A request to use part of a widened sidewalk in front of an Oak Park residence as a parking pad got mixed reviews from officials this fall.
Although some trustees initially expressed concern about the Zoning Board of Appeals’ unanimous recommendation to deny the use variance request, the village board ultimately voted unanimously Monday to allow the applicant to have off-street parking for the two-flat home in the 200 block of Clinton Avenue.
The property, which is for sale, does not currently have any on-site parking — a factor that village staff deemed a “hardship” in their recommendation to approve the use variance application.
“Our basis was that there are just a handful of these type of properties within the village that do not have alley access and they don’t have a wide enough lot to get a driveway to the back of their property so these properties are stuck without a type of parking associated with their lot,” City Planner Craig Failor said at the meeting. “There is a hardship created by the lot itself.”
The owners’ Realtor, Kara Keller, said that the lack of parking has made it difficult to sell the property, citing an approximated $68,000 reduction in value of two-flat properties that don’t have parking.
“The front parking isn’t perfect, but it definitely is a solution,” Keller said, noting that there have been more than 30 showings of the property over the past year. “My very first showing I would have sold this house if there was parking.”
But Michael Quinn, chair of the zoning board, said the applicant failed to show how the property could not yield a “reasonable return” without the variance, adding that the perceived hardship was “self-inflicted.”
Quinn explained that the property owners, who currently live in one of the two flats and rent the other, used to own the adjacent property where tenants of the property in question could park. After selling the adjacent home in 2012, the property owners began renting two parking spaces across the street.
“I thought they did contribute to the creation of the problem,” he said.
Previous requests to construct front yard parking in 2011 and 2013 were denied by the Zoning Board of Appeals, so the property owners instead applied for a permit to widen the sidewalk in front of the residence. Now that the village board has given them the green light to use that portion of the sidewalk as off-street parking, the property owners will need to obtain a building permit to create a curb cut off for the parking pad.
According to a staff memo, the applicants expect to fit two vehicles “in tandem” on the parking pad.
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“This is a very unique situation,” Trustee Andrea Ott said. “I don’t think someone should have to hold onto a property that they want to sell merely because there’s parking there and not in the property that they want to keep. That seems … unreasonable.”
Still, Trustee Colette Lueck said she was unhappy with the property owners’ decision to construct the sidewalk.
“That feels extremely disingenuous,” Lueck said as she voted in favor of the proposal.