open #192830
Other
- Case Date:
- 8/12/2024
Opposing making Green Acres a Conservation District: I am writing today as a member of the real estate community here in Bloomington having been an agent for close to a decade. I'm also writing from my experience as a commissioner of both the Planning Commission and Board of Zoning Appeals for the past several years. I can very much value and appreciate the history and architectural history of the Green Acres neighborhood. I thank the residents who put in the work and told the story of how Green Acres has evolved from the beginning. Stories like these are worth telling and being displayed to the public as much as possible. As far as the petition itself to deem Green Acres a conservation district leading to full fledged historic district designation, I believe is a very broad overreach of the intentions of historical preservation. Having lived several years in the Near West Side/Prospect Hill neighborhood as well as having owned several properties in historic neighborhoods in other cities I can speak to the impact of this type of designation personally as well. Talking about a select handful of houses, which are notable and can be kept as such, and expanding that to include several hundred that have little to no historic significance is where the overreach comes into play. As a real estate agent and investor myself, I fully understand where many are coming from who oppose this broad reach. The point of historic designation is to single out properties that carry a story all their own, not to lump an entire neighborhood, with a large rental population and no historical significance, and confine the expansion and development that is desperately needed to support a growing University and the city as a whole. I've been a part of many discussions on the commissions which I serve about how we can balance preservation with expansion and development and I've seen cases where that blends very well together and is a win-win. This is not one of those cases but since it has been presented as such I'm strongly opposed to it. I believe the intentions are misguided and really crosses a line into government intrusion into the livelihood of many tax paying owners in that neighborhood who want to continue to house students and families at a time when more housing density, of any kind, is very much needed. There are checks and balances in place already to prevent what many are referencing as the Kmart type development here and I fully support the expansion of this neighborhood. I think the goal here should be to keep the current historically significant houses in Green Acres just as they are and work to preserve other individual properties one at a time. Not taking a very broad stroke and misusing the point of preservation in the first place and thus bottlenecking an area ripe for future development. Thank you for your time.