Yesterday, we spoke about a slender single-stair apartment building on a small 60-square-meter site in Tokyo. Today, let's talk about a different kind of proposal. Earlier this month, the Park City Planning Commission heard a redevelopment proposal from the Kensington Investment Company for a site near Old Town at 1500 Kearns Boulevard. The site is 2.71 acres, and the existing building houses 48,000 sf of office and retail space.

The proposal is for a new mixed-use development including:

• 117 residential apartments (97 market-rate and 20 affordable)

• Over 9,400 sf of commercial/retail space

• Over 20,000 sf of amenity space (including a rooftop terrace and patios)

• 210 underground parking spaces

Some of the key development approvals being asked for include:

• Master Planned Development approval & Conditional Use Permit

• A reduction of the north setback from 25 feet to 10 feet

• A building height exception to 49.5 feet (from the 35 feet currently allowed)

A formal vote has yet to take place, though apparently, the project is somewhat controversial. The developer is asking to increase the maximum height from three storeys to four. Ordinarily, the Planning Commission would want to see an increased setback accompany this ask, as opposed to a reduction.

But here we have a classic development trade-off. The developer could, in theory, build more density under the existing permissions, but the ground plane and the overall development wouldn't be as pleasant. So, the request is to build incrementally higher, but then open up the site more.

Here's a comparison between the developer's proposal and what is permissible by-right:

It'll be very interesting to see how Park City votes on this one.

Images via Building Salt Lake

It's fun to examine projects that I could never underwrite or build in Toronto. Here's another one from Tokyo — a 10-storey, single-stair apartment building on a busy street, next to a metro station.

The site itself is only 59.49 m2 (~640 ft2), and the building footprint is 47.97 m2 (~516 sf), for a total of 388.28 m2 (~4,179 ft2). There's retail on the first and second floors, one home per floor on levels 3 through 8, and then a two-storey home on levels 9 and 10. All of this is serviced by a single elevator, and a single open-air egress stair off the back.

The building itself uses a simple structural system involving 6 columns (which you can see evenly placed on the plans). According to the architect's notes, they started with a simple 4-column design, but apparently the columns were too large and compromised the suite layouts.

Tokyo is a unique city and this kind of housing wouldn't work everywhere. But there's a universal lesson here: removing barriers and allowing small infill projects is a good thing for cities. Until these projects are feasible, we won't know exactly what the market actually wants and could support.

Photos from Hiroyuki Ito Architects

We completed and started renting Parkview Mountain House in Park City, Utah about a year ago. Construction took slightly longer than we had initially scheduled, but we finished construction under budget, which is always a good thing. Getting our building permits was easier than expected (thank you, Summit County) and closing them out involved as much back and forth as you would expect for a challenging mountain site. I would happily build another project in Park City.

Some of our greatest challenges happened on the legal and financing side. When we acquired the site, we formed a single-purpose Limited Partnership in Utah that was initially owned by one of Globizen's Canadian corporations, and later with two other partners (another Canadian corporation and a New York LLC).

Limited Liability Companies (LLCs) are very common in the US. They offer a kind of hybrid "sweet spot." They offer the limited liability that comes with corporations, but with the option of having the pass-through taxation you get with Limited Partnerships. However, they don't exist in Canada, and so the legal and tax advice we got was to instead form a Limited Partnership. I'll come back to this later.

The first challenge we had was the seemingly simple task of opening up a bank account for the project LP. Wells Fargo, Chase, and others would not accept a Utah LP owned by a Canadian corporation. Too foreign. Too complicated. We finally managed to get one opened with US Bank, and they've been great, but being Canadian still poses challenges. For example, I can't use their mobile app in Canada. And I can't deposit cheques/checks online without first verifying my mobile number. But I can't verify my mobile number because their system won't send codes to Canadian numbers.

The next hurdle was construction financing. It was frustrating to learn about all of the simple and cost-effective "one-close solutions" available to US entities, but not available to foreign nationals. We could have gotten a great rate, and a construction loan that automatically converts to a permanent facility at substantial completion. Instead, we had to finance construction through a combination of equity, lines of credit, and a private loan. Not ideal, but at least the draws were flexible and easy.

Then came our take-out loan at completion. This proved to be impossible with our legal structure and foreignness. So much so that we ended up having to convert our Utah Limited Partnership to a Limited Liability Company, and become "members" of the LLC personally. This is a clean, common, and widely accepted structure for real estate ownership in the US. But in order to do this, we had to have KPMG advise us on how we could do this without triggering a massive tax liability. We were able to figure that out and close the facility. But our year-end tax filings are going to be a little more complicated this year.

In the end, we overcame the obstacles. But it was certainly challenging, more so than the actual building part I'd say. Every time I mentioned that I was Canadian, I came to expect a pause, where the other person would then need to start processing what to do next. As international as the US is, it feels paradoxically insular when it comes to the things I described in this post. But this is how you gain experience. Now we'll be slightly better prepared for our next US project, whatever that might be.

Note: Nothing in this post should be viewed as legal or financial advice. I'm just sharing our experiences.