A controversial zoning issue in Villa Hills will be heard at the Planning and Development Services of Kenton County (PDS) meeting tonight at 6:15 p.m. Lakeside Christian Church, 195 Buttermilk Pike.
The meeting room will accommodate only 900 people. It was rescheduled because of the over-flow crowd trying to attend the last meeting.
These yard signs are visible throughout Villa Hills.
The zoning issue involves The Sanctuary, the development of land sold by the St. Walburg Convent to Ashley Commercial Group. PDS has approved the zoning from residential to mixed use. The city council unanimously supported the re-zoning.
The development will include a large apartment complex and some commercial.
The opposition, Defend Villa Hills, says this will increase traffic in what has been a residential area — attacking the “integrity of Villa Hills” and “ending the era of Villa Hills as a bedroom community.”
The City of Villa Hills issued a notice about the meeting, saying that a quorum of the city council may attend the meeting but no city business would be undertaken by the council.
Here is the agenda for the meeting:
See the NKyTribune’s story about the development here.
Do they know no shame? The Sisters need retirement money because the surrounding community has failed to support them. Now the Sisters can’t sell the land because Villa Hills wants to maintain their suburban paradise? Let’s not forget Villa HIlls is named after the Catholic school there. Maybe some diversity from the 97.52% White population could help the town enter the modern era. If you truly want to keep your town as it is, sent up a fund to help for the aging sisters, not set up stakes trying to protect your little suburb from the urban sprawl you are inspiring in the whole region.
First off nuns are human beings like anybody else, there are saintly nuns and those who are not. There was a time when hundreds of nuns lived at Villa, hundreds of children lived and went to school there. Graduating classes were close to 100. Those days are long gone. The retirement of the nuns was dependent on younger nuns entering the convent and donations. It was also dependent on wise use of those donations. Perhaps Villa Hills is named after the school but the suburb would still have been developed as a single family community with or without the nuns because people wanted their own land, they wanted to move away from the cities with their row houses and alleys. Many of them had been basically forced to live in that crowded urban environment but it was the car that allowed them to move to the suburbs. What is wrong with the single family suburb? That lifestyle doesn’t harm anybody, it is a choice. This is not a racial issue, anybody can live in Villa Hills. Isn’t it racist to assume only persons of color live in the urban centers? or that a person of color wouldn’t want a single family home with a yard to mow? The issue is many people in Villa Hills came from a poor past, they lived in those urban centers and they don’t want everything they worked for turned into the very place they worked so hard to get out of for years.
As far as the community not helping the nuns, it pains me to say this because there are wonderful nuns in Villa Hills but overall as a group they have let us down long before this development. The Villa campus used to be alive with nuns and children of all types, including Hispanics. Now if you sit at the corner of Collins and Amsterdam when school lets out, what types of cars do you see turning in to Villa, Mercedes and BMWs. There are no large graduating classes and a large percentage of the new graduating classes are not even catholic. It is the price being paid to keep the school open. Now it was said that the community failed to support the nuns, it is the nuns who failed to support the community. They were the spiritual leaders, they allowed the school to fall apart in the 70’s and 80’s. It was their nuns who left the convent in mass. It was not the responsibility of the community of Villa Hills, it was the responsibility of the nuns to use the donations wisely and to recruit and maintain new nuns. The truth is the leaders at the convent let down the older nuns, let down the alumni, let down the children and let down the community long before this issue. If they were a vibrant community there would not be much of an issue. It pains me terribly to say this because some nuns there are saintly. However, it was the administration of St. Walberg that did not take care of the other nuns and the community. Now they need money to keep open an money pit of a campus. Did they really need that add on to the front of the monastery building? What about an empty third floor of the old building that is being heated that used to sleep 50 or more children? Nobody wants to prevent the nuns from selling the property. However, there is greed in the air. The developers are circling the old nuns like vultures. It is worth less to the developers if they build single family homes with more open areas, they won’t make as much money. Villa Hills won’t get as much property tax, well the nuns haven’t been paying property tax anyway. What is wrong with Villa Hills remaining a single family suburban city? When did that become a bad word? When did diversity only apply to row houses and alleys? When did becoming like Europe turn into a good thing? If there is anything shameful going on around here it is the developers trying to take advantage of the nuns, making them think they are doing the right thing leading the people into the “modern era”. People are worried about the older nuns, what about the older people in the city that are terrified that what they worked for all their lives will go away and they will end up where they started, right back in the urban environment they moved from years ago. What makes you think that some younger people, no matter what color, might not want to be able to live in a house with a yard of a decent size? Years ago they ripped down the same houses and alley in Queensgate in Cincinnati and regretted it. They didn’t value the row houses and the alleys. Now you want the row houses and alleys in Villa Hills. You want them because HGTV told you it was in style. You want them because people are moving back into OTR because somebody told them row houses are in style again. You want it because HGTV loves craftsman houses. Isn’t that a song or something, “everything old is new again”. Well alleys are creepy and small crowded houses lead to bad things.
As far as the part about it will preserve nature and there will be more trees. I’ve been on the property for picnics as a child, it is a big beautiful meadow most of the year with large lake. You tell me how lining the streets with trees and a dinky overlook and green buffer space is going to be better than that meadow.
So if you care about the community, make it less dense, no apartments and leave at least half the river view as an overlook. Prospect Point has many condos but it also has a great deal of open areas and green spaces. There is only one reason to make this new development that dense, include apartments and businesses, more money. There is still a great deal of money to be made off that property with less houses, it would just mean less for the nuns and less for the developers. Since Villa Hills has never been getting property tax on it before, any amount of tax money is still better than nothing. Let the old nuns who are buried in the cemetery rest in peace without being next to some horrible urban alley filled social experiment made just because of greed. People need to respect the single family suburb as they would any other historical neighborhood. There is your diversity, respect for all people, including the mid-century suburb. There needs to be respect for the future, respect for the property itself, respect for the people who live here now and respect for the nuns living and dead who love that property.