Foregoing Sidewalks Won't Make Kirkwood Affordable

Update 12/11/2024:

We learned new details about the origins of this proposal and which way the council is leaning at last week’s public hearing. Here’s the latest.

When Director of Planning Jonathan Raiche presented to the council, you could tell he was a little pissed. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that he pretty clearly thought that the change the council was requesting constituted bad policy. It also quickly became apparent that he had had a fairly central role in crafting the policy the council was now trying to undo.

As Raiche explained, the rule requiring property owners to fill in sidewalk gaps on their lots when constructing an addition that would more than double the building’s floor area is fairly new. In fact, it was added as part of the 2020 zoning changes inspired by the recommendations of the city’s Envision 2035 master plan. The whole point of that plan —one that he helped to spearhead and draft legislation in response to its recommendations for— was to try and improve city rules and now the council was reneging on such recently earned progress.

The origins of the council’s 180 apparently dates to a project that was recently proposed for 121 N. Van Buren. The new owner of the 1904 single-family home testified in the public comment segment of the meeting that when he applied to add a 120k sqft addition on the home, he was mystified by the fact that the code required him to add a sidewalk along the West Jefferson side of the property.

The addition itself already meant he had to cut down the mature oak trees in his backyard, he explained, and now the city wanted him to sacrifice a couple of (much smaller) trees in his side yard too? It would be a sidewalk to nowhere, the owner protested during his more than six minutes of public testimony (more than double what’s allowed by rule and four times as long as the Mayor allowed me to speak in favor of a housing project’s public hearing this fall).

As I’m sure you can tell by now, I’m annoyed. I’m annoyed because the guy testifying actually did get a waiver and didn’t have to ever build the sidewalk next to his house so clearly there’s plenty of leniency as is anyway. I’m annoyed because the supposed “sidewalk to nowhere” would have gotten us a few hundred feet away from erasing the West Jefferson sidewalk gap — a critical hole in the connectivity between Kirkwood Park and Downtown. And I’m annoyed because the council seems excited to approve the change (Mark McLean indicated he supported the change so even if Zimmer and Luetzow oppose the legislation, there aren’t really any viable candidates for a third council to help them block it).

I will say though, and this didn’t come up at all in the meeting, but I looked and the code again really do think this also gets rid of the rule for commercial and industrial developments as well, not just single family homes. I’m not sure that the council quite realizes what they’re doing on that front! I guess we’ll find out next week when it all comes to a vote.

Original Story:

This Thursday, Kirkwood’s City Council will hold a public hearing on a proposed amendment to the city’s zoning code. If passed, the amendment would eliminate the requirement for developers to build new public sidewalks when adding an addition of equal or greater size to an existing building. This may seem like a minor technical change, but it has significant implications for Kirkwood’s future walkability and affordability.

The number of projects that would meet all those requirements is so limited to beg the question as to why and how such an item ended up on the agenda in the first place. We’ll get to the “why” in a second, but the “how” is, in-and-of-itself, interesting.

The City-Initiated Process

Whereas most zoning text amendments originate from developers seeking zoning relief for a proposed project, this amendment originated instead from the Council itself. That means the approval process works a little differently. In city-initiated changes, once the Council has city staff draft the amendment, it is sent to the Planning & Zoning Commission (P&Z) for review. P&Z then votes on whether or not they want to recommend the change.

If P&Z votes to recommend the change, it then goes back before the council for a simple majority vote. If P&Z votes against the proposal however —as they did in this case by a 5 to 3 margin— the amendment still goes back to the Council but instead of requiring a simple majority of four votes for approval, it requires a super-majority of five votes in order to be enacted.

I’m hoping that higher threshold proves decisive, because I think P&Z got this right. This poorly conceived legislation falls short of its stated goals while undermining Kirkwood’s broader priorities.

The Argument & Why I’m Not Buying It

Mayor Gibbons has argued that this change would incentivize people to add additions to their existing homes rather than tearing them down and building big new McMansions from scratch. I don’t think this legislation is likely to achieve that goal. It’s poorly targeted, poorly reasoned, and even in the rare instance where the amendment would apply to the targeted demographic, it’s unlikely to move the needle on the financial feasibility of additions enough to make a difference.

A Rare, Questionable Exemption

There are just exceedingly few projects that such a change could conceivably apply to. To qualify for the proposed sidewalk exemption, a project would need to meet very specific criteria:

Double the size of the existing building while complying with zoning restrictions (setback, floor area ratio, height, parking, lot coverage, etc.).
Be on a property lacking a sidewalk.
Be on a street identified in the 2015 Kirkwood Pedestrian and Bicycle Plan as needing sidewalks.
Be a project where the Public Services Director would not otherwise grant discretionary relief to

While in some ways the amendment is incredibly narrow, in others it is way too broad. When you give the amendment a close reading, for example, you figure out it actually applies to all additions that meet the above criteria, not just single family homes.

For a council that is deeply (and I think wrongly) concerned about the impact development may have on the community’s infrastructure, making it cheaper for a restaurant owner or apartment developer to add on to their development by reducing the community amenities and public infrastructure included in the process feels like a weird move.

Juice Not Worth the Squeeze

Even in the few cases where this amendment would apply to the intended target of single-family homeowners looking to stay in place, I’m skeptical that this change would do much to move the needle in terms of the financial feasibility of building an addition.

As P&Z Commissioner Arnold stated in the Commission’s hearing of the legislation, the “existing provision would contemplate a project so large in size that adding a sidewalk would not [constitute a significant portion of the cost].” In other words, if a developer can afford to double the size of a building, they can probably afford to include a sidewalk in their plans. To examine this thesis, let’s take a look at a couple of examples.

The West Jefferson home pictured below is located in an incredibly walkable neighborhood —less than a block from Kirkwood Park, two blocks from Downtown Kirkwood— but by some happenstance lost to history, it and its neighbors never got a sidewalk. Now imagine that the owners of this fine 2,100 sqft 1990s home decided that they wanted to add an addition that would double its size, bringing it to ~4,200 square feet. A quick google search tells us that such an addition would probably cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 per square foot or ~$210k total.

Now, under the current rules, such an addition would also require the owners to include the construction of a new public sidewalk along the property’s 52 feet of street frontage as part of the project. Another quick google search tells us that a sidewalk costs about $9 per square foot to build, so if we multiply $9 by the 52-foot length of the lot’s street-frontage by the 5-foot width of modern sidewalks, we’re looking at the sidewalk requirement costing about $2,340, or about 1% of the cost of the total costs.

The same is true of the 1,846 sqft, $616,400 house on a 9,931 sqft lot at 131 N. Woodlawn pictured above. Using the same formula above, an addition doubling the size of this home would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $185,600. The property is on a corner, so if the owner was required to add a sidewalk on both sides, they’d be looking at 225ft of sidewalk, costing about $10k. That’s not a small expense, but I’d argue that maybe its a fair burden to ask the owners of an $800k, 3,700 sqft to bear in the name of the betterment of the community, especially given that such a large addition would feature a lot of the same downsides for the community that tear-downs do.

A Fix for Tear-Downs?

When people say they’re tired of the tear-downs, they usually don’t mean that they had a specific affinity for the specific structure being torn down. Instead, my sense is that they’re mad about all the specific ways that tear-downs effect them: They’re upset by the big trucks, dust, and loud sounds that accompany major construction, they’re worried bigger homes will cause more flooding on adjacent property, and they’re concerned that the “starter home” is disappearing from Kirkwood.

Sacrificing improved walkability to double the size of an existing building does not address any of those issues. Doubling the size of a building still entails significant construction and all the noise, dust, and traffic that comes with it; a massive addition still has the same negative impact on water runoff/flooding as building a brand new home would; and making a home twice as big as it was before makes that more expensive for future buyers, not less.

In the before-and-after pictured above, for example, one house indeed added a large addition like the type the council is trying to facilitate, but unfortunately that addition actually caused a teardown instead of preventing one. The fact that this legislation could potentially subsidize the exact sort of tear-downs we’re seeking to prevent is, I think, indicative of the lack of foresight being applied.

Better Solutions Available

So if I don’t think this is a great way to address affordability, I also think it’s important to outline some alternatives that I think would be more effective. Here are a few ideas:

Allow Accessory Dwelling Units by-right so that folks can downsize in place and parents can make room for their young adult children
Eliminate the landmark review process for additions to non-historic homes in historic districts
We could eliminate setback and FAR requirements that often limit the feasibility of additions

Those changes would all require fewer tradeoffs for the community than scaling back our pedestrian connectivity goals by eliminating the sidewalk requirement. In fact, the most frustrating part of this whole proposal may be that it demonstrates very clearly that the Council knows that it can enact city-wide zoning text changes to try and improve affordability, but instead they’ve gone for what I think is a pretty marginal, bank-shot approach.

The “Uncanny Valley” of Policy

Now maybe I’m wrong about all of this and the council is right! Maybe it’s true that building sidewalks in this sort of piecemeal way is inefficient! Individual contractors (with less experience in building sidewalks) building tiny sidewalk sections of varying standards with the dream that one day we will link them all together really does sound like a potentially costly and inefficient way of doing things. But if the council is right, then this amendment actually probably doesn’t go far enough, and the sidewalk requirement should be repealed for all projects, even ground-up new construction, and we can just let the city handle the job.

If, however, large construction projects are actually a very efficient time to add sidewalk infill —because the yard is already torn up and you already have the workers and equipment on-site, etc— then there’s no reason to exempt massive additions from the requirements and you’re back to this amendment being counterproductive.

But instead of arriving at a firm decision as to whether the city should handle sidewalks entirely or the existing requirements are optimal, the Council’s approach splits the difference, leaving our policy stranded in an unexamined “uncanny valley.”

If you’re inclined to agree, I’d encourage you to show up to tonight’s meeting and offer a public comment or to email City Clerk Laurie Asche (ascheLB@kirkwoodmo.org) with your testimony so that it may be entered into the public record and forwarded on to the full Council. Remember, we only need three dissenters!