Council Member Won questions on ground floor community use and childcare

Okay, for the ground floor, how...

How will it serve community needs?

And have you committed any civic ground floor space to certain tenants at this time?

And if so, how did you determine them out of the many nonprofits in the district?

And how will the applicant...

and continue to incorporate community input into the selection of the ground floor tenants.

So I'll start.

The community basically asked for commercial, local arts, retail that would contribute.

Sorry, can you clarify?

Are you talking about the community board?

Community board, yeah.

Okay, please use the word community board.

Of course.

Thank you.

So, Councilmember Juan, the first, and by the way, I want to just thank your office because there's been, they've been able to facilitate a lot of these conversations, and we do appreciate that.

So the community board spoke to us about the importance of local arts and local retail.

Oops.

May I continue?

Please keep going.

Okay, thanks.

And the neighbors that we spoke to equally talked about local arts and small business in the area.

The space itself is designed so that we'll be able to provide smaller spaces for smaller retail and local arts and community space.

We have not programmed that yet, given that we are currently in this rezoning process, and we don't even know if we're getting the space yet.

But to the extent that there is a conversation with the community board and with the local neighbors, we'd be thrilled to speak to a subset of the community board and the local neighbors in order to

agree on what would be appropriate for programming that space.

Ashley, again, her family has been in the area for a long time and has a background in the arts.

And so the opportunity here, particularly in light of the nature of this district, we'd be happy to engage in that conversation and to give everyone a say.

in terms of what that space is used for.

Right now, as we're looking at building more family-sized units, there's not enough school seats.

Are you looking to make sure that there's an early childhood care provider who's going to be on the ground floor space?

We haven't.

I think it's something we'd be happy to look at.

Part of our diligence in terms of environmental review is to look at school seats.

I know, Christina, that we've looked at that as part of the environmental review.

For 3K and pre-K and twos and zeros.

I'm not talking about grade school.

For that, I only have for PS and IS.

Yeah, she didn't look at early childhood education.

So to the extent that that space would be a valuable contribution in terms of the opportunity to get younger kids in for school seats, we'd be happy to look at that.

And just, again, Ashley's been a great applicant.

The application has been outstanding for some time, but we're happy to engage in that conversation to try to give back in that regard.