The City Plan commission still hasn’t set the public hearing date for the rezoning request for property at Abrams and Richmond, but we’ll let you know as soon as we get a solid date and time from the CPC. The hearing is likely to be within the next couple of months.
In case you missed it, neighbor Alex Winslow has filed a zoning request for the lot northeast of the Abrams and Richmond intersection. His hope is to turn the residential property at the corner into a commercial one. So far there’s been mixed feelings about it on our previous blog post.
Commission vice-chair Gloria Tarpley, a neighborhood resident, says the CPC has yet to received feedback from neighbors — positive, negative or otherwise. She says the City Plan commission won’t make a decision about the request until after they talk with immediate neighbors, as well as any other Lakewood residents who have an opinion. (We have been in contact with some of the immediate neighbors, so stay tuned for more on that.)
“The planning committee in general is fairly resistant to make a change from a property that is residential to a property that is commercial,” she says. “In general, we don’t want to disturb areas that are long-standing and well-established as residential.”
This particular property is tricky because, not only is it a part of a neighborhood, it also is part of a conservation district, so at some point residents went through the trouble of ensuring the neighborhood would stay residential, Tarpley says.
Though she stressed that she knows and thinks highly of Winslow, who says he came across the property last summer while serving as the president of the Lakewood Neighborhood Association, she says she won’t make any decision about the property until she “has all the pieces.” Right now, she could see the request going either way, she says.
“Although it’s in a neighborhood, it does have commercial around it. The planning commission will have to balance a lot of factors here. We generally try not to disturb neighborhoods, but there may be compelling circumstances,” she says.
District 9 council member Sheffie Kadane had similar thoughts about the property.
“I think it’ll depend one what the neighborhood wants. I’ve heard no negativity towards what they’re trying to do,” he says, and added that he had been told the Lakewood Neighborhood Association favors the rezoning.
He also says he personally doesn’t believe it would be an intrusion into the neighborhood, so if the rezoning is approved by Tarpley and the plan commission, at this point he doesn’t see voting against the rezoning request if the plan commission approves the request and passes it along to the City Council, which must approve a zoning change in a conservation district.
And if past re-zoning requests are any indication, a proposed zoning change favored by the council person in whose district the property sits virtually ensures that the entire city council will abide by the lead council person’s wishes.
Tarpley did point out a key factor she wants to make sure neighbors understand: Just because Winslow provided a rendering of what he hopes the building will look like, that doesn’t mean that’s what the property will actually look like the drawing once it’s all said and done. Zoning simply defines the nature of the property; it in no way mandates or controls the architecture, she says.
” (Winslow) is certainly a credible part of the community, so it makes an interesting case. But this is about land use,” she says.
