Three years, three tries later, The Belmont’s owners get council approval for parking lot
It took three tries over three years, but on Tuesday, the owners of The Belmont and Larcher’s Market in College Hill finally got approval from the Wichita City Council to move ahead with plans to build a parking lot on a site that previously was filled by two 1920s-era houses.
In a 6-1 vote the council approved a zoning change that would permit parking in an area behind Happiness Plaza, 3555 E. Douglas, where both businesses operate. The lot at the corner of Clifton and Oakland has been vacant since Happiness Plaza’s owners had the homes, which they’d purchased, torn down in December 2021 — a week before the council denied their first zoning change request.
Since then, the lot has been dirt-covered and surrounded by metal fencing.
After Tuesday’s vote, Happiness Plaza’s owners said they were relieved that the process was finally over and said they planned to move ahead building the 29-space parking lot as soon as they get architectural drawings completed and the weather cooperates. They’re hoping to have it ready by spring.
Less happy about the vote were some of the neighbors who fought the project off for three years, including Jack Patton, president of the College Hill Neighborhood Association.
“It wasn’t unexpected,” Patton said. “If we got one-tenth the consideration as a neighborhood as developers do, we’d be a lot better off. But that’s just the way it is.”
Ryan and Anthony Francisco, brothers and Wichita natives who now live in Phoenix, bought Happiness Plaza in 2019 and opened The Belmont there in 2020. The stylish restaurant was an immediate hit, and the owners soon announced plans to open a companion market/restaurant in the rest of the Happiness Plaza space that they’d call Larcher’s Market.
They said at the time that they’d need 19 more parking spaces to make the business work, and they planned to put them in a new, landscaped lot on the site of three old houses they’d purchased: at 123 S. Clifton and 125 S. Clifton and around the corner at 3344 E. Oakland. Their goal, they said, was to make the lot look more like a park and to include lots of landscaping, a seating area and a walking path.
But neighbors were opposed, saying that the plaza’s owners shouldn’t tear down homes for parking and should instead consider alternatives like valet services or partnering with nearby churches and businesses to use vacant lots after hours.
The week before the council was set to vote on a zoning change that would allow for the lot, the owners tore the two empty houses on South Clifton down, saying they’d begun attracting vandals. The council then voted 6-1 to deny the zoning change, saying that the area had plenty of nearby parking and that neighbors were opposed to the project. The Happiness Plaza owners were told they could refile their request in a year.
And they did. The council voted again on the measure in April 2023 and again denied it, this time by a vote of 5-2. By that time, neighbors in opposition of the parking lot project had organized their efforts and gathered enough neighborhood signatures on a protest petition that the change would have required a supermajority of council members — six — to approve it.
During the following year, the owners decided to go ahead with their plan to open Larcher’s Market without the parking lot. The business, which serves breakfast, lunch, dinner, cocktails, specialty items and take-home meals, opened in July. But the owners never gave up on their parking lot.
In fact, said Tory DeMarce — the Wichita-based co-owner of both The Belmont and Larcher’s Market — they’ve become more convinced since Larcher’s Market opened that the parking lot is needed.
“We’ve heard complaints from neighbors who don’t want people parking in front of their houses,” he said. “And we’ve had guests all the time who say they try to pull in to find a parking spot but leave because there’s nowhere to park and they don’t feel safe parking on the street.”
The owners say that, after the first denial, they tried to open a dialogue with the neighbors and plead their case. In advance of Tuesday’s vote, they also spoke to several city council members, many of whom acknowledged at the meeting that they’d had outside conversations with the owners of Happiness Plaza as well as with neighbors.
This time, the vote went the other way. Even though neighbors were again able to successfully secure a protest petition, the plaza’s owners got their supermajority vote. Only council member Mike Hoheisel voted against the request.
Noting that it was the third time he’d seen the application, council member Brandon Johnson, whose district includes Happiness Plaza, made the motion to approve the request. Johnson voted against the zoning change in 2021 but in favor of it in 2023.
Before the vote, council member Becky Tuttle said that the difference this time was that she’d heard from more people who supported the parking lot than didn’t and that a newer parking study justified the need for the lot.
“I truly believe that it’s a safety issue to have this many cars on the street,” she said. “I think it’s dangerous for pedestrians and it’s dangerous for cyclists that I have been a long advocate for.”
Neighborhood association president Patton said that he guessed neighbors got tired of looking at the dirt lot over the past three years and decided that a parking lot would be a better alternative. But he’s disappointed, he said, that the council backed down.
“The sentiment went from ‘No,’ to, ‘Well, they’ve already torn the buildings down, so we might as well let them do what they want,’ which you would never do with your child,” he said. “But with a developer, it’s business as usual.”
Happiness Plaza’s owners will have to adhere to 11 conditions attached to the approval, one of which will require them to move the lot back farther from the sidewalk, which could result in the loss of a couple of parking spaces. But they’re hoping to find a way to design around that, DeMarce said.
The house that still remains where the owners plan to build the lot — the 1907 Victorian at 3344 E. Oakland — will likely be moved, DeMarce said, adding that the owners were working with “multiple people” to see how the house could be utilized elsewhere in the community.
The owners said they wanted to thank the neighbors who supported them this time around, and they also had a message for those who opposed them.
“We understand that there’s people who have been against it and in support of it, and I want everybody to know that we want to be great neighbors,” DeMarce said. “We’re going to do what we said we would and we’ll make sure that the lot is done very tastefully and that we represent not only ourselves but also College Hill and the community to the highest potential. We’ll be the best stewards of the property and the neighborhood that we possibly can be.”
This story was originally published December 4, 2024 at 5:03 AM.
.jpg)