Plan for senior home riles Bloomington neighbors

Seven active kids grew up in the Grobel house on Thomas Avenue in Bloomington. The fields behind it were an ideal playground, with a baseball diamond and a makeshift hockey rink that their dad flooded in the winter.

But the almost 10 acres of grass and trees wasn't a city park. The land belonged to Southtown Baptist Church, which for 50 years has welcomed use of the green space that surrounds the church at 2600 W. 82nd St.

Now the church wants to pay for much of the cost of a new building by selling about half of its land for a senior co-op development. But United Properties' plans for a four-story building in a neighborhood of 1950s ramblers have upset some neighbors. The church and developer are trying to find a compromise that will satisfy everyone.

United Properties and the church's architect are redoing their plans and hope to approach the city again in the next two months.

"The neighborhood response has taken us aback," said the church's pastor, Stan McFall. "We are listening to them. ... We just need to step back, take a breather and redesign to address the concerns of the City Council and the neighbors."

About 200 people signed a petition objecting to the project, and opponents started a website. Brian Pahos, who has lived in his Thomas Avenue home for eight years, is one of the organizers of Bloomington Residents for Appropriate Development. His street to the west of church property.

"They're trying to fit something in that's absolutely out of character with this neighborhood," he said. "They're going for high density. ... This area was zoned single-family residential, and we assumed if anything was built it would be in that character."

United Properties is trying to be responsive to neighbors' concerns, said Brian Carey, the company's senior vice president of development. The first development plan included buildings as close as 30 feet to the back yards of homeowners on Thomas Avenue. Carey said the newest site plan, which is likely to go to the city, would put the two-story part of the co-op more than 330 feet from the Thomas homeowners and the four-story section more than 400 feet away.

The latest plan places a 94-unit co-op building shaped roughly like a "7" at the property's eastern edge, where the nearest neighbor would be a five-story office building. The development would be the sixth Applewood Pointe co-op in the Twin Cities area. The residences are aimed at middle-income people age 55 and above.

"The impact to the neighborhood should be minimal," Carey said. "It should be quiet, with parking underground, so they will make very good neighbors."

Church plans expansion

McFall said that the church membership of about 200 voted by a nearly 9-to-1 margin to sell up to half the church's land to finance a building expansion.

The 15,000-square-foot brick church, a modest building that dates from the late 1950s, has problems. A pew in the sanctuary holds a bucket to catch drips from a leaky roof. Much of the building is inaccessible to anyone in a wheelchair. McFall said the sanctuary can hold 168 people when "packed"; the tiny basement fellowship hall holds only 60 people. It's hard even to hold funeral dinners in the building, the minister said.

The building also is drab looking and sits low to the ground. "We're kind of off the beaten track," McFall said. "And the design does not shout, 'Come in!'"

So the church plans to expand to about 21,000 square feet, with a sanctuary that holds nearly 250 and a fellowship hall that can accommodate perhaps 220. Architects are working on incorporating part of the old church in a new building that would cost about $3.4 million.

Moving the co-op to the east toward Penn Avenue means the church has to expand at its current site, which quashes hopes that a new building would be more eye-catching if it were nearer Penn. But McFall is still hoping the new design will raise the church's profile even though it probably will keep much of its current footprint.

Though an area of green space would remain at the property's northwest corner, much of the rest of the land would be occupied by buildings, parking lots, and two storm-water ponds and a rain garden that are being added to treat water flowing off the property. Carey said almost all of the mature oaks and elms on the site would be saved.

Pahos believes rezoning the land for high-density buildings sets a bad precedent that means there is "no protection for residents in single-family homes." Next-door neighbor Kent Grobel, who bought his home in 1956 and was the one who flooded that hockey rink every winter for neighborhood kids, remembers when pheasants and deer ran through tall grass where the church is now.

He admitted that some of the anti-development sentiment in the neighborhood may be linked to loss of the green space, "but as parents, we knew that could go," he said.

"The church has been a great neighbor over the years," he said. "We don't have any beef against them at all. They need to build ... but something not so high. The neighborhood just isn't designed for that."

Mary Jane Smetanka • 612-673-7380