By Peter Dorfman
The push to urbanize Bloomington’s residential neighborhoods, cramming larger and denser housing into the quiet neighborhoods that make the city what it is, begins again in earnest this week. Wednesday, March 12, 2025, a new round of densification proposals will be presented in the form of City Council Resolutions 2025-05 and 2025-06, at a special legislative session starting at 6:30. It’s on. Again.
Since 2019, Bloomington residents have endured two protracted battles over land use within the city’s residential neighborhoods. A faction within the Monroe County Democratic Party has pushed proposals to urbanize Bloomington neighborhoods, cramming more multi-family housing into neighborhoods once reserved for single-family-only development.
In 2021, that faction succeeded in pushing through part of their agenda, eliminating single-family zoning in all Bloomington’s residential areas over loud and strenuous objections from residents. They wanted triplexes and fourplexes as allowed uses everywhere; they got a bare minimum majority on the Council to OK duplexes, as conditional uses.
The city amended its Unified Development Ordinance (UDO) and a small number of duplexes were built – as predicted by the people who opposed the densification, almost entirely by corporate developers as market rate rental housing, not as anything that could be described as “affordable housing.” Then it all went quiet. Until now.
As predicted multiple times in this blog, the advocates for urban density have launched another push to turn Bloomington into Ann Arbor, in the vapid hope that shoe-horning more, smaller apartments into already-dense areas will improve housing affordability through the fairy dust of supply and demand.
Just as in 2019 and 2021, this supply-side formulation is rationalized as consistent with Bloomington’s Climate Action Plan and with the tired old article of faith that housing densification and the elimination of space to park cars is somehow a recipe for racial justice.
In previous rounds of this campaign, residents turned out to oppose densification at Plan Commission and Council hearings, in person and online. It’s unlikely that many of them have changed their minds.
Opponents may want to read what is scheduled to be presented on March 12 – the meeting packet is available here.
Resolution 2025-05 proposes, among other things, to eliminate minimum parking requirements for new developments, including plexes; and to reduce minimum lot widths, lot areas and building setback requirements, so bigger, denser structures can be squeezed into smaller lots – essentially endorsing the quads-everywhere trial balloon that former-Mayor John Hamilton floated back in 2019, sparking intense protests everywhere Planning staff presented it.
Resolution 2025-06 proposes to:
- Allow duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes as permitted uses in residential zoning districts, remove use-specific standards and the separate utility requirement, as well as apply dimensional standards equally for duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes;
- Remove owner-occupancy and square footage limitation on Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), and allow more than one ADU per lot;
- Change the definition of a single-family attached dwelling and amend use-specific standards to increase the maximum number of dwelling units allowed; and
- Amend the use-specific standards of cottage developments to increase and generally improve the feasibility of cottage developments.
Very few ADUs have been built in Bloomington. It’s not because ADUs are a bad idea. It’s because, like houses, an ADU is likely to cost upwards of $100,000 to build, very few Bloomington homeowners have the money to build them, and financing is hard to come by. Essentially the only entities who could easily take on these projects are corporate developers.
But developers haven’t been interested, because of the requirement that if an ADU is built on a lot, the owner has to live in either the main structure or the ADU. Resolution 2025-06, sponsored by District 2 Council Member Kate Rosenbarger, proposes to eliminate that requirement, so that a developer can essentially buy a house and convert it into a market-rate duplex by building an ADU – or a triplex by cramming two ADUs onto the lot. Or, conceivably, three ADUs.
How this would be preferable for the developer versus simply building onto the main house and converting it directly into a duplex or triplex is unspecified, but here’s a thought: From a regulatory perspective, a duplex is just a house with two units in it. It’s required to have smoke detectors and a firewall between the units, but that’s about all. Anything larger, such as a triplex or a quad, is regulated as an apartment building, and needs sprinklers, commercial-grade HVAC and other expensive add-ons. It’s unclear at this point, but perhaps a duplex plus an ADU would be spared those requirements.
The two resolutions will get a first hearing Wednesday night, March 12. (The presentation will include a pitch deck from long-time dense housing advocate Deborah Myerson – it’s included in the meeting packet, and it encompasses more or less the same bland YIMBY groupthink that densification opponents heard and saw through in 2019 and 2021.)
We eagerly anticipate the response from Mayor Kerry Thomson, who campaigned in 2023 in part on having been among the opponents to the reckless densification of the city’s neighborhoods. Now we find out, from her response to this push, whether that was just a rhetorical stance – or something she’s changed her mind about since becoming Mayor and getting the keys to John Hamilton’s Cabinet of Secrets.
Those still opposed to urbanization and not entirely exhausted from contemplating the state of cosmos, who still care about the quality of life in this small Blue Dot in the middle of MAGAbizarroWorld Indiana, would do well to listen in and talk back to the Council.
The Dissident Democrat 