
Worried that dense development is encroaching on the city's single-family housing stock, a crowd of homeowners packed into City Hall Tuesday looking for a more powerful tool to fight back.
They are pushing for the creation of so-called "conservation districts," which would allow a neighborhood to define the characteristics of an area and block development that is deemed out-of-scale. They were joined by two recently ousted council members, Meg Tuthill and Diane Hofstede.
The conservation district ordinance, authored by council member Cam Gordon, has not yet reached the largely pro-density City Council. The chair of the city's zoning and planning committee, Lisa Bender, has already said she has concerns it will be used to block specific development during a period of growth for the city, however.
Attendees largely hailed from Uptown's Lowry Hill East neighborhood, the Marcy-Holmes neighborhood and Prospect Park neighborhood. Lowry Hill East and Marcy-Holmes have experienced dramatic growth in recent years, largely through the construction of four- to six-story mixed-use development projects.
Conservation districts would allow neighbors to limit development facets such as height, setbacks and landscape features beyond what the current zoning of those districts allows.
Many meeting attendees said the current language requiring two-thirds of property owners to consent to creating a conservation district was too stringent. Renters do not receive a vote, under the current language. The creation of a district would ultimately be up to the City Council.
"We do most things in this country by 51 percent," said Florence Littman of Prospect Park. "You don't normally need a supermajority. So I think it really doesn't make sense to have anything higher than 51 percent."
Kathleen Kullberg of Lowry Hill East, which includes huge swaths of Hennepin and Lyndale Avenues, said they originally envisioned making the entire neighborhood a conservation district. But the current language requiring a majority of the properties in a district to embody a certain style would make that difficult, given several new developments near Lake Street.