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Brown School overlay update: city plans to preserve original schoolhouse, demolish unusable gym and pursue adaptive reuse
Summary
City staff presented updates to the Brown School overlay district proposal, describing plans to preserve the original schoolhouse with a preservation restriction, demolish an unusable gymwing, reserve adjacent park space and pursue a small one-story addition to support reuse as affordable housing. The board said the item will be held in committee while staff and partners refine materials.
Ben Harmon, chair of the Planning and Development Committee of the City Council, presented an update on the Brown School overlay district during the joint hearing on Feb. 18, 2026.
Harmon described the proposal as site-specific and focused on adaptive reuse: preserving the original schoolhouse (including a proposed preservation restriction), removing a structurally unusable gym section, reserving neighborhood park space, and permitting a relatively small one‑story addition at the rear to support programming and residential units. Harmon said the city is contributing work on demolition of the unusable portion and that the project team (a partner identified in the record as "Zeta Insight" and their architects) provided graphics and renderings to show the proposed condition. "The original schoolhouse will be preserved," Harmon said, while noting the gym portion is being demolished.
Harmon also described changes to zoning text to clarify that this work should be treated as an "addition" rather than a "new or replacement structure," and called attention to dimensional triggers that affected feasibility. During the presentation a numeric lot-size discussion took place in which figures were cited (the transcript records numbers such as "4,000" and "34,000" in the course of describing minimum-lot-size considerations); the record does not specify units or make clear the relationship between those two figures. Harmon said the project timeline has been delayed by additional public-requested steps and that historic-commission review and preservation-restriction work are forthcoming.
Board members asked questions and requested additional materials; the chair said the item would be kept in committee for further edits and to allow the sponsor and staff time to respond to public concerns.
What happens next: staff and the sponsor will refine the zoning language and historic-preservation materials, submit the project to the historic commission and return the overlay amendment to the committee at a future meeting.
