In August, five houses along Jefferson Street faced demolition.
These five properties, all small houses built in the 1940s and early 1950s, lie within the Green Acres neighborhood, just east of IU’s campus.
They had been slated for demolition since April, but the houses had been labeled as “contributing” historical resources in a 2018 Local Historic Resurvey. This gave 90 days from the submission of the petitions for demolition during which the Bloomington Historic Preservation Commission was meant to review them. At the June 13 meeting of the HPC, the commission voted to ask for another 30-day delay, which Housing and Neighborhood Development Director Anna Killion-Hanson granted.
On July 29, residents of the neighborhood submitted an application and petition with signatures representing 59 households, including 25 renters, to designate Green Acres as a conservation district. On Aug. 12, two days before the demolition delay would have expired, the HPC voted to recommend the designation to the Bloomington City Council.
For the time being, the houses were saved. Making the area a conservation district would create new protections and require the HPC to issue a Certificate of Appropriateness from the HPC for future demolitions or to move or construct a new building. Pending the designation, the entire neighborhood was under interim protection from demolition.
A conservation district in the Green Acres neighborhood would have encompassed more than just these five properties. The proposed district would have included 447 properties, running from Third Street up to the Illinois Central Railroad tracks, between Union Street on the eastern edge of campus and State Road 46.
The proposition received enough backlash from other property owners in the neighborhood that on Sept. 30, the day before the city council’s final vote on the ordinance, the Green Acres Conservation District Development Committee chair Lois Sabo-Skelton sent the council a letter withdrawing the petition. The city council voted not to pass the ordinance Oct. 1.
But, Sabo-Skelton said in her letter, “we will be back, and we remain hopeful that future discussions will lead to a positive outcome for the Green Acres Neighborhood.”
So, what’s next?
According to Ann Kreilkamp, a Green Acres neighborhood resident and one of the petitioners, the next thing to do is re-start the neighborhood association.
Kreilkamp was a member of the old Green Acres Neighborhood Association in 2007 when it developed its neighborhood plan in cooperation with City of Bloomington staff. GANA hasn’t been active since 2010, but Kreilkamp remains committed to her vision for the neighborhood. She said she hopes the neighborhood association will foster a sense of connection that is central to this vision.
Ann Kreilkamp, 81, walks through her permaculture gardens Oct. 14, 2024, in the Green Acres neighborhood in Bloomington. Kreilkamp has been cultivating permaculture gardens for years.
Also central to this vision is the preservation of the homes that make up the neighborhood.
“What's happening now in this town is there's a huge push for development, meaning multi-story buildings,” Kreilkamp said. “Students love living in this neighborhood. The ones that are here go, ‘Oh, yeah. So much better than those horrible places.’ It's cheaper too. So the point is, how can we have progress, but also value the past?”
To Kreilkamp, conservation and preservation in the neighborhood means maintaining its modesty, affordability and community connectedness rather than pushing for “bigger and better.”
Since the dissolution of the neighborhood association, Kreilkamp has devoted herself to creating what she calls a “template” for what the rest of the neighborhood could look like. In the years since she moved into the neighborhood in 2003, Kreilkamp purchased three properties surrounding her house; now, though she has since sold one of the houses, it’s hard to tell where one property ends and the other begins. Connected by several gardens and paths and sharing a garage-turned-greenhouse, the unified properties serve as an urban farm and a gathering space.
Kreilkamp said it takes work, even having shifted from focusing on the whole neighborhood to just her properties. She said she wants to show what can be done in what she calls a “regular boring suburb.”
Ann Kreilkamp, 81, points at a poster with written goals for the community in her screened porch Oct. 14, 2024, in the Green Acres neighborhood in Bloomington. Green Acres does not have parks, but Kreilkamp said she and others feel there are spaces for pocket parks on corner lots throughout the neighborhood.
The conservation district application, however, focuses not on the vision for the future, but the value of the past. The application traces the history of Green Acres to the post-World War II era, when students, professors and professionals bought the small, affordable houses with government assistance after returning from the war.
The application names some people of note who lived in the neighborhood, including social justice advocate and sculptor Jean-Paul Darriau and pioneering female architect Elaine Doenges, and highlights the historic designation of the nearly 180-year-old Millen House. The application also contains an autobiographical statement from the author, Marinés Fornerino, on her personal attachment to the neighborhood as an IU alumna-turned-homeowner. Fornerino’s statement is one of a number of statements made by petitioners on their own history with Green Acres over the course of the process.
A conservation district designation is most often the first step to a historic district designation. To qualify for a local designation, an area must have a distinctive architectural style and significance to the character or history of the city, according to Bloomington’s historic preservation guidelines.
On their own, the five properties were not considered to have enough historic merit for the HPC to reject the houses’ demolition.
“They’re 1950s homes, they’re rental properties. There’s no real architecture,” local real estate agent Tim Ballard said. “They’ve got stories behind them, but here’s the thing — every house has got a story. If we start telling the story of every home, then no homes can ever be touched.”
Ballard works with clients who are investors in the Green Acres neighborhood and serves on the planning commission and board of zoning appeals. He said he has worked with historic preservation and restoration in the past and considers it dear to him. Ballard said there are ways to keep properties protected from demolition through individual historic designations, but blanketing over 400 properties in the designation constitutes overreach.
“I think [these are] good intentions, but not the right way to do it,” Ballard said. “We talk a lot about affordable housing, and to me, this is the antithesis of that. It goes against being able to develop and be able to produce more units, which we desperately need in this city, and it also really dilutes historic preservation down.”
Ballard said he found the process by which the HPC recommended the designation un-democratic, especially given the number of signatures on the petition in relation to the size of the district. He said the homeowners he consults with, many of whom rent out their properties, didn’t even know about the petition until B Square Bulletin reported on it.
Mary Hrovat, a Green Acres resident, said she received news of the petition through a neighborhood mailing list but declined to sign the petition when a canvasser arrived at her door. Hrovat moved into the Green Acres neighborhood 18 years ago, drawn by the combination of affordability and walkability it offered, and said she feels a conservation district would threaten that.
“I would love to see more people living here and have it be more of a dense, walkable, you know, sort of a cityscape where people can get to the things they need to get to without driving,” Hrovat said. “That would be my dream for the neighborhood.”
Proponents of the designation objected to the idea that the five houses on Jefferson Street might be replaced by an apartment building or other large development, but Hrovat said she isn’t all that worried about it. These houses lie on the fringes of the neighborhood.
The rest of Green Acres is an R3 zoning district, which, according to the City of Bloomington website, is intended to protect established affordable residential areas through “small-lot subdivisions, accessory dwelling units and property improvements compatible with surrounding development patterns.” Hrovat said she feels the neighborhood is already adequately protected.
Instead of promoting affordable housing and walkability, Hrovat fears a conservation district would make it more expensive to buy and maintain a home in the area, especially since conservation districts become historic districts after three years without a majority of homeowners’ opposition in writing. Homeowners in historic districts are required to seek approval from the HPC for any changes to the exterior of a house, which costs the homeowner time and often money.
Kreilkamp said the neighborhood association would provide the means to gather the written statements required to stop the neighborhood from becoming a full historic district, although there is no precedent for this. She only wants the neighborhood to have the protections offered by conservation district status. If that didn’t work, she said the neighborhood association could help draw up loose guidelines for the historic district. Guidelines vary between individual historic districts.
“There’s so much unused potential here — and that’s true everywhere,” Kreilkamp said.
