This parcel popped up with a price change in my feed, and the listing specifically says “Listed at a fraction of the cost of similar parcels in the area.”
Often that just means that a seller is motivated, but sometimes there’s something more complicated about the site that has been keeping it from closing. I don’t have any insight to any deals that might have fallen through, but I am always interested in diving into an urban infill site to check for building opportunities!
This parcel seems straightforward. It’s a small 20′ x 60′ rectangle on one of the hilly streets at the lower edge of the main Cincinnati basin. This one is east of Vine St in between McMicken and Clifton. One more block up and the street gets really steep. It’s not too bad right here, and the land parcel is actually quite flat.
While there’s a lot that goes into real estate values, personally I think anywhere in the central city core is a fine place to invest and build, and this specific location would be ripe for some transit-lite city dwellers. Trilobite Design is working on a hillside home a few blocks to the east, already.
This Frintz parcel is small, but it is zoned RM-0.7-T (the most intense/dense Residential Multi-Family zone, and it’s in the Transportation corridor overlay). Here’s how that translates to the site buildability:
There is a long list of what building types are allowed, but single, duplex, and multi-family are all permitted by-right. Including attached/rowhouse configurations. Without the T-designation (Connected Communities Transportation corridor), it wouldn’t be allowed to have 2 or more units on this size parcel, though. The building code requires 700 sf of land area per unit. Since this parcel only has 1200sf of land, the math would not allow even 2 units. But that’s why the Transportation Corridor designation helps. It specifically notes the following specifics that help this site:
- Minimum lot-area-per-dwelling-unit regulations do not apply.
- Two-family, three-family, and four-family uses shall comply with the minimum lot area regulations for single-family uses.
- Minimum off-street parking regulations do not apply.
- The height of new structures may exceed the maximum height of the underlying zoning district by an additional twelve feet.
And here are the base zoning requirements for Building Placement in this zone:
- 5′ front yard setback (which conflicts with the Historic District requirements of 0′ setback)
- 0/5′ side yard setback (means one side can be up to the property line, but combined, the side yards need to total 5′ of setback)
- 20′ of rear yard setback
- 35′ height limit.
So because of the underlying zoning and those adjusted rules, this site could hold a building 35′ deep, 15′ wide, and 47′ tall. It’s not a very big footprint to go that tall, so I wouldn’t recommend it. The tight width really makes this tricky, in fact. Even with a 525 sf footprint per floor, a lot of that will be taken up by vertical circulation. A tight compact stair will often be 100+ sf.
So after looking at that, it’s possible to build multifamily here, but they’d be 400 sf studios, one per floor. I’d self-limit it to three, no prevent the requirements of a sprinkler system and elevator. It might be difficult to get this to pencil for a developer interested in this scale of project at all.
This site can be a compact single-family unit, though. It still has all of those same contraints, but doesn’t feel quite as bad if it’s a 1500 sf home over three levels. Off-street parking isn’t really an option here at all. A front-facing garage is not permitted within the historic district, and the site is really too small to make that happen anyway. If the location, constraints, and size fit your goals, then we can jump all the way up to thinking about construction staging and logistics issues. But now it might be more clear why this parcel is underpriced in the neighborhood.
Combine it with the two parcels to the south and all of a sudden an immense amount of opportunity opens up, though.
Listing: 1713 Frintz St Cincinnati, OH 45202