The City Council's insistence on more and more housing units is beginning to bear fruit: a developer has purchased about six acres of a beautiful green space just east of Cottonwood Park and wants to build many dozens of homes on it.

When more than 30 Louisville citizens on September 6 pleaded with the City Council to save this land, some Council members summarily dismissed their pleas, saying that the city could not and would not buy the land as open space, and other Council members met the pleas with silence.

There is a large distance between buying the land as open space and silence. That is, even if the land is not purchased as open space, the Council could have given assurances that any development

would have to be scrutinized to determine whether, for example, it was respectful of the neighbors’ expectations and homes and consistent with Louisville’s small-town character. Not this Council.

This Council is notorious for advancing growth creep. (There are three recent examples.) Unless the make-up of this Council changes, the open land next to Cottonwood Park likely will be the next casualty of growth creep in Louisville. Because that land is zoned medium density, the developer could propose development of more than 80 housing units, i.e., apartments, condos and/or townhomes. This Council has expressed a desire for high- and medium-density units throughout many of the remaining open lands in Louisville, even though it makes no economic sense and it’s completely unnecessary (see the discussion of no growth on the home page).

Sadly, this new residential development makes it even plainer that this Council has no concept of how to keep this City’s population at no more than 23,000. On August 16, the Council added language in the Comprehensive Plan that it was the Council’s “intent” that the city would grow to no more than 23,000. It was clear when the Council adopted that “intent” that the “intent” was meaningless. Virtually every Council member insisted that the Comp Plan could never be binding or enforceable. Worse, when the Council adopted that “intent,” it had already agreed to changes in the Comp Plan that will result in a population that exceeds 23,000.

But with the development of the open land near Cottonwood Park, there’s more bad news: the Comp Plan and Council did not even consider the possibility of an additional 80+ housing units near Cottonwood Park; it’s not on the Comp Plan map. So, in addition to the more than 200 new housing units the Council proposed on August 2 that already put the population number well over the “intended” 23,000, the new “Cottonwood” development simply continues to add to the population, with no end in sight. This is the insidiousness of growth creep as practiced by our current Council.

For more information on the Cottonwood Park open field, go to www.cottonwoodisp.net.

Open field just east of Cottonwood Park

Replacing green space with apartments and condos: the anatomy of a new housing development

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