Back to the drawing board for Allentown apartment plan

ALLENTOWN, Pa. - The developer behind a proposal to build fewer than 10 apartments on a tiny lot on Allentown’s east side still needs to convince planners it can work.

Carlisle Real Estate LLC proposes eight one-bedroom apartments on a roughly half-acre lot at North Carlisle and East Liberty streets near the Hanover Acres housing development. The developer presented the Allentown Planning Commission with a sketch plan in January and returned Tuesday looking for a possible preliminary approval.

The Carlisle Apartments project was initially met with a great deal of skepticism thanks to the size and topography of the property. Initial plans included a three-story building with first-level parking underneath the building along with a pedestrian bridge to provide handicap accessibility to the third floor.

The project is now a two-story building, and project engineer Don Lynch told planners Tuesday that revised plans reduce on-site parking, reconfigures a retaining wall and moves the garbage bin. The changes that were made were done to keep the project financially viable with eight apartments, he said.

The project has been pitched as filling a need for affordable housing in the city.

Douglas Stewart, the city's planning and zoning director, reiterated his concerns about the difficulty in developing the property, adding he wasn’t sure how the developer would be able to comply with the city’s steep slope regulations.

The project includes parking above the site and below and will require a number of retaining walls, according to Stewart. It’s not an ideal site, and he said he’d hope to see a better plan.

Planning staff review also indicates that the size of the property does not exempt it from on-site stormwater detention.

“I just view this as not a high-quality site plan because it just pushes the site around so much,” he said.

Commission Chairman Oldrich Foucek agreed that building on the property is like “squeezing 10 pounds of potatoes into a 5-pound sack.” But the commission is limited in what it can do as the developer, by right, can build as many as 10 apartments on the property.

Discussion was limited as the developer has a fair amount of work to do to come up with a workable plan. Commissioners tabled the project for a later date.

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