Downtown rezoning plans: Everything you need to know

Unless you’ve been closely following every Homewood City Council and Planning Commission meeting since November, you might feel confused as to why many Homewood residents oppose the downtown rezoning plan.

On the surface, it’s simple. Downtown Homewood has 13 different zoning districts, and this plan brings that number down to three: high-intensity, medium-intensity and low-intensity districts.

But dig a little deeper and the plan is swimming with controversy, conspiracy theories and a fear of overdevelopment.

To understand some Homewood residents’ feelings of distrust toward their city government, one must go back about four years. In October 2016, the City Council approved a 1-cent sales tax increase and a $110 million bond to pay for expansion projects in the school system and parks. Some Homewood residents who spoke at the Oct. 24, 2016, meeting said the decision was rushed — the whole process officially took a little more than a month.

Homewood residents said they believe members of that council held closed-door meetings about the bond deal for up to two years before the deal was made. One group of Homewood residents created a website called Change Is Hard Homewood, which asks for the city government to adopt many “basic practices.” The first statement on the website calls for all planning, discussion and meetings to be open to the public, and it lists the 2016 bond deal as an example.

Council President Peter Wright said there was never a private City Council meeting pertaining to the bond deal but that there were meetings and discussions between council members and school board members. They discussed the “bubble” of population growth in the school system and the need for the expansion of parks, Wright said, and they attempted to come up with a proposal to bring before the council.

“Every single discussion you have is not subject to public scrutiny and public involvement — you couldn’t get any work done,” he said. “Yes, there were discussions — there had to be. ... But what there never was and never has been was an official meeting, an improper meeting regarding any actionable item.”

The ends justified the means, Wright said. With President Donald Trump about to be elected into office at the same time that the proposal officially made it to City Council, there was a concern about what would happen in the bond market. The bond rates at that time were “phenomenal,” he said.

“The bond was an incredible success,” Wright said. “We saved the city anywhere from $1.5-3 million by the timing of us moving faster and taking advantage of the good rates before the election.”

NEW PROPOSAL

Fast forward to November 2019, when the Planning Commission held a public hearing about possibly rezoning downtown. This came shortly after the council passed an ordinance that no longer required them to post yellow signs at each property that was up for consideration to be rezoned.

“The requirements under the law are to notify the property owners,” Wright said. “That’s with certified letters, and I think that was largely and properly accomplished. However, if you line up all of the businesses, we would have 50 yellow signs throughout the downtown area — I may be exaggerating, I don’t know the exact number, but I’m just giving you the thumbnail sketch. But that’s why that part of the notice was altered.”

The business owners who rent the properties were not required under law to be notified, so some of these people did not know about the rezoning request. This was a reasonable complaint, Wright said; however, he also pointed out that there were public input surveys and sessions. The public hearing for downtown rezoning was also announced during the Oct. 1 Planning Commission meeting.

“It added to the social media frenzy of a secret, covert campaign to turn our thriving downtown area upside down,” Wright said. “Why would any reasonable member of our city or of our council want to turn our thriving downtown business community upside down? No one wants to do that.”

The rezoning proposal focused on the “Heart of Homewood,” a 162-acre area with City Hall located in the middle. This area currently has 13 different zoning districts. The rezoning plan would place all properties in that area under one of three new districts: low-intensity, medium-intensity and high-intensity.

In the original plan, which was discussed at the Nov. 12 Planning Commission meeting, medium-intensity districts — which include the 18th Street shops — would be storefronts and mixed-use buildings up to four stories. Under current zoning, 18th Street businesses can be up to three stories tall, but most businesses are in one- or two-story buildings. The proposed change was met with public outrage.

Wright was surprised with the public’s reaction, he said. This process started years ago when the city hired the Regional Planning Commission and Placemakers LLC, which held public input meetings and discussed downtown residential spaces and mixed-use zoning at these meetings. The Homewood Master Plan, which Wright said has been around for 15-20 years, also mentions mixed-use zoning.

“When we came forth with the plan, we were all a little surprised,” he said. “We all know that not everyone’s going to be happy, and that’s part of it. But there was such a public dismay about it.”

Sue Graphos, a longtime Homewood resident who owns Sam’s Super Samwiches on 18th Street with her husband, said she attended the Nov. 12 public hearing.

“My immediate thought was, ‘Where are people going to park if they do four stories?’” she said. “It would cause a ripple effect, number one, if they did something like that. One building’s going to be torn down, the next building’s going to be torn down, and the next building’s going to be torn down. It’s going to put everybody in the entire downtown Homewood out of business. And there’s nowhere to park as it is.”

Despite public concern, the Planning Commission recommended the rezoning plan to City Council. After hearing more concerns from the public at the City Council’s Dec. 9 meeting, the zoning plan was amended Jan. 28 to restrict the building height to two stories maximum and remove residential use for the 18th Street businesses. At the Feb. 4 Planning Commission meeting, discussion on the rezoning request was tabled, and then the response to the COVID-19 pandemic hit the Homewood community a month later.

RESISTING CHANGE

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” is an idiom that many Homewood residents have expressed regarding the change to the zoning ordinance. The retail shops on 18th Street are thriving, even in a time when e-commerce has hurt brick-and-mortar shops in other cities.

However, spot zoning is a bad practice, said Susan Henderson, a consultant with Placemakers LLC.

Spot zoning is when a new zone is created to accommodate an incoming business or developer that is slightly different from the previous use. This is why Homewood currently has six different commercial zones downtown, for example — one zone each for retail shopping, neighborhood shopping, commercial shopping and more.

Not only does this create suburban sprawl, Henderson said, but it can also hinder economic development.

“Say a retail goes out of business in this post-pandemic world, but it’s zoned for retail, not office,” she said. “Then if the market softens on retail, there’s no way to put in the office use without a rezoning, and that is a lengthy, laborious process for the landowners.

“At the end of the day, they’re stuck with an empty building. Downtown Homewood is less vibrant. There’s a reduced tax rate. And it begins to diminish the economy because the zoning is so complicated, and it’s prohibiting similar uses.”

Despite this, some Homewood residents say they prefer the traditional method of presenting rezoning requests before City Council.

“We don’t need to do a blanket 162-acre rezone of private property against the will of some of the private property owners because of the excuse of 13 zoning categories and that we have to do something about C-4b,” resident Mary Ellen Snell said.

“This is the biggest deal in the history of Homewood,” Snell added. “Nothing has ever been done like this.”

UNCLEAR FUTURE

Right now, the proposal is tabled in the Planning Commission. The Planning Commission is not a governing body — it just makes recommendations to the City Council. It is “duty bound” to make a recommendation and send it to City Council, Wright said, but it hasn’t done that yet.

“I don’t think, frankly, that there is much heartburn over that right now,” Wright said. “It was generating such dismay that I think ... instead of wallowing in that issue, it probably was arguably a blessing in disguise to let it be tabled and sit quietly and help us all take a breather.”

This is particularly true now during the novel coronavirus pandemic, he said.

“There’s obviously not much appetite to take up any of these zoning issues anytime soon until we get out of these more critical, pressing times.”

For Homewood residents looking to the future, many say they hope the city will be more open and timely in the future. Snell, who manages the Edgewood Neighborhood Watch Facebook page, said she wishes the issue didn’t come up during the holiday season. She wasn’t able to have a Christmas or put up a tree this year because following the rezoning plan “was like putting together a puzzle,” she said.

Liz Ellaby wishes to never repeat the bond deal of 2016, she said. She is one of the residents who signed the Change Is Hard Homewood webpage.

“They’re not only excluding residents from how ideas are generated, the genesis of these ideas,” she said.“They also exclude other members of the council.”

Visit heartofhomewoodplan.com for more information on the proposed downtown district zoning.