COLUMBUS, Ohio — Change could soon be coming to a vacant lot at the corner of Lindora and Carbondale drives in southeast Columbus.
While residents who live in the Walnut Heights neighborhood say they welcome progress, right now many of them have a problem with what the landowner is looking to put in the lot.
"The proposed area for this is going to become 24 units of one-bedroom apartments,” said Doug Hatcher who lives in the area.
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According to site plans, the land would be rezoned from commercial to apartment residential, and those apartments would come with 26 parking spaces.
Hatcher believes this will lead to spillover parking on the street.
Instead, he and others in his community think a small business may be a better fit.
“I think the parking is gonna be limited based upon the amount of time somebody spends in there. So overnight parking in my mind is gonna be the biggest issue. You come home at night, the neighbors in the neighborhood come home at night, they wanna be able to pull in their driveways. Not always true,” he said.
Ron O'Brien, the attorney representing that landowner, said they've heard the complaints but added that potential parking concerns were factored into the plans currently being proposed.
"Well, we had a discussion about the number of parking spaces and that's one of the reasons that it was designed as a one-bedroom unit, obviously, two people can be in a one-bedroom unit,” he said.
According to O’Brien, the landowner is open to working with the community to find other ways to accommodate parking or even building fewer apartments to help address parking concerns.
"We're flexible in trying to address concerns of both the city and the community. And so that's been a subject we've talked about and we'll continue to talk about,” he said.
Right now, the project is waiting to be cleared by several city departments. It's also set to go before the Greater South East Area Commission for a second time.
It was tabled at a meeting earlier this month after community pushback.
The next commission meeting is in mid-October and residents say they'll be at that meeting to ask the commission to recommend that the city council vote against this project.