Neighborhoods are mad. Developers are mad. Why is Lexington development in turmoil?
Why is Lexington’s development scene so full of sound and fury these days?
First, we have a developer with a plan to tear down a block of historic houses on Maxwell Street that the city and out of town landlords have allowed to deteriorate. The developer says it’s a downtown neighborhood and plans a 10-story apartment building. The city’s planning staff, which has new goals of more density, gives the go-ahead. The neighborhood hires a lawyer. Then the planning staff tells the developer it can only be seven stories. Because of public pressure, the Urban County Planning Commission and the city council nix the entire plan.
The developer is furious.
In the Pensacola Park neighborhood on the west side of Nicholasville Road, a property owner planned to tear down an old house and build a multi-family development. The city wants denser housing, but the neighborhood does not, and so goes through a torturous and expensive process of getting a historic overlay. Only somehow the property owner isn’t included in the overlay, and by the way, is planning on single family houses, not multi-family.
The neighborhood is furious.
Then, across the street on the east side of Nicholasville, attorney Julie Butcher owns a beautiful old house that she wanted to make her office a decade ago. The neighborhood and planning staff opposed the zone change plan, so she pulled it and has rented the property out ever since. With a new comp plan that stresses density on Nicholasville Road, Butcher tries again with the lowest density professional zone. The planning staff approves, the neighborhood opposes. Then the planning commission has a tied vote.
Everyone is furious. (There is another hearing on Feb. 27).
Welcome to planning and development in Lexington, thanks to Placebuilder, the city’s new matrix or guide to planning adopted as part of the 600-page 2018 Comprehensive Plan. If you’re a developer, you can wade through even more paperwork just to get a zone change; if you’re a neighborhood association, you can spend money you don’t have to fight whatever rationale the developer has made to develop in your neighborhood.
Sometimes when all the warring factions hate something, you’ve hit the right note. Other times, it feels like the process is grinding to a halt of long meetings, lawsuits and lawyer fees.
“It’s a real conundrum,” said Bruce Simpson, a development attorney who has represented lots of neighborhood associations and plenty of developers, most recently David Jones in the Pensacola Park neighborhood fiasco. “it’s great for lawyers and engineers but not for many others.”
As reporter Beth Musgrave has pointed out in her coverage, Placebuilder includes 27 land use categories with separate development criteria, including “downtown developments suitable for high-density residential” and “corridors suited for medium-high density development.” It’s so complicated that most developers, not to mention volunteer neighborhood associations, need an attorney just to navigate the process, Simpson said.
The Homebuilders Association is suing to stop it in federal court, saying it exceeds the city’s authority to regulate comprehensive plans.
“It was terribly predictable that Placebuilder would result in the increase in hostility between neighborhoods and developers that we are seeing today,” said Nick Nicholson, a land use attorney who represents the Homebuilders Association.
Different interpretations
As in the Maxwell case, a developer may see a neighborhood one way, a neighborhood quite another. But it’s a nightmare for the neighborhoods, too, who don’t want to hear that where they live is supposed to be a high-density corridor or that old houses should make way for apartment buildings. The way the city has treated the Pensacola Park Association, such as issuing building permits to the developer even though the association thought his property was included in the H-1, is a comedy of errors, just not very funny.
Jesse Voigt, is a resident of Pensacola Park and an architect.
“There is no way to argue against it (the comp plan), because the city changes the story based on the argument,” she said. “It is just a formless argument. And the real question that neighborhoods have is, so what is the plan? What is the goal?”
For example, she said, Jones’ disputed property 1847 Nicholasville could be rezoned because the comp plan calls for more housing. But at Butcher’s property at 1922 Nicholasville, the staff said it’s fine for that densification to replace housing with office space.
“So, which is it, are we short on residential, or are we short on professional offices?” Voigt asked. “Because if you ask any neighborhood that has been confronted with the comprehensive plan as a means of progress, they will tell you it feels more regressive, more hostile, and more destructive to what they have spent time and money building to be a better Lexington. And ultimately, isn’t that what the comprehensive plan was supposed to be all about.”
The comp plan is supposed to be a guidebook for Lexington’s growth— predicted to be 10,000 more people in the next 10 years — without hurting area’s signature horse farms that surround it. That is complicated, and it does require infill and redevelopment. Placebuilder was supposed to be, as planning commission member Frank Penn described it, a rudder to the comp plan ship.
Instead it seems to be crashing on the rocks. This is incredibly complicated policy, made worse by the interplay of different rules that guide the council, the Planning Commission, the Board of Adjustment. Then add in lawyers and and some high-running emotion. While you can’t make either developers and neighborhoods completely happy, there has to be a better way to get them to work together.
Butcher attended two training sessions on Placebuilder to try to understand the process better. She said the most important piece of the training was community engagement, which she has tried to do, meeting individually with neighbors to find out what they’re able to accept.
“We’re all working on trying to figure out how all this moves forward,” Butcher said. “I think people have to give it a chance and work with it, and try to engage the stakeholders.”
Given the comments from the last meeting, many of those stakeholders from the Southern Heights Neighborhood Association remain unconvinced. And on Thursday, the city announced a corridor study of Nicholasville Road, which some think could delay the whole process even more.
City spokeswoman Susan Straub says there’s always room for improvement.
“We continue to listen to opinions from all over town.,” she said. “Lexington is a place where we can talk out our disagreements and reach conclusions that are in the best interest of the entire community.”
But for now, it feels as though every zone change just ends up with stakeholders fighting at meetings and in courts. Supporters say more time is needed to work out the Placebuilder’s kinks and deepen everyone’s understanding of the flexibility it offers. The city should try to work out those kinks quickly before a federal court is the one to get it fixed.
This story was originally published February 14, 2020 at 10:15 AM.
