Monroe County commissioners have, for a second time, rejected a proposed housing development in the Clear Creek area, with one commissioner suggesting the city of Bloomington could provide more housing if it allowed buildings to be taller.
“Bloomington is providing a lot of housing, and that’s where people should be moving to,” said Commissioner Lee Jones. “Their housing could be more attainable if they were to allow an increase in height in housing, and I consider this to be a much better solution to our housing problems than developing the entire county.”
Commissioner Julie Thomas, president of the board this year, said the county, through its planning documents, has decided to “keep urban areas urban and rural areas rural, and I’m kind of holding on to that.”
Fellow commissioner Penny Githens agreed.
“The plan is to keep rural parts of the county rural,” she said.
Commissioners decline to rezone land to allow more density
The commissioners unanimously rejected a rezoning request that would have allowed developers Donnie Adkins and Kevin Schmidt to build 136 housing units. The proposal included triplexes starting near $285,000 and some single-family homes that would have cost more than $500,000.
The proposed development, called Trails at Robertson Farm, would have been built on a 44-acre property between South Victor Pike and the Bloomington Rail Trail. The proposal recently had received support from the county planning staff and the county plan commission, which voted 6-2 to forward the proposal with a positive recommendation to the county commissioners.
However, the commissioners, who rejected a similar proposal by the same developers in the same location in 2021, said they had too many concerns over the development’s density and its impact on traffic and flooding.
Jones said storms in recent years have produced extensive damage and flooding, and with storm severity and frequency likely to increase in coming years, communities have to seriously consider how to make sure their built environments drain properly while not overwhelming local watersheds.
“I understand that there’s a lot of profit involved in moving people to this county,” she said. “I also definitely get the feeling that, if possible, people who want to profit on building would probably put the whole county under (an) impervious surface, as long as it was profitable for them.”
Thomas said the housing shortage plagues communities nationwide.
“One development is not going to … prevent that problem from existing,” she said.
And Githens said the starting price for the triplexes, $285,000, would be unaffordable for many people, including a teacher at Monroe County Community School Corp. Adkins, one of the developers, agreed, but said the home could be affordable for two teachers.
Both Jones and Thomas also said they believe it's prudent to take into consideration the strong opposition from neighbors.
“I do feel that people who already live here do have precedence over people who you might want to move here,” Jones told the developers.
Thomas said, “We respect the people who are already here, who have been here for decades or have been here for two minutes, who have already invested in this community over, you know, planning something for imaginary people who may come.”
At Monday’s public meeting, the developers’ proposal received some support, though primarily from people with connections to the real estate industry.
Tracee Lutes, a broker with RE/MAX, said increasing the housing supply would address the affordability challenges raised by the commissioners, while not building more homes would drive up prices even more. She also said the commissioners’ sustainability concerns would be addressed, at least in part, by replacing the current “cow pasture” on the property with the number of trees the developers have proposed.
Project opponent: Commissioners are 'heroes ... (for) rural values'
Meanwhile, neighbors who attended Monday’s meeting voiced concerns about flooding, traffic and the environment.
Guy Loftman, a retired attorney who said he has lived next to the site for 49 years, said the project should be denied for multiple reasons, including that it proposes 0.1-acre lots, which are smaller than anything allowed under the current or proposed county planning ordinance.
The project would create “dense, urban-style housing,” he said, and lacks enough open space because developers count as “natural area” the power line easem*nt that Duke Energy “bush hogs and poisons.”
Bloomington “has a wonderful mix of urban and rural virtues,” Loftman said, but the countryside “is under attack by the development industry, which would profit by destroying it.”
He urged the commissioners to again reject the development and thanked them for being “heroes in standing up for rural values in Monroe County.”
His daughter, Eve Loftman Cusack, a local resident and teacher, said the upheaval caused by the development could have dire consequences for plants and animals, especially two bird species of special concern for the state: the northern bobwhite and the American woodco*ck.
Erika Morris, who lives on Victor Pike, said despite assurance from highway officials, the road infrastructure in the area already is insufficient, as traffic on Victor Pike sometimes backs up during rush hour from Ind. 37 to Church Lane. In addition, she said, the property owners have not taken care of the property, and unmowed grass and fallen trees have contributed to turning a once beautiful property into a “neighborhood blight.”
Dave Busch, who lives south of the proposed site, said 300 people have remonstrated against the plan, and while he thanked the developers for revising their project in response to neighbor concerns, he remained opposed.
Patricia Busch, too, opposed the project because of the impact on wildlife and concerns over flooding.
“This project makes things worse, not better,” she said.
The developers pushed back against some of the concerns, saying their plans had received support from highway and drainage officials, as well as the planning staff and the plan commission.
Adkins said the project would reduce the water flowing out of the property by 80%, and Schmidt said the county would put in additional traffic features, such as a four-way stop, to reduce congestion.
Adkins said the developers had tried their best to respond to some of the neighbors’ concerns, but said they needed to balance density and housing cost, as lower density means higher home prices.
He said he agreed with Loftman in that Bloomington is an incredible place, one which Adkins said he hopes an additional 136 families can enjoy — rather than moving to Greene, Owen or other nearby counties.
‘Decisions that put homeownership further out of reach’
After the commissioners’ rejection, Adkins said via email Tuesday he and Schmidt are “incredibly disappointed that the people of Monroe County have lost another opportunity to help address the attainable housing problem that has significantly worsened in recent years.”
Adkins said he was “perplexed” the commissioners rejected a “ready-to-go solution” only 4,000 feet away from where the commissioners themselves proposed spending $3.5 million to support a Habitat for Humanity housing development.
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The housing shortage “is impeding businesses and preventing growth,” Adkins wrote. “This rejection is a leadership decision to ‘do nothing.’”
He got support from Eric Spoonmore, a former county council member and current president and CEO of the Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce, who said via email he was “saddened” the county rejected the project.
“Monroe County is one of few places in Indiana where I still believe our workers have a fighting chance for a better life and more opportunities, including the ability to attain the American Dream of homeownership,” Spoonmore said.
“By now, it should come as no surprise to anyone why Monroe County is experiencing population loss of working-age people,” he said. “It is because the hopes and aspirations of so many hard-working people in our community are diminishing with each new iteration of these decisions that put homeownership further out of reach.”
The median home sales price for Monroe County in July was $318,350, up 9% from a year ago, according to the Indiana Association of Realtors.
Adkins said he and his partners could build single-family homes on one-acre lots on the property, but those homes would cost at least $1.25 million, which would not address the housing shortage. So he and Schmidt are looking at other options “including entertaining a request to host a charity mud bog which may allow the property to provide some benefit to the community in the near term.”
Boris Ladwig can be reached at bladwig@heraldt.com.
