The student-housing market in Springfield has been hopping in recent years, and it’s bringing obvious and subtle changes to the development scene.
The Kimbrough Avenue corridor between Grand and Cherry streets has been transformed since 2011 with half a dozen new student complexes, such as Bear Village and Beacon Commons. In downtown, the Heer’s, McDaniel and Woodruff buildings are each in the middle of conversions that will open loft apartments to area college students and young professionals. Just last week, the former Earthgrains bakery on St. Louis Street was demolished to make way for a 166-unit student-housing complex across from Hammons Field.
All that activity led city leaders, planners and others to wonder if zoning regulations are meeting the needs of the community.
Springfield Principal Planner Bob Hosmer said planning staff recently was directed by City Council to engage in conversations with resident groups in Rountree and Midtown that have taken issue with how the student-housing trend might be changing their neighborhoods.
With apartment project East Cherry Flats at the corner of Kickapoo and Cherry streets, Hosmer said an effort by developer Russ Meck to increase available parking by reducing the required setback for his four-story apartments was met with privacy concerns.
Two miles north, the Midtown Neighborhood Association objected last year to Dusty Emmert’s plans to build microefficiency apartments on East Webster Street because they wanted to save Timmons Temple Church of God in Christ. Two months ago, the Springfield-Greene County Park Board approved a plan to raise and move the stone church, 934 E. Webster St., to the adjacent Silver Springs Park.
Earlier this month, Diana Day, a board secretary with the Rountree Neighborhood Association, told Springfield Business Journal association members were anxious to work with the city to find ways to ensure future developments fit with the character of the neighborhood.
Hosmer said the solution could be in zoning changes.
As a general rule, he said it’s good to transition in steps from lower density districts to higher density.
With Rountree, Hosmer said part of the problem might be that a single-family district south of Cherry butts up against the high-density district Meck wants to build on.
“The Rountree Neighborhood Association is saying, ‘maybe there needs to be some different criteria here,’” Hosmer said.
“In urban planning, you’d want to have more of a step-down.”
In Springfield’s urban core, two zoning designations have served as primary targets for developers of student-housing projects: high-density multifamily and center city districts.
Center city zoning is designed to fit businesses and structures into tight spaces. Hosmer said there are no parking requirements for new construction downtown, and parking wouldn’t be allowed at the front of businesses or residences.
High-density multifamily districts, which largely surround Missouri State University and several urban areas in town, can allow up to 40 apartment units per acre. By comparison, a single-family residential district in Springfield allows only seven units per acre.
On the residential side, Hosmer said there are also townhouse districts, low-density and medium-density zoning. There also are exceptions to zoning rules that can take the form of overlay districts and planned developments.
With the Aspen Heights project on the former Earthgrains site, planners created parking requirements as part of an overlay district to protect nearby residences. Hosmer said a complex of that size at the edge of the center city district would push cars into surrounding neighborhoods with no parking requirements.
“In downtown, there are parking garages, but on the fringes, there could be spillover,” he said.
Matt E. Miller of Miller Commerce built student apartments Deep Elm, The Jefferson, The Monroe and Q Place around MSU over the past four years, and earlier this month he proposed two new projects that would put more beds near the campus.
With One House apartments, one of the two he proposed to council Jan. 12, Miller worked with city staff to reduce the building’s distance from the street – a move Hosmer said is conditionally allowed in a high-density multifamily district.
City Council is scheduled Jan. 26 to vote on those plans, as well as Emmert’s apartment project.
Miller also has tentative plans to construct a multiuse building on a roughly 4,000-square-foot lot at the southeast corner of McDaniel Street and South Avenue, just south of Park Central Square.
“I’ve been looking at doing a mixed-use project there,” Miller said.
The space is tight, and Miller said his plans aren’t fully formed, but he’d like to split the first floor space between office and retail with upper floors slated for apartments designed to attract students and young professionals.
“Quite frankly, I haven’t landed on a plan that makes sense yet,” he said.
The corner is the center of activity for downtown festivals, events and nightlife, but the project has to pay for itself. He’d like to have balconies, for example, but those can’t hang over sidewalks under center city codes.
Miller said he’s not currently planning to ask for a variance.
“This stuff is chess, not checkers. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it,” Miller said.
Hosmer said he doesn’t expect codes to change dramatically in the future, but he hopes conversations with the neighborhood and efforts to more closely examine urban trends will bear fruit and meet the needs of the community.
One change that could be on the horizon is form-based zoning, a trend he thinks could be adapted downtown. If so, it would harken back to a century ago, when much of downtown Springfield began to take shape.
According to
FormBasedCodes.org, the code system emphasizes physical form, aka structural requirements, instead of separation of uses.
Hosmer said communities such as Fayetteville, Ark., Iowa City, Iowa, and Montgomery, Ala., have adopted the approach to varying degrees.
“Back in the old days, that’s what they did. In the center city district, all those buildings were built that way and now they can be repurposed pretty quickly,” Hosmer said. “It’s not too complicated to repurpose these buildings for apartments or offices or manufacturing.”
