The City of Bloomington hosted a kickoff event at City Hall for the Hopewell South neighborhood development project Monday, announcing its goal to begin the building process by June next year.
The city’s leading the Hopewell development effort to turn the former site of IU Bloomington Health Hospital into a neighborhood. The city first unveiled plans for the neighborhood five years ago. The development will happen in three phases: South, East and West.
“And if you saw that timeline, you know that we're really hoping to train developers and get this ready to go by June of next year,” Mayor Kerry Thomson said. “So that's our timeline.”
Thomson led the event, as well as representatives of Flintlock LAB, the architecture and building consulting firm approved by the Bloomington Redevelopment Commission in June to partner with on the housing project.
Alli Thurmond Quinlan, the project lead at Flintlock LAB, presented over video call to the attendees about the status of plans for Hopewell South. Quinlan presented three different concept plans for the neighborhood, all based on building plans that the city will pre-approve.
“We're not trying to zone for good architecture via really complicated zoning patterns and architectural design controls that then mean review boards,” Quinlan said. “Instead, we're developing good built outcomes that the city's selecting the architecture, selecting the details from the beginning so that you know what you're getting.”
Of the concept plans presented, two proposed changing city codes to allow for the use of alleys as frontage, meaning the front of a building. That proposed code change would allow for more homes to be built within the area. The third proposal, which involved no code changes, had an average home value of $415,000 with an estimated 28 homes built, in comparison to the largest proposal with code changes featuring 118 homes built at an average cost of $290,000.
Another code change she proposed was legalizing the splitting of lots into smaller land parcels.
“Under current by-right development, we can fit 28 homes,” Quinlan said. “Right, so about three quarters less than we're proposing doing with a couple of these code changes.”
Quinlan also said that Flintlock LAB is calibrating its plan for Hopewell South so that it could be considered for city-wide use in the future.
“So, we are talking about a planned unit development at Hopewell, and so that will be just for Hopewell,” Thomson said. “But we’re really hoping that Hopewell is sort of our living laboratory and people can come and see what it looks like and what it feels like, and that we may be able to incrementally make some of these changes in our unified development ordinance moving forward.”
At a July 29 press conference in City Hall regarding housing in Bloomington, Thomson and several city officials discussed plans to change the permitting process to speed up development projects and lower housing costs associated with paying employees before building permits are attained and work is allowed to start.
“So we're just starting that audit, and so that's going to be a – we'll have some quick hits, but then it's going to be a pretty long process to do that full audit,” Thomson said Monday regarding changing the permitting process.
Attendees at the event brought up that one of the Hopewell South concept plan maps contained the former Bloomington Convalescent Center, which city officials are considering as a site for new police headquarters.
Quinlan stated that this was included to meet the requirement of 5 acres for Planned Unit Developments, a type of zoning meant to allow for mixed use buildings and home types. She said that despite that, it may not be included, as the Bloomington Redevelopment Committee had not decided the building’s use going forward yet.
In response to a question about how a police headquarters could bring frequent sirens into the neighborhood, Thomson pointed to the neighborhood’s past.
“This is obviously a neighborhood that's had a lot of lights and sirens because it used to be the hospital site, so, home to many ambulances,” she said.
Going forward, the city has to approve concept plans for the Hopewell South and find local developers before breaking ground.
