Opinion ID: 1668813
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Background of Southside Area of Birmingham, Including the Highland Park Neighborhood

Text: In the 1960s and 1970s, the City of Birmingham experienced a significant growth in population, particularly in the area known as Southside. To accommodate this growth and to encourage developers to renovate the aging Southside, Birmingham modified the zoning classifications applicable to the Southside area to allow for more intense uses. This included changing many areas classified as single-family residential to multiple-family residential and allowing commercial, office, and institutional uses alongside residential uses. These changes resulted in significant land-use modifications. These changes resulted in neighborhoods in which apartments and townhouses and commercial and business uses mixed with single-family residences and created sprawling multi-family buildings and parking, drainage, and traffic problems. According to one city planner for Birmingham, [I]t appeared that the effort to restore the city that had been contemplated in the '60s had substantially backfired and the opposite effect was true. In 1990, city planners for Birmingham reviewed neighborhood demographics, trends, and then current land uses. The City also held numerous public meetings and hearings. The information gathered by the City indicated that residents of the Highland Park neighborhood strongly desired to emphasize the single-family residential character of the neighborhood and to discourage any further business or commercial encroachment into the neighborhood. Additionally, Birmingham was losing many of its single-family residents to surrounding municipalities; Birmingham wanted to retain those residential landowners it had and to attract more residential landowners to its neighborhoods. In order to emphasize the residential character of its neighborhoods and to retain and attract residential landowners, Birmingham adopted a long-range-use plan, stepping back from the higher intensity land use the City had allowed in the 1960s and 1970s. The land-use plan recommended that much of the property in the Highland Park neighborhood be reduced from the more intense high-density, multi-family uses to less intense, medium-to low-density uses. The City of Birmingham adopted the proposed land-use plan in 1990, and, thereafter, much of Southside, including the Highland Park neighborhood, was rezoned in conformity with this land-use plan. Although many of the earlier multi-family and business uses still existed in the newly restricted areas, they were allowed as preexisting nonconforming uses and were grandfathered in under the 1990 land-use plan. The zoning of the subject property  the block in which the Morrow House is located  was changed at that time to R-3, single-family residential. The zoning for that area has remained R-3 to this date.