The Board of Zoning Appeals met 03/20/2023. One of the items they took up was a request for a variance from the property at 602 N Lawe Street, which is the corner of Lawe and Pacific. The property is a house that has a commercial C-2 zoning and is right in between Moon Water Café and Jacob’s Meat Market. The property owner would like to turn it into a tavern with a maximum capacity of 49. City code requires that a tavern provide 1 off-street parking space for every 3 persons allowed based on maximum capacity which means they need to provide 17 parking spaces. The property only has 3 parking spaces with no room to install more, so the developer was requesting a variance to not have to provide those 14 additional parking spaces. The committee ended up approving the variance request in light of the fact that the property has long had a commercial zoning and most other commercial uses of the property would have similar issues not being able to meet the city code’s parking space requirements.
I’ve prepared a transcript of the discussion. There were some technical issues so the people who provided public comment were picked up by the microphone only intermittently. As a result, I’ve not included the public comment portion of the meeting, but the transcript does include the committee’s discussion and deliberation regarding the variance request.
When I posted the agenda for this meeting, I mentioned that I expected this item would result in pushback from neighbors given the proximity of the tavern to residential neighborhoods, and that turned out to be the case. As noted above, their comments were not picked-up clearly by the microphone so I can only give a very high-level overview of the concerns I could gather were expressed. Those concerns included:
- Families no longer wanting to purchase houses in that area due to not wanting to raise children by a bar
- Decreased property values
- Noise and nuisance from tavern patrons
- Trespassing on adjacent properties by tavern patrons
- Safety issues with people trying to cross the street
- Safety issues for children in the neighborhood
The property was owned by Neighborhood Investment LLC, which also owns Moon Water Café right next door. One of the members of that group and the person who appeared before the Board of Zoning was Andrew Dane who lives in the neighborhood and is also a member of the City Planning Commission. Although it was not actually germane to whether or not the property had a hardship that warranted a variance, he did note that they planned to only be open from 4pm to 9 or 10pm and they intended to serve beer and wine as opposed to hard liquor. He also had a verbal agreement with the owner of Jacob’s Meat Market for the tavern patrons to utilize Jacob’s parking lot. He also raised the possibility of building a fence along the back of his properties to provide a barrier between them and the adjacent neighbors.
He repeatedly likened the situation with this property to that of the Ellinor restaurant just a couple blocks to the east. All Things Appleton readers may remember Ellinor back when it was going by the name Alpine Swift. It also was a commercially zoned building in a residential neighborhood; similar to this property, its owner wanted to open a neighborhood restaurant that served alcohol and needed to seek a parking-related variance which the board did grant. Ellinor’s/Alpine Swift’s parking issues were actually more severe than those experienced by Lawe/Pacific property because it was completely surrounded by houses, whereas the location of this tavern had some commercial properties around it.
He also noted that the property had been a blighted drug house when he purchased it for $60,000. Since then, he had invested around $100,000 into it, and it had been appraised for $210,000. He also mentioned that Moon Water Café next door to it had seen its appraised value more than double since he had purchased it.
The board understood the concerns of the neighbors. They briefly tossed around the idea of tying a variance to Mr. Dane establishing a formal agreement with Jacob’s Meat Market but that did not seem practical. They also considered granting a variance for fewer parking stalls than the full 17 that the tavern would need or possibly granting a number of parking stalls as a percentage based on the available parking on the street divided among the nearby commercial properties, but that was deemed overly complicated and somewhat outside the scope of what the Board of Zoning Appeals should be doing.
In the end, the board voted to grant the variance as requested because there was a hardship on the property in terms of parking for any commercial use, the need for 17 parking spots was probably the worst-case scenario, and the property needed some sort of flexibility to be able to provide a service to the community. Board member Kelly Sperl also said he thought that these sorts of businesses were good for the neighborhoods they were in and pointed to Milwaukee, Chicago, and Denver as having unique boutique-type bars, restaurants, and coffee shops similar to the proposed tavern.
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1084896&GUID=E31C8A02-C3E3-4355-AD26-054E405A9284
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