After past denial, Lexington planning commission OKs smaller student apartment plan
A year after the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Planning Commission shot down a proposed student apartment complex on South Limestone, the commission unanimously approved a scaled-down version of the same project Thursday.
Subtext, a St. Louis-based developer, has cleared its first hurdle in building an eight story, 170 unit apartment complex at 545-549, 553 and 563 South Limestone, 121 and 123 Prall St., and 118 Montmullin St. The apartments will host 491 bedrooms, 215 parking spaces in an internal parking garage and retail space on the ground floor.
The Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council will have a final vote on the proposal sometime in late February or early March.
The plan is smaller in scale than the first version submitted by Subtext at the same area in 2024. That building would have had 239 units and 799 bedrooms.
The 2024 proposal also would have extended deeper into the neighborhood along Montmullin Street, where 11 single-family homes would have been demolished for the project. Those 11 properties are not included in the new plan.
The planning commission’s initial disapproval stemmed largely from fear that the project would further gentrify the campus-area Pralltown neighborhood, which the proposal sits on the edge of.
Pralltown is one of Lexington’s first Black neighborhoods. Attorney John Prall founded the neighborhood explicitly to provide homeownership opportunities for freed slaves.
But since the 1980s, the majority of neighborhood houses have been turned into student rental homes.
Daniel Crum, a senior planner for the city, told the planning commission last year Pralltown is now 76% white residents and the median age is 26.
“We can’t unwind that clock,” Crum said.
Other Lexington downtown and campus areas have seen a privately-owned student housing boom amid the University of Kentucky’s ever-increasing enrollment. Two blocks of Maxwell Street alone will soon see 556 apartments and 1,450 bedrooms across two new buildings.
What changed before new development plan?
Unlike the first iteration of the plan from Subtext, the Pralltown neighborhood association voiced support at Thursday’s meeting for the revised Limestone development, although there are several pricey conditions attached to the association’s support.
Subtext has committed to pay $3 million to the Pralltown neighborhood association to create a new neighborhood-run foundation that will run community events, create historical markers throughout the neighborhood and ensure the area’s few owner-occupied homes remain owner-occupied.
It’s rare, but not unheard of, for developers to offer financial incentives to neighborhoods to win support for a project. The Webb and Greer Companies gave landscaping allowances to residents near the Fountains at Palomar development who wanted to plant trees or build additional fencing separating their homes from the new commercial area.
Bruce Simpson, a longtime Lexington attorney representing the Pralltown neighborhood association, says the foundation is vital to ensuring Lexington’s housing needs are met without impacting marginalized neighborhoods.
“It’s not buying a zone change,” Simpson told the Herald-Leader. “It’s ensuring compliance with the comprehensive plan with respect to critical features that are often ignored because historically, African-American voices have been kicked to the curb and not heard.”
The city’s comprehensive plan sets policy goals for how Lexington’s urban development should be managed. Developers have to convince the city that their proposals meet those goals. Likewise, planning commissioners and council members have to base their votes on proposals on the comprehensive plan goals.
Many of the plan’s goals call for major density increases in the city’s urban core. Others call for preserving neighborhood character, especially in Black and marginalized neighborhoods.
Those goals often create tension in local development. Some projects, such as the two student apartment buildings approved on Maxwell Street, were advanced by the city to increase density in accordance with the comprehensive plan.
But a third apartment complex on the same stretch of Maxwell Street was rejected by the city council, which argued the project was not in accordance with goals to preserve neighborhood character.
Simpson says the agreement between Subtext and the Pralltown neighborhood association strikes a balance that could be a game-changer for future neighborhoods looking for a similar agreement with developers.
“With the foundation, neighborhoods will get to say, ‘We have resources to stand toe-to-toe with anybody that wants to infringe upon or set us back,’ particularly in today’s climate where the Trump administration is going backwards with respect to racial justice. No, we’re not going to tolerate it in Lexington,” Simpson said.
Subtext has also agreed to provide scholarships to UK students and to not pursue any future developments that encroach deeper into the neighborhood.
The neighborhood association will also play a role in deciding what businesses get to rent the building’s retail space.
The Pralltown neighborhood association wants the city council to make these conditions legally binding as part of its potential approval of the project.
