Fayetteville Speaks: Support neighborhood conservation
I am a homeowner on the south side of Fayetteville — a field away from Pinnacle Foods, the train track, a neighborhood vest pocket park along with the sale barn.
The blocks that separate me from the sale barn is mostly the Fayetteville National Cemetery. It is a shining jewel in the center of the neighborhood with its flag visible from all directions. Created in 1867, the cemetery is one of only a few hundred across the country, on the National Registry of Historic Places and now recognized as a National Shrine.
This neighborhood was here when the sale barn was built. The cemetery was. My house was. My neighbor’s house was, though it was moved by mules from around the corner about that time. A house or two up the road were here to see the Butterfield stagecoach deliver mail. The rest has grown up with the sale barn as its neighbor.
Ours is a quiet single family neighborhood primarily, with a mix of light industrial, agricultural uses, a few duplexes and a 12-unit single-story apartment building with a mix of young families, middle-aged and older folks living here.
This unique neighborhood deserves to be preserved, as new developments attempt to emulate much of what we have.
The sale barn has faced criticism as Fayetteville grew up around it. Established use and preservation of a way of life won it favor many a time.
The only thing that makes a bit of sense is to rezone this parcel and the rest of the area as “neighborhood conservation.” Period.
The proposal for rezoning to allow rent-by-the-room student apartments is simply incompatible with the surroundings. We owe our veterans’ final resting place that respect.
Estimates are that the cemetery has capacity for only the next four years. Will we have our troops out of harms way by then? The sale barn’s 11 acres could add a century.
I ask my neighbors and the community at large to please join me in urging the Fayetteville City Council to be good stewards and take the opportunity to rezone to “neighborhood conservation” and nothing less.
The next council meeting on July 7 at 6 p.m. will address this issue. Please call, write and come out to give a voice to preserving our neighborhood and not allow the way to be paved for a mega-complex to overshadow the National Cemetery.
Lauren Hawkins
Fayetteville
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Comments
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Another local resident
July 3, 2009
This idea that presence of students and young people defiles the cemetary is offensive. Seriously.
How many bigots and fearmongerers are there of you?
Aubrey Shepherd
July 3, 2009
Have you ever been to the national cemetery during a funeral?
Imagine 500 students living in three- or four-story buildings 100 feet or less from the nearest gravesites. Have you spent much time near fraternity, sorority and dormitory buildings? Imagine a cemetery with gates open 24-7 to allow access for mourners next to such places.
The potential for disruptive activities is endless.
More than 800 new bedrooms for students will be available this fall about 200 yards west of the proposed site of more apartments. Is there a need for more apartments in Fayetteville?
burgerboy
July 3, 2009
There are way too many apartments in Fayetteville already.
The biggest problem with these big apartment complexes isn’t the short term. Its the longer term because they never get rehabilitated. They deteriorate. They command less and less rent as they become less attractive and newer, shinier modern apartments are built elsewhere.
They become havens for the poor, and eventually, crime.
I wouldn’t ever buy a home next to a big new apartment complex, because over time, it is going to have a negative impact on the neighborhood and property values.
We are seeing some of the results of this in and around Leverett where old apartment stock is filling up with Section 8 and the extremely poor.
If Fayetteville wants to have a bright future, we need to put a moratorium on apartment development for a few years, and try to incentivize apartment complex owners to rehab their properties.
Scott Stapp of Creed
July 3, 2009
Oh no, not the extremely poor! Dear God, send us drug dealers, single mothers, foreign students with a poor grasp on conversational english, Texans, anything but the extremely poor!
burgerboy
July 3, 2009
Or, we could just ignore the growing apartment ghetto north of the University if that makes you feel better. At least you’re sensitive and politically correct, which is apparently more important than being intelligent and objective.
It doesn’t change the fact that large tracts of Section 8 housing and the extremely poor = increased crime. Fayetteville isn’t immune just because we have a bunch of trees and parks. We’re repeating the same mistakes most larger cities have spent the past couple of decades trying to undo.
Smaller pockets of reasonably-sized rentals wouldn’t have the same impact as these giant apartment complexes.
Scott Stapp of Creed
July 3, 2009
We should just pass an ordinance banning anyone who makes less than $15,000 a year from living in the City of Fayetteville. After all, it has been proven through science that poor people and criminals are one in the same.
The point I’m trying to make is that zoning districts have far less to do with where “the extremely poor” settle than do the preferred development styles of Jim Lindsey, et al. As if that was even the issue. btw it’s cute that someone thinks Fayetteville has a ghetto.
burgerboy
July 3, 2009
Its so cute, in fact, that the Fayetteville Police Department recently petitioned against the State ABC Board granting a permit to sell beer at the EZ Mart in the neighborhood because it has been identified as a problem crime area.
Interestingly, they didn’t voice any opposition to any of the other beer and wine permits recently granted to convenience stores. But what do the police know about crime and where it happens in this city. Some smarmy smart aleck named Scott Stapp of Creed posting on the Flyer obviously knows better.
I suppose we should wait until the crime gets really bad there before we start discussing better ways to lay out development patterns in our city.
Zoning districts, when they create huge tracts of deteriorating apartment complexes bounded by industrial zoning, have everything to do with creating undesireable areas in cities. People who can afford not to, do not live in those types of areas. And if you don’t understand that there’s a link between large numbers of poor people in a given area and crime, then I can’t help you.
There’s a direct correlation between that area’s crime problem and its substandard housing stock.
Zoning districts and the particulars of those zoning classifications are the only tools a city has to discourage the “preferred development styles of Jim Lindsey”. How else do you propose we improve those development styles?
I suppose you’d suggest we attack the problem with biting sarcasm.
Scott Stapp of Creed
July 3, 2009
All ghettos are “problem crime areas,” but not all “problem crime areas” are ghettos. Certainly not the “problem crime areas” in Fayetteville. There is more to a ghetto than an area that can be spatially defined by average annual household income, or where the Police don’t want beer to be sold. There’s a social component to what is typically considered a “ghetto” and it’s just not found here.
Zoning districts don’t create blight. Job loss, urban migration, changes in industry and other economic factors do. Zoning districts simply specify what land uses are permitted by right or by conditional approval. Unless this city has a special zoning district that mandates the presence of deteriorating multi-family apartment buildings, you’re going to have to further explain your position.
Zoning districts do not regulate the architectural design of apartment buildings, nor do they control the property value or the cost of rent, who rents them, or anything other than the land use. Sure, there are other sections of the City’s development code that control these things, including the separate building permit review process, but if something is zoned for residential multi-family use, then no distinction can be made between a proposed shantytown tenement and a proposed million-dollar AMA, LLC high-rise condo. There’s no zoning district exclusive to “nice” developments.
Scott Stapp of Creed
July 3, 2009
Also, quit actin like there’s a single better place to be snarky than Teh Internets.
burgerboy
July 4, 2009
Wow, where to begin…
1. A “ghetto” or a low income neighborhood prone to crime doesn’t exist here completely, but the area surrounding Leverett is well on its way. Substitute “ghetto” for “bad part of town you don’t want to be in after dark on foot” if you don’t like the word “ghetto” and want to strictly define it culturally (or racially, as I suspect). Size is relative. Our city is smaller as far as cities go, so our “ghetto” is smaller. Still, one is being created right now. The demographic and crime profile of that area is shifting, and its largely due to substandard housing (which all started as new, “student-oriented” housing) being grouped densely in that neighborhood. There are crime statistics from the past 5 years which prove this.
2. Zoning has nothing to do with blight? Jesus, you’re clueless. Zoning can contribute heavily to blight. Zoning controls what is built where, the cohesiveness or fracturedness of a neighborhood, the quality/size/nature of housing units, business use, industrial use, etc. Why do you think zoning even exists? It is used as a tool to improve the design of a city which improves (hopefully) the quality of life in that city. One of the reasons Springdale sucks is because of their complete lack of a cohesive city plan, housing and apartments abutting industrial uses, ragtag apartment development, “spot” zoning, etc.
3. Zoning explicitly does determine the density of housing development on a given parcel, which is the key point. That you don’t know that, or choose to ignore that, means you should educate yourself before jumping into a discussion about zoning.
You also missed my primary point about how a shiny new giant apartment building built today becomes a run down, government subsidized crap hole 20 years into the future. Single-family housing resists this trend better. Smaller apartment blocks resist this trend better. Both are always preferable to the “apartment complex” because they are easier to sell, easier to maintain, and easier to renovate.
Its obvious you don’t have even an elementary grasp of zoning, its purpose, how its used, so I won’t bother with you any longer.
Scott Stapp of Creed
July 4, 2009
Wow, thirty years ago someone should have told the Detroit City Council to adopt stricter zoning codes prohibiting blight. That way they wouldn’t have lost any jobs and their problem crime areas wouldn’t have gotten so out of hand. I guess the New Orleans planning office should have looked into some anti-flooding zoning ordinances, too. Could have saved the city a lot of trouble had they done that five years ago. But you’re right though, I forgot to mention that zoning controls the density of development as well. I see how that’s pertinent to your point about how the City of Fayetteville should ban apartments altogether as if any city ever has or could ever have the authority to do that.
sirkeystone
July 4, 2009
Funny though. I thought the article was about the sale barn and the way it’s being forced to go the direction of Thunder Valley.
All of the mention about the Leveritt area without mentioning the homeless population living in the wooded areas around 6th street and 540…
Aubrey Shepherd
July 4, 2009
The Washington County Livestock Auction closed after its June 25 sale. The loss of agriculture to urban sprawl has contributed to its demise as subdivisions of mac mansions were built by developers offering more for the land than a cattleman or farmer could earn over the rest of his life working the land. Many of those have not been completed but the land has been covered with red dirt (as impervious as concrete) and is no longer valuable to wildlife or livestock.
Meanwhile the new administration encourages local agriculture and even community gardens and sustainable low-maintenance yards with native plants.
POINTS related to earlier discussion. The Town Branch Neighborhood is a neighborhood of mostly single family homes built in the 1950s and 60s after the huge dairy farms there were subdivided. The only two-story houses in the neighborhood were built in the 19th century or early in the 20th century. It is much like what the city talks about and old-timers pine for. Tree-lined streets and shady lots with absorbent prairie soil that holds the water that falls on it.
Few couples earn more than $30,000. Many live on minimum wage. This isn’t about keeping out the poor or low-wage-earning people. It is about protecting them from being pushed out. People who live in the neighborhood work close to home and many walk or bicycle to work.
When the developers starting buying the 30 acres proposed and approved to be Aspen Ridge condos or town houses, they destroyed not only three tree-shaded mobile parks but also about a dozen occupied houses, some rentals, some owner-occupied.
That 30 acres is now covered with red dirt and pavement and three-story student apartments that offer more than 800 bedrooms to students. I have been told that less than half have been leased with the beginning of classes only a little more than 1 month away. They western half of the project isn’t finished but the eastern portion is. The muddy silt still runs off the property into the Town Branch of the West Fork of the White River and downstream flooding likely will continue to increase during heavy rainstorms.
Will 500 more bedrooms for students be needed a year from now? UA officials say NO.
The homeless people who were forced out of the woods on the Aspen Ridge/Hill Place property still have no adequate public shelters. When the Town Branch Neighborhood was protesting the Aspen Ridge project in 2003, 2004 and the first half of 2005, I many times mentioned that those homeless people would be affected greatly and that the people who could afford only those mobile homes would be affected drastically. Few could buy or rent anything better than they had. But the previous administration saw REMOVING BLIGHT where I saw turning people earning minimum wage into homeless people. And that occurred in several cases.
The sale-barn property will be a wonderful addition to the National Cemetery and will be needed. The WWII veterans and Korean War veterans are filling it fast. Vietnam veterans (a high percentage of current homeless men in Fayetteville are veterans of Korea, by the way) are dying prematurely for various reasons (can you spell Agent Orange or post-traumatic stress disorder?).
The incompatibility of the Downtown General Zoning, whether student apartments or some other project were to be built on the sale-barn land, with the surrounding neighborhood and the National Shrine is undeniable. Apartments built for students in Jonesboro and some Texas cities have turned into apartments for the public and the rent in those has obviously gone down to keep them earning something. Such problem situations have been well documented in many college towns.
The mix of people in the Town Branch Neighborhood varies from very poor to comfortable (college and high-school teachers and other professionals.) There are no rich folk, only people who feel rich by having a livable, safe home with trees and soil that allow gardens to grow without fertilizer and with little watering because of the soil’s ability to retain moisture. It is all former pasture, which in this areas means that the settlers found as tall-grass prairie with wooded riparian zones along the many tributaries of the Town Branch. And several families in the 70s and 80s live in their parents houses still.
Aubrey Shepherd
July 4, 2009
By the way, much of the direction of this thread of comment is based not on the content of Lauren Hawkins’ letter but by the headline above her letter. She certainly would not have advocated forced zoning. But neighborhood conservation is the zoning currently popular with the city for this kind of neighborhood. Actually, the average lot is not more like two houses per acres than four houses per acre and neighborhood conservation would allow denser use of the property. The problem is that most of the neighborhood is now zoned for MF24, multi-family housing. People are buying and restoring old houses because they have big lots, not because they want to fill the space in.
Aubrey Shepherd
July 4, 2009
The veterans’ coalition is making real progress in gaining support to raise the money to buy the property from the owner if the zoning for student apartments is denied by the council. Both Senator Blanche Lincoln and Congressman John Boozman have expressed support for the national-cemetery expansion fund-raising effort, and the veterans’ groups expect support to bring federal money along to supplement the money that is coming in from private donors.
The owner of the property will not LOSE if Downtown General is not allowed. No one wants him to lose. And I believe that he and his family will be happy to see the 1936 sale barn become a part of the 1867 national cemetery.
Scott Stapp of Creed
July 4, 2009
I’m with Aubrey and Lauren. Neighborhood Conservation will allow for a dozen or so student triplexes, with an average of three students to an apartment, so you’re looking at maybe around 100 obnoxious beer-bonging undergrads desecrating the veterans’ memories to Bob Marley all night long from their puked-on balconies. Plus their cars (and their friends’ cars). Anyway, one hundred students with Neighborhood Conservation seems like a reasonable compromise. By my calculations, that’s something like only a fourth of the number of students perpetually committing lewd and lascivious acts and outraging the spirits of our Nation’s fallen heroes that would otherwise occupy this property under Downtown General.
What I want to know is, why does the City of Fayetteville hate veterans so much? I bet they’d support them if they’d died serving the socialist agenda…
Another local resident
July 5, 2009
The sale barn land isn’t a part of your neighborhood. Except for the cemetary, every other border touches commercial and industrial businesses.
The cemetary can expand into many other properties, so the expansion issue is a red herring.
And finally, THIS ISN”T A JIM LINDSEY PIECE OF CRAP PLACE. It’s not being zoned RMF-24, which is what allows piece of crap developments to happen. This is downtown general. Rents, relative to dorms or Lindsey or Sweetser apartments, will be very high. You won’t get riffraff living there.
Scott Stapp of Creed
July 5, 2009
It may not be a Lindsey development, but multi-family apartment buildings are a use by right in Downtown General just as they are in RMF-24. Neither district precludes piece of crap apartments. Neighborhood Conservation, however, does. But again, and for the last time, zoning does not control riffraff (as if “riffraff” could or should be controlled by zoning).
Another local resident
July 6, 2009
Actually, that’s the whole point of downtown general zoning: the design standards.
West Ave
July 7, 2009
Downtown General will not keep out a developer with a very bad reputation, just check out this link out: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1104622579&ref=profile#/group.php?gid=7787175980.
Go to http://www.apartmentratings.com, type in “The Grove” search box, see what you come up with.
Yes, I believe this place will turn a safe quiet neighborhood into a noisy, high traffic and high crime area. It has nothing to do with the students, its not that at all. Campus Crest does not exclusively rent to students anyway. It has to do with the developer.
It is a single-family neighborhood, and it should be kept that way. If I wanted to live near apartments, I would of moved to a neighborhood with apartments. single-family neighborhoods should not be mixed up with apartments. Other cities have very careful zoning requirements to separate neighborhoods from multi-family dwellings, like in FL. But Fayetteville is just a mish-mosh of houses mixed with apartments, especially areas north of U of A–its ridiculous!
suthrnchick
July 16, 2009
I agree with Scott. My grandpa is burried in the veterans cemetary and it will really tick me off if a bunch of college kids (which WILL be partying and raising cane and destroying things)desacrate my grandpa’s grave. I don’t care how much the rent is, more than likely it will be the rich kids doing all the damage because they have no respect for property since it has always been given to them.I haven’t seen any nice apartments stay nice for very long no matter what class lives in it. I consider myself on the poor side, but if your not feeding the city money on the side then your screwed. And I’ve lived on the south side of Fayetteville my whole life. [Two sentences removed.] I wonder what else they will shut down after this???
interested party
July 22, 2009
Here’s the deal. (1)The city council approved the appartments on the other side of this neighborhood and we didn’t have all of this discussion and hoopla, I wonder why??? (2) There is a cemetery right up near campus behind the kappa sig house and to my knowledge the students do not run rampant in the cemetery causing destruction. If they do, it never makes the news. (3) The bartholomew family has been a good tax paying business to this community since 1936. Progress and people have taken over much of the land that used to grow cattle in this area, and have pushed their business out. Now, they have found someone that is willing to purchase their land for a fair price, and a few people are preventing them from moving on with their sale. It is not right. (4) The veterans had a fair chance to purchase just like anyone else and they did not or have not ever made an offer to purchase because they do not have the money. Why should the seller wait for them to raise money, when they have someone that has the money now???? Why should the seller’s future plans be held up by someone who may never be able to raise enough money?? It makes no sense at all.