Why can’t UK, Lexington ever talk about housing before demolition starts? | Opinion
Updated: On Wednesday, Nov. 19, the Lexington Fayette Urban County Council voted to disapprove a planned apartment building on the corner of Maxwell and Rose formerly approved by the Lexington Fayette Planning Commission.
The Maxwell-High Street corridors of downtown Lexington are undergoing massive changes. At least four big apartment buildings by private developers are planned: three on Maxwell and one on High Street at the site of the current YMCA.
It’s happening so fast that a lot of people are alarmed at the pace of demolition of part of Lexington’s historic core, hard to ignore as you drive past an open hole that used to be filled with decrepit yet National Historic Register houses.
The three Maxwell projects — all aimed at University of Kentucky students — have passed the Lexington Fayette Planning Commission already. But the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council has decided to hold a public hearing on the last one, a 900-bed complex that will stretch across Stone, Kalmia, Maxwell and Rose.
The public hearing will be 5 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 19, followed by a vote on the zone change.
It’s going to be contentious, with the Blue Grass Trust for Historic Preservation leading the charge.
“It’s been interesting to see the tremendous public outcry over this one,” said Jon Coleman, the Trust’s executive director. “I don’t know if people have woken up to what’s going on. While we need increased density because the housing crisis is severe, that doesn’t throw out the need for thoughtful density, and this is a slash and burn campaign.”
The fight has harnessed a coalition of residents, including some young people. Gray Broderson is an artist and activist who agrees Lexington needs more housing. Just not this.
“We’re not completely opposed to development, but when it obliterates active housing for people is not the path we should be going down,” Broderson said. “We need actually affordable housing, not housing that starts at a tiny room that is $900 a month.”
Lexington is in a housing crisis, caused by the unique situation of being the site of the state’s flagship university and the Urban Service Boundary aimed at preserving Fayette’s signature agricultural industries. These kinds of apartment buildings alleviate some of that pressure; while not really “affordable housing” per se, they will help prevent UK’s ever-expanding student body from taking over more residential neighborhoods. And UK is going to keep growing, both in students and in its other enterprises, like health care.
But this situation shows us so many ways we could do better as a university town.
One of the reasons it was hard to protest the Stavroff project — a 238-unit, six-story building on East Maxwell Street between Lexington and Stone Avenue — is that the 13 historic buildings had been allowed to decay so deeply that it would have been nearly impossible to rehab them. As someone with a son who lived in one of them, I’ve seen a lot of substandard student housing in my time, but this was a truly disgusting, rundown rathole.
Why did the city — which has an active code enforcement department — allow them to become so degraded? Why don’t we hold landlords to higher standards?
Despite a host of historic buildings, this area was not protected by an H1 historic overlay. That’s a long story; basically, lawyer and developer Bill Lear owned a lot of properties west of Rose Street, so when the H1 designation was proposed in the 1990s, he agreed to support it if the overlay stopped at Rose Street.
Now, H1 overlays have plenty of their own problems, and are part of why we don’t have more density in Lexington. But it’s the only way to stop this kind of mass demolition.
If you’re opposed to density on Maxwell, you better be prepared to support it elsewhere. The Hub project on Maxwell and Rose will demolish some buildings known as the “missing middle,” those kinds of four-plexes we see dotted throughout Lexington’s older neighborhoods. But when proposals come along to build more multi-family buildings in residential neighborhoods, people tend to freak out. You can’t have it both ways.
“It does kind of suck that we are losing some of this missing middle housing, in that this is the kind of housing we need a lot more of in a lot more places,” said housing advocate Blake Hall. “But it doesn’t necessarily mean that right between UK and downtown shouldn’t be much denser than it is already.”
City, UK must cooperate more
But the real elephant in the room is UK, itself a small city in the middle of Lexington. Why can’t UK and the city do a better job of talking and planning about the housing issues that are so crucial to both? UK knows how many students it’s projected to get over the next decade and where else it wants to grow the campus. Surely that would be useful information to city planners. But they operate in silos.
This is a perennial problem in university towns, but just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it should be ignored. There hasn’t been a proper Town-Gown commission or task force since President Eli Capilouto arrived in 2011. Universities always keep growing; that’s why, in just one example, UK spent years buying up all the houses west of Limestone and demolished them to make way for more health care facilities.
As UK architecture professor Leen Katrib asked in a thoughtful OpEd in August: “How can the university balance its commitment to students with responsibility to the surrounding community?”
Debra Hensley is a former Urban County Council member who lives in the Aylesford neighborhood. She remembers sitting down with UK President David Roselle to talk about housing.
“In those days, there was a real effort between UK and neighborhood associations,” she said. “It took that kind of leadership. I would say the current president lives not too far away from all this, and he should be reaching out to city officials on this.
“It’s unbelievably burdensome for this neighborhood to take on all these huge buildings in such a small area,” she added. “I don’t see why we don’t have better planning, it’s simply a matter of one entity reaching out to the next. To me, it’s maddening that we have to be the ones to bring these critical entities together to plan for the future. This is not rocket science. It’s basic. Why it isn’t happening is shocking to me.”
Jay Blanton, vice President for university relations and chief communications officer for UK, said as part of his job, he reaches out to council members.
“We want to be good partners with the city,” he wrote in an email. “We believe we are, but always want to be open to where there are challenges and where we can be even better partners. We do believe our growth — consistent but thoughtful over the last several years — is good for the community.”
UK has grown by about 12,000 students in the past 15 years, along with an expansion of UK HealthCare, which brings more jobs and revenues to Lexington. UK now houses about 85% of freshman and is building some new housing on the old Kirwan-Blanding complex, which was demolished in 2020. “As for the future, we are working on a time for council members in the near future to come on campus and continue the dialogue as well as see developments and infrastructure improvements,” Blanton said.
Planning Commission member Frank Penn would also like to be involved in those discussions.
“I don’t think they’ve ever come before us,” he said. “My question is: how many more of these projects do you suspect you will need to have built? We would be glad to talk to them, but so far we haven’t been able to make that happen.”
Cities inevitably change, and it’s up to their residents to decide what kind of city they want to be. We have so many thoughtful, concerned citizens, it seems like we could do better on these kinds of discussions before the bulldozers are at the door.
“Housing policy is about everything— health, education, economics, transportation,” Hall said. “It’s so entangled and has repercussions to everything.”
It’s difficult, but not impossible, to have more housing without Lexington losing all of its character. I think Lexington is up to the challenge.
This story was originally published November 18, 2025 at 10:00 AM.
