POPmove“This was just the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Roxanne King explains during a phone call.

King lives in Little Forest Hills near the corner of Oldgate and Santa Clara, just a house away from the parking lot where the new Promise of Peace community garden is soon to be built. When King learned about the garden, she – like a handful of other nearby neighbors – was upset about potential problems it could create for her and her neighbors.

Sign up for our newsletter

* indicates required

“We’re inundated with traffic here, people who filter into this community, all week long with the churches,” she says. “And the idea of having something two doors away from me, that would have music and fundraisers and children’s camps and just more things that are going to attract more people commuting to this community and needing a place to park, was too much for me to bear. It was honestly like, ‘That’s it, I can’t take it any more.’”

Right away King put her house on the market, she says, and she found a buyer almost immediately.

“Oddly enough, it’s a family with two small children, and they think that this Promise of Peace garden is going to be a fabulous addition to the neighborhood,” she says with a chuckle. “It is definitely a night or day type of thing. You either love the idea or you hate the idea.”

What irked her about the garden was that no one talked with her or the neighbors about it, she says.

“There was no information. So if we go by what’s happening at the existing place, it’s a lot of traffic because the intent is to have a lot of people. Kids camp is equivalent to a daycare; let’s not kid ourselves,” she says. “That’s not acceptable to me.”

King predicts she won’t be the last Little Forest Hills neighbor to sell her home over the garden controversy.

“I’m just the first,” she says, “and once people see how easy it was for me to sell, they might put a sign out and go.”

 

What else are nearby neighbors saying about the Promise of Peace garden moving to Little Forest Hills? Check back later today for more information about the controversy.