A 60-year-old apartment complex in the West End is about to get a little bigger.
On Tuesday, the Planning Commission will review a special use permit to add 19 apartments to The Alante Apartments, a 296-unit complex next door to the Seminary Towers Apartments and Francis C. Hammond Middle School, and is bounded by N. Van Dorn Street and Seminary Road.
The property owner is asking the city for permission to reduce 50 parking spaces at the 532,000-square-foot property at 4800 Kenmore Avenue. The plan would convert the former common laundry rooms in the property’s seven buildings into 19 new apartments (two studios, 17 one-bedrooms), according to a city staff report.
The laundry rooms aren’t needed anymore. KMF XI Seminary Hill, LLC bought the property in 2018, renovated it and stopped using the laundry rooms by adding personal washers and dryers in each unit.
According to the city:
The conversion of spaces such as storage rooms and laundry rooms in older multi-unit buildings should be encouraged and facilitated as an economically viable, creative approach to meeting the City’s housing goals. The parking reduction needed to facilitate the creation of additional units will have a negligible impact on the existing parking supply and should be supported…
There are only 447 existing parking spaces on site for a ratio of 1.51 spaces per unit. With the addition of the 19 units (2 studios and 17 one-bedroom units), the parking requirement is 497 spaces. Given the 447 existing parking spaces, the proposed parking ratio with the parking reduction special use permit is 1.4 parking spaces per unit.
The City Council will also consider the matter at its meeting on May 17.
