On Feb. 17, 2015, the Auburn City Council passed an apartment moratorium that will stop the development of apartments, condominiums or any other form of ownership or operation within the University Service zoning district located east of College Street.
The moratorium will be in effect for six months unless it is terminated or extended by action of the City Council, according to city documents.
Property owners, such as Chris Kearns of Badger Properties, who had come to the meeting, were displeased when it was passed.
“We had a multi-million dollar property that was under contract to be sold, and it was canceled by this,” Kearns said. “That’s a pretty big effect right there.”
Kearns said that he doesn’t know what his plan will be now, but that he is not happy about the moratorium passing.
Kearns said if the city proposes something different and doesn’t pass it, then there will more than six months wasted, because they all have to sign leases for another year.
Larry Gerber, proponent of the moratorium, said most of the multi-unit housing being discussed was intended for students. Places such as Two 21 Armstrong and 160 Ross were brought up repeatedly at the meeting, which both have completed or begun construction since 2006.
“Auburn University is not going to expand its student body beyond 25,000,” Gerber said. “I think the last thing we need is to overbuild multi-unit housing for students that aren’t going to be there and results in vacancies and lot of problems.”
Mark Fierro, sophomore in computer science, was concerned a moratorium would affect the liveliness of Auburn’s downtown.
“The effects of this moratorium will last a lot longer than six months,” Fierro said. “This vote could very well change where Auburn is going.”
Fierro voiced concern that developers will now start building farther away from the University, causing sprawl in the city. He discussed other Alabama cities, such as Mobile, which he said become ghost towns after 5 p.m.
“The effects of this moratorium could be very detrimental to the city’s development (and) deprive the city of hundreds of millions of tax dollars and jobs that come about from the building of these units,” Fierro said.
Carolyn Carr, proponent of the moratorium, said they have had problems in their neighborhood after Two 21 Armstrong was built. Carr is the president of her neighborhood association located across the street of Two 21 Armstrong on Payne Street.
“We have people that are very interested in preserving some of the older historic buildings, because Payne Street actually is the oldest, still-in-town residential area,” Carr said.
Carr said she was not against students who live in their neighborhood or nearby, and that the problems they are having would exist even if Two 21 Armstrong were not filled with students.
“It’s just the traffic density and the drainage issues off of things built like that,” Carr said. “That problem would exist even if the students weren’t there.”
According to city documents, the purpose of the moratorium is so the city can conduct studies on land use, zoning and the housing market.
City documents also said this is all to prevent future development from causing deterioration of existing neighborhoods, decreased property values, increased demand for city services, traffic congestion, negative environmental and economic impacts, harm to the aesthetics of the city and to preserve the character of Auburn.
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