no hallway. secondly, i don't have a calculation here before me, but light travels more or less in vectors. so, it's very hard for me. inabout i havely i think the difference in light that we're proposing and she's proposing would be almost impossible to calculate it would be so small. >> that being the case, let me just look at these drawings here. she does have this marked as a
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path which obviously would have to be a hallway, not a bathroom. in your plans i guess what you did is take the bathroom out of the position, created a hall, moved the bathroom over next to what's marked the media room because there's a family room and a media room which is a little bit strange. i'm not sure what those -- what the difference is there. it's a huge room. i'm not sure why one of those isn't a bedroom. but that's a little confusing. and then what you did is you moved the bathroom over to where the media room is. so that the hall could be created there. and then instead of having a bedroom that has a wall that goes at an angle, it would have a wall that's straight. it looks like much of the size would be the same. >> well, perhaps. well, perhaps. and as you say, one can imagine different scenarios where you can put in hallways. * but the other thing that strikes me as problematic is this green [speaker not understood] can go here is imposed over an existing lightwell on the other side
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which extends all the way down to the ground. >> that's true. i believe that this actually then imposes on us an unreasonable burden on structural costs and so forth in order -- in other words, this is up at the fourth story. we would have to find a way to can't lever and structure, impose a building on our other side of the neighbor. so, we're just i don't want to say trading one problem for another, but we're creating a problem for another neighbor who is not here obviously not part of this dr. i don't expect they would thank us very much for partially filling in their lightwell. and we're also imposing it on the sponsors within the realm of residential architecture an unreasonable financial burden to deal with the structure applications. once again, somebody has done a lot of light studies and so forth and so on. intuitively, i can't give you a calculation, but my professional judgment is there
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would be no difference in light to the subject window. no calculable damage. >> you make a good point. because looking at the plans, what they've done with this green square is to cut part of that lightwell out which takes light from the neighbor on the other side. and that has to remain -- [multiple voices] >> it gets chopped up pretty good. unless, of course, it went further back. i guess you still want to maintain the root back on the structure there beyond the proposed bedroom. i think the depth itself doesn't seem to be the problem i suppose. i don't know why the green square is deeper [speaker not understood]. i can't speak to why the dr requester would draw the square and that exact configuration. >> thank you. we'll see what the other commissioners have to say. >> commissioner moore. >> i'd like to get back to discussing what is in front of
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us and see how we can sort it owl, just the analysis of the department and residential design review, group provided for us. * sort it out i suggest the commissioners open this particular page of their packet and that tells an interesting story. the first story is obviously rooftop petitions and enlargements of units propose what we are using as reference in the code is indeed that matching lightwells normally provide the protection for light and air that we can defend based on how we need to look at projects. and [speaker not understood] instructed us as this project being code compliant beyond what is normally done, the [speaker not understood] back of the bedroom to the center of the roof. which by the way if you look at
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this area, see on the building four buildings to the left, that being probably the west, shows you how other people are doing that as well. the person next to our applicant does something which is even slightly less sensitive. they actually even push their extension further out in the roof by where the impact should our applicant have windows on that side would probably -- could potentially make a same complaint about shadow in the middle of the roof. however, in urban settings with property -- with windows on property lines, we don't have other tools other than the lightwell to except that. so, i believe that this proposal is unusually sensitive to the issues and i find the presentation, while i understand the applicant, the dr applicant's concerns as normal, we hear them all the time. however, we have much more
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severe cases. i would be inclined to approve the project as is without trying to redesign it because from a residential design review point of view, this is better than what most people do. this is the most astounding comment you made because it goes beyond the call of duty bringing the billion back which most people don't want to do because they don't want to have an angle in the roof. so, my tendency would be -- not my tendency, but i'm going to make a motion that we follow department's judgment and ruling and move to approve without taking dr. >> second. >> commissioner borden. >> that's why i wanted to speak. i understand the concern the dr requester has, but unfortunately based on the residential design guidelines, we only ask people typically to match lightwells and this is a
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much larger matching. i sympathize with the light and i can see you will have a loss of light. it's hard to predict whether the change you are proposing would actually achieve as much greater light than what you'll get from what they're already doing. but it is a challenge because, you know, unfortunately the way the buildings are built, there are many dark rooms in back of homes. i know we have them in my building and it's problematic because there is not a whole lot that we could do in this situation because this is actually greater than what the design guidelines called for. in term of the other issues, i would definitely -- if there are building issues or health department issues, unfortunately those are not things that we have anything to do with or even can use in basing our decisions. so, i definitely would encourage you to pursue the other processes either with the health department or with the building department if there are things that are inappropriate. but unfortunately based upon
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what we have to make a decision upon, this is not an exceptional or extraordinary case unfortunately. so, i just wanted you to understand that because you did bring up some other issues that may be significant, but they are unfortunately not issues we are able to deal with. >> commissioner moore. >> i'd like to add one thing, and that is for asking the applicant and the architect to make sure that the color hue on the outside of the extension are one color to [speaker not understood] with the positive light transfer, direct or indirect, into the adjoining properties and the windows which face you. i think it's very important that we're not talking about dark woods or any of those kinds of things, but with a very soft, warm color in the very lighter hues of san francisco. appreciate that. >> commissioner antonini. >> i just want to ask project sponsor a little bit about the
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areas to the front of this. i'm not quite sure what the difference. it looks like the family room and the media room are the same room. and it looks like a really large room. i'm not sure what the difference is here. it's a fairly large room, quite large room. [speaker not understood] placement. we can have movies or home theater, that sort of thing in one part of it and family gathering. but it's a large [speaker not understood]. >> it looks like it's probably 28 feet in length or 30. i'm not sure what that length is. it's a pretty large room, which is a nice feature. you may have taken a little bit of that to move your bathroom over there. i'm not sure. i'd have to look at this a little closer. i'm just wondering, you know, if there is anyway to minimize -- move everything that way and perhaps bring this bedroom back, some on the back. it looks like that's probably not realistic given where the
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walls are. they're not bearing walls because i guess this is the top floor. that's right. the existing [speaker not understood] you see, we are actually using the bearing wall, the wall that is more or less differentiates between the bedroom and the media room is partly where the rafters currently bare. it would create a structural situation. >> you'd have to move everything around, changev your whole roof ferment a different gable probably. okay, i understand that. okay, dr requester, one question for you. i sympathize. i really don't see the difference here because it looks like, unless i'm reading these plans wrong, right now you have a four-foot separation all the way along. there's two lightwells, two windows on your property. one window has a four-foot lightwell matching it which will remain. that is not changing any.
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and then they have created essentially almost an eight-foot lightwell for the other one. so, i'm not quite sure what the difference is. it seems like all you're having is you're looking at a structure that wasn't there before out the window. >> that structure is imposing on the light that shines into the lightwell. * as i said, it's a three-sided lightwell. it's not totally enclosed lightwell. so, they are taking the open space and putting the wall there. i wanted to also say in response to the earlier discussion you have with the architect, we are not architects. when we drew this green diagram, it was not our intent to -- it's an error, simply, to go over the other neighbor's lightwell. it was -- the intent was to have some kind of structure that goes from the median to the western side of the building and that gives her an
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additional bedroom, 160 square feet. perhaps you can use the media room and family room which you quite correctly point out are quite large. one of which could easily -- i don't know really the difference between the media room and family room. it seems to me you only need one -- >> may i have a point of order here? we have a motion -- >> i'm sorry, i was asking a question if i can get an answer. >> [inaudible]. >> i'll call for the question if i get a second. >> second. >> i just would like -- thank you. i'm almost done. >> [inaudible]. [inaudible].
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i'm very pleased that today we have a number of distinguished guests joining us from the ribbon cutting ceremony, so allow me now a few moments to introduce our guests first of all please welcome san francisco mayor mr. edwin lee. [ applause ] >> >> next please welcome singer, song writer and unico cast member, quopola. [ applause ] >> we also would like to welcome the director of the san francisco zoo, miss tania peterson. >> and now, ladies and gentlemen, let's please welcome unico, ceo mr. tabashi yani. [ applause ] >> and last, but not least,
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please welcome unico usa chief operating officer, mr. pani... [ applause ] >> at this time, i would like to ask unico ceo, mr. yani to give us a few opening remarks. >> mr. yani please. >> good morning, everyone. yeah, i am now so much excited because of for the opening soon and also i would like to express my personal experience 45 years ago i was 18 years. i passed 15 this usa, in san francisco, is my past experience to around here.
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and also, i much say, i am a 49er. [ cheers ] >> because i was born 49 year, and also, for each century, do you know, today, today is a day, you know, today is steve jobs passed away, one year ago. i give steve jobs so much and this is a place of innovation, i try to make innovation here for us today. thank you very much for listening. thank you. [ applause ] >> thank you, very much. >> may i now ask mayor lee for a response, please?
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>> thank you. and mr. yuni thank you and welcome to san francisco, welcome unico for to the square it is a great place to be, this 30,000-square foot flag ship for the west coast and i have been wanting to tell you that i have known about your store to my daughter for quite some time, who have been religiously shopping for their affordable and very well-designed clothing for quite some time, and of course, i'm very intrigued being the next model to follow joe montana. but, i'm happy to be here and joined with, of course, tania peterson our zoo director and so many friends. i also had to wake up to my wife saying, we are going to the store today, are we not? so she is there
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