Here we go again.
Yet another real estate investor is trying to rezone
yet another home on Conner Street. This time it’s Larry J. Ley. He wants to
turn the home at 1135 Conner St. into a commercial property. It’s been a
residence since it was built nearly 100 years ago.
There’s a troubling uniformity to people who try to
rezone Old Town Noblesville homes to businesses. They know little about the
place and haven’t a clue what it’s like to live here.
As best I can tell, Mr. Ley fits the mold. He doesn’t
live in Old Town nor does he appear to live in a neighborhood where anyone will
ever try to put a commercial use up against his own home. In other words, he
won’t personally have to live with the circumstances he seeks to impose on
others.
Appearing to underline his misunderstanding, Mr. Ley
met with the Noblesville Preservation Alliance board recently and promised he
would take good care of the house. He perhaps thought if he promised to be a
good steward of the home the group would support him. But this isn’t about the preservation
of old houses. It’s about families and neighborhoods.
Why does the neighborhood want the home to stay
residential? For the same reason such business/residential mixes are banned by
deed restriction in every modern subdivision in Noblesville, and from the very neighborhoods
where Mr. Ley has homes in Carmel and on Morse Reservoir in Noblesville.
Old Town residents are no different than people
living in those protected neighborhoods. Neighbors know each other. Their
children play together. Evenings and weekends they might end up talking on
someone’s front porch or share a beer around a patio campfire. When on
vacation, neighbors feed each other’s pets and watch over their homes. These
are the building blocks of community.
Where businesses exist amid neighborhoods, it hard
for residents to know the businessperson who goes home each evening to a
different neighborhood. No child at the business will play with yours. You
don’t share dinners with them and don’t help each other in times of need.
Strangers come and go from the business all day. It sits empty at night. The
yard is often a paved parking lot with a dumpster that’s emptied in the middle
of the night. The business might even buy the house next door and demolish it
for more parking. Subtract a second neighbor. And with each, subtract a little
sense of community within the neighborhood.
Not much chance this will ever happen to Mr. Ley at
his leafy Carmel address or his waterfront home. But he’s still looking to
change the rules and the lay of the land for families surrounding the home he
wants to rezone on Conner.
There hasn’t been a commercial rezone on the
residential stretch of Conner in 25 years, and that last one was done to save a
significant piece of architecture from demolition. In those 25 years, another
home that was business actually went back
to residential. That means there’s been no net increase in business in the
residential stretch of Conner in over 30 years.
And that’s not a fluke. It’s the result of 3 decades
of vigilance.
Families here have had to marshal their efforts time
and again to protect their neighborhood. During the last attempted rezone, 7
years ago, I helped canvass the neighborhood, finding that nearly all residents
from Maple to Logan opposed the rezone. I also found that even the businesses
already here don’t want more businesses. They already arrive at work many days
to find strangers parked in their parking lots. House another business in a
tight residential area and see parking woes multiply. That’s why even the
Presbyterian Church opposed the last attempt at a Conner Street rezone.
And Mr. Ley is trying to create his new business
location at the end of a dead-end alley. Heaven help that block of families on
both Conner and Maple who will now have Mr. Ley’s customers struggling up and
down this dead-end alley, turning around in driveways and blocking garage doors
– something they’ve already experienced in the past. Such things happen in
other areas of Old Town where businesses have been allowed to locate among
family homes.
What happens if Mr. Ley succeeds in getting a
rezone? It would set a precedent. If you say yes to this property, what about
the house next door? How could you say no? And then the next one . . .
It’s easy to imagine most of Conner and 10th
– our main thoroughfares gradually overtaken by businesses, gouging a commercial
X through residential Old Town, cleaving it into 4 separate pods and bringing
businesses up against the private back yards of one side of Logan, Maple, 9th
& 11th Streets. Bringing business up against those private back
yards is something that’s seldom discussed during these rezones attempts. What
you do on one busy street will echo to a back yard behind it.
Do that and we’d start looking like Westfield and
Cicero, towns that have done an embarrassingly bad job of protecting the
calling cards of their small town atmosphere – their entry thoroughfares.
And Mr. Ley told the preservation group the house he
wants to rezone was in bad condition, suggesting he saved it. I showed the
house to a client of mine right before Mr. Ley bought it. I’ve restored 4 homes
myself and have a deep background in preservation. I found the house in excellent
condition. If it was in such bad condition, why did he pay the highest price
paid for a residence in Old Town since 2006?
And though Noblesville’s Planning Department
officials told Mr. Ley that they wouldn’t support his rezone request, word on
the street is he continues to throw money at the plan. Neighbors tell me he’s hired
construction crews who are busy replacing original detail on the home. And he’s
hired a local attorney and a surveyor to help him make his rezone case to the
city.
But boards of zoning appeals and plan commissions were
not created to fix overconfidence or feelings of entitlement or even ignorance.
They were created to fix legitimate land-use need and hardship. If hardship
exists for Mr. Ley, it is self-manufactured.
Most of the Old Town families who are rebuilding
these neighborhoods don’t have pockets deep enough to hire attorneys every few
years to fight to protect their neighborhood. Hardly seems fair, but that’s the
way of the world. They’ll have to count on their elected officials to protect
the environment where they’re raising their children and the quality of life
they’ve worked so hard to build.
