Bloomington resisting rezone to allow 2 group homes for treating addiction, but second hearing set

A rezone request from the Indiana Center for Recovery (ICR) will get a second hearing at the next scheduled meeting of Bloomington’s plan commission, on March 11.

But based on Monday night’s deliberations, in March it will be a tough slog for ICR to win a recommendation of approval from the plan commission for its rezone request.

The center would like to build two group home facilities in central Bloomington, near Walker and 1st Streets—one on the north side of West 1st Street, and the other on the south side. The homes would be used for treating patients with substance use disorders and mental and behavioral health conditions.

But to use the land for the purpose of treating patients in a group home would require a rezone of the property, which is currently designated as R3 (residential small lot).

The ICR wants the land rezoned to MH (mixed use healthcare), which was previously the zoning district for the property, before it was rezoned from MH to R3 as a part of the 2021 adoption of a new zoning map for the city.

It is Bloomington’s city council that will have the final say on ICR’s requested rezoning—even if the plan commission’s recommendation is something the council can weigh.

But looks likely that at least two councilmembers would vote against the rezone, if the question is eventually put in front of them. On Monday, councilmember Isabel Piedmont-Smith spoke from the public mic, already in opposition to the rezone proposal.

Hopi Stosberg, who is the city council’s appointed to the plan commission, said that the requested rezone “feels like a step back instead of a step forward.”

On the plan commission, vice president Jillian Kinzie said the proposal “seems incompatible with what we’ve outlined in the comp[rehensive] plan.”

Even though their recommendation for Monday was simply to continue the petition to the required second hearing at its next meeting, planning staff are not in support of the rezone.

On Monday, the staff report on the proposal was presented by senior zoning planner Eric Greulich. He indicated that just from the zoning perspective, the problem identified for MH district is that it does not support the city’s goal of increasing housing in the area—in particular owner-occupied housing.

While the MH district does allow for detached single-family houses, that comes with a use-specific standard that they’re allowed only on lots that were lawfully established before Feb. 12, 2007. (It is presumably a pure coincidence that the date of Monday’s hearing was also Feb. 12, but 17 years later.)

In contrast to the proposed MH zoning district, the current R3 zoning also allows for duplexes and for cottage development dwellings, both as conditional uses.

Even if a group home for substance use treatment were deemed a suitable use for the location, by adopting the MH zoning, the city would be preventing the area from serving the future land use goals that are reflected in the city’s comprehensive plan, Greulich indicated.

Greulich indicated that of the possible zoning districts available in the city’s unified development ordinance (UDO), MH is not an ideal choice—if the goal is simply to allow construction of a group home to treat substance use disorders. Every other zoning district—besides the basic residential districts of R1, R2, and R3—allow the kind of group home that ICR wants to build, Greulich said.

What size buildings is ICR looking to build? The ICR describes the proposed building on the north side of the street like this:

• North first floor: 2 one-bedroom units, 7 two-bedroom units, 4 offices and 2 meeting rooms.
• North second floor: 3 one-bedroom units and 8 two-bedroom units
• North third floor: 3 one-bedroom units, 8 two-bedroom units

For the building on the north side of the street, that’s a total of 31 units and 54 bedrooms with 4 offices, and 2 meeting rooms.

The Center for Recovery describes the building on the south side of the street like this:

• South first floor: 4 one-bedroom units, 2 two-bedroom units, 1 office, and 2 meeting rooms.
• South second floor: 4 one-bedroom units and 3 two-bedroom units.

For the building on the south side of the street, that’s a total of 13 units and 18 bedrooms with 1 office and 2 meeting rooms.

Except for R1, R2, and R3, pretty much any other zoning district besides MH could be considered, Greulich said, when it comes to allowing large group homes. Greulich pointed out that while MH zoning still exists in the text of the city’s unified development ordinance (UDO), it has been completely eliminated from the zoning map.

So if the real estate that is the subject of ICR’s request were rezoned to MH, Greulich said, it would be the only land in all of Bloomington with that zoning designation.

When IU Health decided in 2015 to build its new hospital on land owned by Indiana University out on the SR 46 bypass, Bloomington did not see a need to rezone that area to MH—because it was already zoned as institutional, Greulich said.

Factoring into the current discussion on the ICR rezone request is the fact that IU Health hospital, which occupied the area north and east of ICR’s proposed 1st Street rezone, has been demolished as a part of the city’s effort to redevelop the area. The city purchased the property from IU Health in a $6.5 million deal, and has master planned and zoned the area as a new, yet-to-be-built neighborhood, called Hopewell.

On Monday, plan commission president Brad Wisler asked why the MH district even exists in the text of the UDO, if there are no land areas on the  city zoning map with that designation. Greulich told Wisler that it might well be that MH district is no longer needed in the UDO text, either. The one use that only the MH would allow is a hospital, Greulich said. All of the various medical clinics and related offices are allowed under the MC (mixed-use corridor) zoning district.

From the perspective of ICR, the MH zoning district is the right one to request for a rezone, because that’s how it was zoned before 2021, when the city overhauled the zoning map.

Legal counsel for ICR, Cheyenne Riker, who joined Monday’s meeting on the Zoom video conference platform, said, “We’re just asking to be placed back where we were, as was suggested back in 2021, when we went through this remapping process.” Riker’s reference was to the fact that ICR objected to the comprehensive redrawing of the map at that time, which included a rezone of its property from MH to R3—but had been told it could later request a rezone of its property.

At Monday’s meeting, Riker did not raise any of the legal issues that he conveyed in an early December letter to the plan commission,  which laid out ICR’s view that the 2021 change was a “spot zoning” of the property. The term “spot zoning” describes a situation where property is unlawfully singled out for different treatment from surrounding land.

In addition to its contention that the 2021 was an unlawful rezoning of the property, ICR takes the legal position that its patients fall within a protected class. That’s a class of people with disabilities—as defined under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Fair Housing Act—who have substance use disorder, and mental or behavioral health conditions.

The idea that the requested rezone does not meet the city’s goals for increasing housing resonated with plan commissioner Jillian Kinzie, who said, “This is a tough one for me, because I don’t see how we can go against what we’ve outlined in the comprehensive plan.”

Kinzie continued, “I know it might seem like a simple request to go back to what it was—that seems like a logical thing to do.” But she added that it’s not as easy as that. She put it like this: “We made a conscious decision as a community that we want more residential units.” About the rezone, she said, “I don’t see how we can do this.”

Speaking from the public mic, Bloomington city councilmember Isabel Piedmont-Smith said she is opposed to the requested rezone, “mainly because it does not fit in with the plans that the city council adopted when we did the new zoning maps and discussed this area moving from a medical use to a more housing focused use.”

Piedmont-Smith added, “To be clear, temporary housing for folks who are getting treatment for substance use disorders, while important, it is not the same as housing. It is not what we consider housing in our comprehensive plan.”

Piedmont-Smith called ICR “a for-profit business” drawing most of its clients outside of Bloomington.

Hopi Stosberg, who is the city council appointee to the plan commission, drew out the point that the two group homes under the zoning requested by ICR would still need a variance. That’s because Bloomington’s UDO has some use-specific standards on group homes that say a group care home cannot be located within 300 feet of any other group care home.

The 300-foot requirement applies across zoning districts, Greulich confirmed, so there is no particular advantage, from the perspective of the 300-foot requirement, to choose MH as the rezone district. Stosberg also expressed concerns about the idea that the massing of large group homes did not serve as a good transition from the trailer park to the south and the area to the north.

Also speaking from the public mic on Monday was Paul Ash, who is a member of the executive committee of the McDoel Gardens Neighborhood Association. The area of the association goes up to 1st Street in its northwest corner. Ash, who followed Piedmont-Smith at the mic, kept his remarks brief: “I could go on, but we just don’t want them here.”