Some members of the Urban County Council spent an awful lot of time Tuesday evening talking about who might be hurt in the future by a temporary moratorium on large additions to homes.
What they seemed to ignore is who's being hurt right now by the outsized add-ons that are turning single-family homes in neighborhoods near the University of Kentucky into de facto dormitories.
The reality for many people who live there is that what used to be small, family homes on their blocks now house six, eight or 10 students.
Taxpaying, law-abiding, home-owning, productive citizens have to choose between selling out and fleeing or living with overflowing traffic and trash and the inevitable noise and parties.
Talk about property rights.
The damage doesn't stop with the individuals losing the economic and emotional investment in their homes. It's destroying neighborhoods and that, in turn, hurts the entire community.
The city has taken one whack at trying to solve this problem through restrictions on additions, but it clearly wasn't a permanent fix. Recently, the pace of these conversions has picked up.
Councilwoman Diane Lawless, who represents many of the neighborhoods surrounding UK, is proposing a moratorium on certain additions to, in her words, "stop the hemorrhaging," while the city tries to figure out how to really, truly protect these neighborhoods.
Lawless' proposal applies only to residential zones within the Urban Service Boundary. Proposed additions that are 25 percent or less of the square footage of an existing house would not be affected.
Larger additions would not get a building permit without the approval of the council. It would last a year or until the council takes action which, we hope, will be sooner.
That's pretty much it. Lawless has invited suggestions to adjust the percentage or otherwise tweak the moratorium to relieve hardship on people who want to make responsible additions to their homes.
To hear the reaction of some council members, you would have thought this is the first step on a one-way trip to economic perdition and an unbearable burden on homeowners and contractors.
The motion to simply put the proposal on the agenda for full consideration only passed when Mayor Jim Newberry cast a tie-breaking vote.
This whole debate is about property rights, so it's fair to wonder how a moratorium would affect contractors and their clients.
What isn't fair is to pretend that homeowners in the affected neighborhoods aren't already being deprived of property and peace of mind.
The council should approve the moratorium and get to work quickly on a long-lasting solution to this problem.
