LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – While a proposal for one affordable housing development in the wealthy suburb of Prospect languishes amid a zoning fight, Louisville’s LDG Development is on the cusp of building another low-income apartment complex in the same area, one that could be home to up to 100 former tenants of the Beecher Terrace public housing complex downtown.
LDG last year received all the Metro planning approvals needed to begin building a $37 million apartment development called “Veridian at Prospect’s Edge” at 10500 and 10600 U.S. Highway 42.
It would be the first affordable housing built in the Prospect area “in my lifetime,” Cliff Ashburner, a land use attorney for LDG, told the Metro Planning Commission when the body gave final approval to the project on Oct. 29, 2020.
The only “roadblock” to construction, according to LDG, is a pair of “frivolous” lawsuits filed by businesses or associations representing nearby landowners, who want to stop the development.
“We’re not at a point where we’re ready to start construction, but we’re in the process of finalizing site plans,” LDG executive vice president Christi Lanier-Robinson told WDRB.
Veridian’s 164 units, each containing one to three bedrooms, would be split among eight buildings on the 13-acre site just north of Rose Island Road.
Once called Prospect Family Apartments, Veridian wouldn’t be as tall nor as dense as LDG’s earlier low-income housing proposal, Prospect Cove, which generated a torrent of complaints in 2017 from homeowners.
Many said they weren’t opposed to low-income housing, but Prospect Cove was simply too big and out of character with the area.
Nonetheless, when Veridian was proposed in 2019, the vast majority of Prospect residents who emailed city officials about the project were opposed to it.
Along with complaints about traffic and tree loss, residents expressed deep anxiety about public housing residents bringing crime to Prospect and lowering their property values, according to dozens of emails and letters in the city planning file.
“Let’s take all the residents in Beecher Terrace (with one of the highest crime rates in Louisville) and move them to Prospect (with one of the lowest crime rates),” Karl Bergklint wrote to Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer in 2019. “Let’s take all the crime imbedded in these folks and move it to a sleepy bedroom community. Then let’s take the people who have basically the lowest education and kill our Jefferson County schools in Prospect.”
“Placing a project like this so far out on the actual county line appears to be a sociopolitical if not an anti-social move to move Beecher Residents out to a virtual "gulag" outside the city, so that down-town "gentrification" may proceed,” wrote Bruce Haskell, who identified himself as University of Kentucky dental school professor.
“Just because you move poor people to a wealthier neighborhood, does not mean they are going to change; especially if you continue to deincentive (sic) them by having no expectations that they will ever do better,” wrote Prospect resident Sherri Koselke. “People who want to do better will work hard and eventually make their circumstances better. People that don’t want to work hard will stay where they are and continue to live off the government.”
Though the development is outside the municipal boundaries of Prospect, the city also opposed it.
In a 2019 letter, Prospect Mayor John Evans wrote that LDG’s plan would leave residents of the proposed Veridian stranded near the Jefferson-Oldham County line with no bus service, sidewalks, churches, schools, doctors or stores nearby and spotty police protection.
“Given the foregoing, why would anyone want to live there?” Evans wrote.
Evans declined to comment when reached Thursday.
To be sure, there is no guarantee that any former Beecher Terrace residents will live at Veridian.
The Louisville Metro Housing Authority has approved Veridian as one of the possible replacement sites for up to 100 former Beecher Terrace tenants who are able to pay their rent with federally funded housing vouchers.
Beecher Terrace was cleared in 2019, displacing more than 1,000 tenants and their families, to allow for a federally funded rebuild of the complex.
Former Beecher Terrace residents will have the option to live at Veridian, but none will be forced to, and no vouchers conditioned on living there, the authority confirmed.
LDG’s other proposal, Prospect Cove, is also an approved site for former Beecher Terrace residents.
LDG plans to finance the construction of both apartment complexes with federal low-income housing tax credits that require units to be reserved for people of limited income. For Veridian, the limit would be about $61,000 for a household of four, Robinson said.
The median household income in 40059, the zip code encompassing Prospect, was $150,736 in 2019.
Housing advocates say Louisville has a shortage of more than 30,000 affordable housing units, a problem that will only grow as Baby Boomers of limited means stop working.
Zoning the big difference between two proposals
Why has Prospect Cove been blocked while Veridian at Prospect’s Edge is free to be built?
The key difference is that Veridian site on U.S. 42 is already zoned for multifamily apartments, meaning planning officials needed only to review that the Veridian proposal met code requirements.
That’s a much lower bar to clear than the zoning change which was needed – and denied by the Metro Council – for Prospect Cove to proceed.
But the approval of the Veridian development last October shouldn’t have been so simple, according to attorneys for the groups suing to stop the plan in its tracks.
Bissell Roberts, an attorney for Prospect R&R LLC and Prospect Land Conservation LLC, said the 1972 zoning change that placed multifamily status on the Veridian acreage was not properly approved, among other technical issues.
The people behind Prospect R&R and Prospect Land Conservation are Clark Scott, Robert C. Schwartz and Robert W. Rounsavall III, according to affidavits filed in Jefferson Circuit Court.
Another lawsuit by a group called Friends of 42 LLC alleges that the Metro Planning Commission and city planning staff erred in concluding that the Veridian project is consistent with Jefferson County’s comprehensive land-use plan and land development code.
Each lawsuit is in its opening stages, according to court records.
