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Originally Posted by LMich
Wait, so they took apart an arboretum? In that case, I'm against it. I'll have to look up the area on an aerial, but I can't imagine there wasn't fallow land over that way that wasn't a forest.
BTW, what was this originally zoned? It's weird that big boxes would have been possible. I imagine it must be a PUD (planned unit development) or something similar?
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It is generally referred to as The Arboretum, but it was never a true, planned Arboretum like, say, Ann Arbor's. My understanding is that it was originally a tract of 183 acres of land, some of it open fields, some of it wooded, and all of it without official trails, access points, etc. Anyone who used it was just accessing it from their yard or adjoining property. Presumably the more cleared areas were at one time used for agriculture, before the area urbanized, and if things had gone a different direction, it could have been kept in its natural state and converted into an actual nature destination (an aside - WMU does in fact own and maintain a nature preserve in the city, called
Kleinstuck preserve, which is actually quite beautiful).
The first development proposal that started everything came in 1994 (this ended up not being built, but it was the trigger for everything that followed). In February 2005 the City adopted the new West Side Area Plan. I found a PDF of it
here if you want to look at it. I haven't read it all yet, but I tried skimming it to learn what the land was originally zoned as. All I could find out was that at least the 80 acres north of the existing Arcadia neighborhood were originally zoned as low density residential (see pg 7 of the plan, under 'C'). I don't know if this means that all 183 acres were zoned that way though - the plan is not clear in that regard and I would have to dig up old zoning maps to verify. In October 2006, the City Commission approved rezoning 30 acres of property along Drake for commercial / community (CC) use, which implies that it was maybe zoned residential too, prior to that. In 2016, 12 acres of that same 30 acres of land was rezoned again, this time to multi-family residential (RM-24), to support the current 'Flats' development. That is where the threat about "this could have become all big box stores" came from. It was the developer and the city saying, well, be thankful we rezoned this part of the land again so that you can have apartments instead of another Walmart.
The below two articles give some more info. The timeline is a particularly helpful summary of events:
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Arboretum's shrinking open spaces concerns some Kalamazoo residents
By Paula M. Davis | MLive
May 22, 2011
...Adopted by the city in 2005, the West Side Area Plan calls for commercial and residential development in The Arboretum, but also preserving 40 acres of contiguous open space that “should remain accessible to the entire community,” the document says...Doug Williams, Arcadia’s Neighborhood Watch coordinator, said the West Side Area Plan is a guide document, and its recommendations aren’t legally binding...
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