City of Buffalo Planning Board·September 8, 2026
Thirty minutes, one recommendation, three tablings. Buffalo Rehab Group’s Abbott Road clinic was sent back to face the street instead of its parking lot. A seven-resident rooming house at 674 Jefferson was tabled after Majority Leader Halton-Pope called it a “hard no” without the neighbors. The 412 Auburn corner store was recommended; 416 Wohlers tabled when no one appeared. Council hearings Oct. 6.
The application of record is “Jefferson, K — Special Use Permit, 674 Jefferson, for Rooming House in N-3E zone.” The people who presented it were two women who said they had bought the house “a couple weeks ago” with their own money: one who introduced herself as Dr. Sierra Gilbert[*], a doctor of physical therapy who runs a private home-care practice, and a partner who said she spent 28 years at Merrill Lynch. Their plan is a “professionally managed shared living residence” for up to seven independent adults — private or double rooms, shared kitchen and bath, month-to-month leases, a 24-hour on-site house manager, and none of the things that would make it something else: “not a hotel, not an Airbnb, not a skilled nursing facility, not an assisted living facility.” No meals, no medication management. The cap of seven, they said, comes, as they described it, from a code minimum of 60 square feet per person applied to the rooms as they exist; an architect will set the final count.
Board questions were practical — how is it funded (privately), how are residents paid for (they pay their own rent), how many (seven, per room or per bed), is this your first (“This will be our first. Yes.”). Then a member noted that “the council member is here,” and the meeting changed register.
Majority Leader Leah Halton-Pope, whose Ellicott District includes the property, had stayed to speak — “which is why it was really important for me to be here for this today.” She told the applicants what she said she tells everyone who comes to her office: “Unless you talk to the neighbors in the community, it's a hard negative for me.” The house is “right adjacent to Sycamore Village,” a new-build subdivision she called “a priority community for me to continue building out,” and, she said, “unless you have support from them — hard no.” She was careful to separate the idea from the address. “I think I love the idea. I think it's great. I just don't think that this is the right neighborhood to test something that you've never done before.” Her district, she said, already carries most of the city's affordable and public housing and more renters than any other; the applicants, per the application, do not live in the city; and month-to-month tenancy is, to her, transience — she pointed to a shelter “down at Jefferson, right over at Genesee” whose clients “end up on the porches of homeowners down Jefferson.” “I know it's not a shelter,” she said. “I'm explaining the situation I already have.”
The applicant answered with her own history. She was raised, she said, in a homeless shelter with her mother and siblings; one person's intervention put her mother through a master's degree and into a career at HUD, and the children became an engineer, a lawyer and an investment banker. The residence is meant to be that intervention for someone else — with job and trade programs and transportation, “so that it's just not your average rooming house.” “I get it. And I respect you,” the majority leader said. “This is not a matter of disrespect.” But she also explained the arithmetic of a Planning Board recommendation: “They can approve it here. It will come to the floor and still get denied.” She would rather the conversation had happened in her office “before you filled out paperwork, put money down.” The applicants said they had gone to her office the day they paid the fee, found her on her first vacation in three years, and have an appointment for next Monday.
Board members, at least one of whom Halton-Pope said had heard her make this case at community meetings before, backed her up without ruling on the merits. “No one doubts your sincerity,” one said, but the neighborhood “has had millions of dollars of investment in new single-family homes over the last few years,” which makes it “especially sensitive” to anything that might change its character. Another named Willow Park Village as “a very, very passionate community” and reminded the applicants that “the final word is not here. The final word is with the Council.” Vice Chair Cynthia Schwartz moved to table the item “pending notification that you've had a meeting with the council member and a community meeting”; Arthur Hall seconded; 5–0. The October 6 Council hearing date on the docket stands unless the item is re-noticed.
In Buffalo, a special use permit is a use the Green Code allows in a zone only case by case — a rooming house or a corner store in a residential district, for instance — and the decision belongs to the Common Council, not the Planning Board. The board's job is to recommend: “Rec. Approve,” “Rec. Deny,” or, as it did twice Tuesday, nothing yet. The Council then holds its own public hearing — the “Hrg 10/6/26” on each of these items — and votes. That is why the council member's presence mattered more than any board question: a favorable recommendation with the district member opposed is, as she put it, a conversation the applicants would rather not have twice.
The 4 o'clock public hearing was on the site plan for a one-story, 2,970-square-foot commercial building at 1002 Abbott Road, at the corner of Cushing Place in the N-3E zone — a Buffalo Rehab Group physical therapy clinic. Dmitry Zintek[*] of Dean Architects[*] made the case, and it was a narrow one: the item, he said, is really about parking in the interior side yard, which the Green Code allows in N-3E only with the Planning Board's express approval as part of a major site plan review. His argument was the clientele. Physical therapy patients “are recovering from injuries, surgeries, or have other conditions that can significantly limit their mobility,” so the distance from car door to front door “is not simply a matter of convenience.” The plan shows 28 spaces, more than the building's size requires, pushed against the building and toward the rear, with landscape buffers on the Abbott and Cushing frontages, a detention pond and buffer between the lot and the child care center's parking next door, and “limited to no” street parking on that stretch of Abbott to fall back on.
Staff explained why a 3,000-square-foot building was before the board at all: on its own it would have gone through administrative minor site plan review, but the side-yard parking request bumps it to a major site plan and puts the whole plan, not just the parking, in front of the board — and keeps it out of the Zoning Board of Appeals entirely. Members asked about the exterior (light grey fiber-cement siding, stone veneer, metal canopies, storefront glass, a charcoal shingle roof) and then got to the point. The building, one member said, “is very attractive for sure and will be a nice addition on the street,” but its long side and its “little mini tower” face the parking lot off Cushing rather than Abbott Road. “I would just like to see this read as a building that is on Abbott Road, not in a parking lot off the side street, which is the way it reads right now.” Turning the building “a quarter turn, one way or the other,” the member argued, would not change the parking volume or the walking distance, “but it makes a big difference in the way it appears on Abbott.” As drawn, there is “half a block of parking between this new build and the already existing building next door.”
The architect said the secondary entrance exists for the same mobility reason, that utility poles and the driveway location may have driven the orientation, and that rotating the building would push still more parking into the side yard — though it was, he allowed, something the team could explore. No member of the public spoke. The hearing was closed on Leonard Sciolino's motion, seconded by Cynthia Schwartz, and the site plan was tabled on the same pairing, 5–0, so the architect can “take the comments from the board” and return. “The landscaping, the design, the building, the building use — all of that is terrific,” the tabling member said. “I just think the design of the building on that footprint could be improved.”
Green Code. Buffalo's zoning law is Chapter 496 of the City Code, the Unified Development Ordinance, adopted in 2017 and known as the Green Code. It replaced a 1953 ordinance that sorted the city by use with one that sorts it by form: how tall, how close to the sidewalk, where the door and the parking go.
N-3E. The “N” zones are neighborhood zones, numbered from the densest (N-1, downtown) to the least (N-4, single-family). N-3 is the ordinary Buffalo neighborhood; the suffix says what mix is allowed. N-3E is “Mixed-Use Edge” — the commercial and multi-family edge of a residential area, typically along a street like Abbott Road or Jefferson Avenue. N-3R is the residential interior of the same neighborhood; N-2R is its denser, closer-to-downtown counterpart (412 Auburn). In an edge zone the code wants buildings at the sidewalk and parking behind them; parking beside a building — the interior side yard — is allowed only if the Planning Board agrees.
Site plan review (§496-11). The check that a specific building on a specific lot meets the code's standards for layout, access, landscaping and stormwater. A minor site plan is approved by staff; a major one comes to the Planning Board with a public hearing, as this one did. It is separate from a special use permit (sidebar above), which asks whether the use belongs there at all.
412 Auburn Avenue (Item 3, 26-000255). The docket entry reads “Abdullah, Z — Special Use Permit, 412 Auburn, for Neighborhood Shop in N-2R zone,” and the case was as short as the entry. The property “was previously a store for the last maybe 20, 25 years,” the applicant's representative said; “one owner sold to another,” the city said a new special use permit was needed, and so here they were — “just continuing the same business,” with no changes to the outside and some updates within. A board member checked with staff that nothing had come in from the Niagara District council member. “It's pretty straightforward,” the member said, moving to recommend approval to the Council. Vice Chair Schwartz moved, Arthur Hall seconded, 5–0. The Council's hearing is October 6.
416 Wohlers Avenue (Item 4, 26-000250). “Islam, M — Special Use Permit, 416 Wohlers, for Assembly in N-3R zone,” Masten District. Called once at 15:32 on the recording with no response, set aside, called again after Jefferson: “Anybody here on Wohlers?” No one. Tabled, Schwartz and Hall, 5–0. The item also carries an October 6 hearing date. The docket text spells the use “Asssembly,” three s's, twice.
Three of Tuesday's four substantive items were tabled, and none of the three tablings was a rejection. At this board a tabling is a hold: the item stays on the docket and comes back when whatever is missing arrives — a redesigned site plan (Abbott), a meeting with the council member and the neighbors (Jefferson), or an applicant (Wohlers). It is the opposite of what a reader might assume from the word. What the applicants lose is time; two of the three have Council hearing dates of October 6 that may now be hard to keep. “Rec. Approve,” the fourth outcome, is a recommendation to the Common Council, which decides.
Built from the City's recorded roll-call votes in the items file, cross-checked against the summary minutes and the recording. Five members voted on every item: Morrell, Schwartz, Hall, Sciolino, Billman. Lamparelli absent. No recusals. Every motion passed 5–0. Timecodes are positions on the recording, not clock time.
Moved Sciolino, seconded Billman. On the recording one voice says “I was not here” before the vote; the record nonetheless shows five ayes and no abstention.
Per the minutes, initiated by Sciolino, seconded by Schwartz, after no member of the public came forward. Voice vote on the recording.
Moved Sciolino, seconded Schwartz. Tabled so the architect can respond to the board's request that the building be reoriented to present its long side and entrance feature to Abbott Road rather than to the Cushing Place parking lot. Board members praised the building, landscaping and use. Attachments of record: redacted site plan application; updated site set dated 9-4-26; site plan drawings; SWPPP dated 09.01.26. Flagged as the meeting's one public hearing.
Moved Schwartz, seconded Hall. No communication from the district council member reported. Attachments: photographs and application.
Moved Schwartz, seconded Hall. No one appeared for the applicant when called at 15:32 or again at 28:45. Attachments: photographs and application.
Moved Schwartz, seconded Hall: tabled “pending notification that you've had a meeting with the council member and a community meeting,” then to return to the agenda. Majority Leader Halton-Pope spoke in opposition absent neighborhood support. Applicants distributed materials at the table that were not in the filed packet. Flagged for the council member's stated position.
Voice vote. The chair first asked the remaining attendee whether she was there on another item or observing; she was observing.
The record and the tape. The vote record (items file and summary minutes) is the source for every disposition, mover, seconder and tally above; the recording captures voice votes only (“all in favor — aye”), and the tallies were not read aloud. Two small gaps: on the July 27 minutes, one voice on the recording says “I was not here,” but the record shows five ayes and no abstention, and this brief reports the record. The recording's own roll call is largely unintelligible (Whisper heard “James Moraw, Cynthia Schwartz, Scott Dillman, Paul”); attendance is taken from the minutes, which list Martha Lamparelli absent. The minutes header gives the venue as the “OPS Conference Room”; the meeting notice gives Room 901, City Hall, hybrid. Whisper also rendered the meeting date as “September 26th”; the record date is September 8.
Titles. Board membership is verified by roll call. The minutes header titles James Morrell “Chairman of the Planning Board” and Cynthia Schwartz “Vice Chair”; those titles are used on that basis and no other. The council member who spoke on 674 Jefferson is not named on the recording; she is identified as Leah Halton-Pope because the item is docketed to the Ellicott District (ELL), she referred to “my district,” and a board member told the applicants to “meet with the majority leader.” Halton-Pope is the verified Ellicott member and Majority Leader.
Corrections applied. Whisper gave the Abbott Road hearing as “Cabot Road” and “Abbegrove” and the cross street as “Cushing Street”; the agenda's Abbott Road and the street index's Cushing Place are used (street check: three suggestions, all applied; Jefferson Avenue exact). “M3D zone” on the tape is the N-3E zone of the agenda. “Hardy board” is rendered as fiber-cement siding. The staff member addressed as “John” and a seconder heard as “Alex” are not on any roster and are not named. Applicant names of record (Abdullah, Z; Islam, M; Jefferson, K) are as the City docketed them.
Names this brief could not verify. The Abbott Road architect (heard as Dmitry Zintek, of a firm heard as Dean Architects) and the 674 Jefferson presenter (heard as Dr. Sierra Gilbert) appear only in audio and carry [*]. The 412 Auburn representative and the second Jefferson applicant are identified by role. The testimony about the Jefferson applicant's upbringing is reported because she offered it on the record as the reason for the project; nothing beyond what she said is stated.
Other checks. The interests watchlist was checked against every address, applicant and entity on the docket; no match. The scanner entity database was not available for this brief; the four docketed addresses are tagged for the editor's lookup. Item 5's docket number does not appear in the pages of the summary minutes provided.