One of the objections some Village Trustees raised was that the project exceeds building density zoning maximums. What does “building density” really mean?
Density is a calculation that analyzes two things:1) physical building size and 2) human impact on a given location. 1) Building sizes are analyzed by a concept called Floor Area Ratio (“FAR”). FAR is the ratio of the total floor area of buildings on a certain location to the size of the land of that location, or the limit imposed on such a ratio. The Floor Area Ratio is the total building square footage (building area) divided by the site size square footage (site area).Boeger Place Apartments is designed under FAR limits and has been proposed as a smaller, shorter building with larger setbacks than either Arlington Heights’ current B1/B2 or the proposed I zoning requires.2) Human density measures the impact of a project in a certain location. For instance, a high rise building is a highly dense building due to the height of the building and the number of people on a specific location. In the Village of Arlington Heights, human density is measured by apartment counts, without much reg
