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Originally Posted by deja vu
Beat me to the post! It is very odd around there. Honestly, the whole stretch of Sprinkle Road from Kilgore to E Main has always felt bizarre to me. It has a very unplanned feel. Not quite city, not quite suburb, and a little rural thrown in. It's a hot mess. Just north of E Michigan Ave, for example, Consumers Concrete has a massive operation right across from single family residential. There are some massive greenhouses too, arrayed along River Street. Random traffic improvements like roundabouts and raised medians make it all feel even more haphazard. I am pretty sure that the area with the hotels was mostly industrial first, and then the hotels starting popping up, variance by variance, due to the high traffic counts and proximity to I-94, the airport, Pfizer Stryker, etc. I know at least some of them cater to visiting, extended-stay business folk.
In other semi-zoning-related news, the City formally approved the 2-block "neighborhood enterprise zone" downtown. This will hopefully kick start planned developments within this boundary (there are at least 2 planned mixed-use projects with affordable housing conponent).
If there really is that big of a shortage, they are going to need more than 2 blocks of enterprise zone.
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That's a really interesting story about how that area formed, and a perfect example of the abuse of the variance process. Variances are supposed to be just that, to allow for variances. You know, when a project needs a little more height, here, for a less stringent front yard requirement there. If you start allowing them to cover fundamentally different changes in uses and then do it again and again and again, that's how you get that mess of development down there, and why the rezoning should have happened a long time ago, quite frankly. lol
Speaking of zoning, what's the land zoned within this new south-of-downtown enterprise zone?