UK plans to buy and demolish several blocks of houses as part of healthcare growth

The University of Kentucky is planning to buy and then demolish up to 50 properties on South Limestone to make way for more space for the Markey Cancer Center, part of the inexorable growth of the state’s largest medical complex.

The properties — mostly student rentals — are mostly located within a rectangle made of the 100 blocks of Conn Terrace behind the new Shriners, State Street, University Avenue and the north side of Waller bounded by Elizabeth Street and South Limestone, said George Ward, UK’s Executive Director for Coldstream Research Park and Real Estate. There are two owner-occupied houses. However, the lines are still changing because of the need to locate a utility infrastructure nearby.

Ward sent a letter to all the owners in April, announcing UK’s desire to buy the houses because of a 20 percent increase in visits to Markey in the last five years. UK Healthcare estimates it needs more than 300,000 square feet of additional specialty outpatient clinical space and parking near the main facilities.

Appraisals are underway, which will inform them of how many students live there and how many will be displaced. The purchases would allow landlords to honor leases through August 2022. Although many of the houses are bungalows, several have big box additions that were built on the back before the city outlawed them. Eminent domain would be a last resort, he said.

Ward says he doesn’t foresee any problem with students finding new housing given the addition of the two Hub properties, one on the corner of Virginia and South Limestone and the other on Jersey Street.

“That’s probably where there will be some movement,” he said.

But in university towns, when universities start buying up and tearing down residential neighborhoods — even UK student party slums where the air is tinted with the smell of burnt couches — people who still live near campus get a little nervous because of what seems like an endless appetite for new construction.

“It makes us very nervous,” said Kate Savage, who has lived on Columbia Avenue for the past 32 years. On her block, which borders UK on the other side of campus, what started out as a neighborhood of families with a few students has reversed into all students and two families. UK has built more on campus housing, enough for most first year students and some second, but it’s often more expensive than a bedroom in a house.

“I understand they’re a landlocked university,” said architectural historian Janie Rice Brother. “But with the land out at Coldstream, why do this here and why continue to destroy the very thing we need more of — walkable neighborhoods where people want to live?”

Several landlords who own property in the area did not return calls for comment.

UK spokesman Jay Blanton said outpatient cancer care still needs to be near hospital facilities, so the Coldstream location was not an option.

He also took umbrage at the idea that demolishing student housing has any ripple effect in the community.

“Given the stock available both on campus and in close proximity to UK, it is simply incorrect to make an assumption about what the purchase of student housing on one set of streets — that many in the neighborhoods have considered a problem for years — will do to other neighborhoods given the dramatic increases in available housing on and off campus in recent years,” he said

It’s a tension found in many college towns, where a university’s stature as the biggest employer in town gives it enormous power. It’s interesting that there is no longer any kind of Town-Gown Commission; Savage served on it, but said that in the end, “it was just a courtesy thing, where everybody played nice. We all thought there was a point, but there wasn’t a point.”

And there’s no point because UK does what it wants to do — like closing Rose Street — whether residents like it or not. Both UK and city officials tout their great relationship, like the swaps that gave UK control of some campus streets in return for 200 acres at Coldstream, or the way they worked together to crack down on party houses during COVID.

“There is a greater sense of collaboration and partnership and it plays out every day in numerous ways,” Blanton said. “Our interests are inextricably linked and we act together, in ways large and small, every day on issues.”

No one from UK has contacted Jim Duncan, the city’s director of planning, because UK is not subject to local zoning rules. “Generally I think you cannot communicate too much, and good communication goes a long way,” he said.

They did communicate with Hannnah LeGris, council member for the 3rd District, which encompasses the proposed purchase area. LeGris also works for UK. She hasn’t heard from constituents because so few people know about the plan. But she does think it would be good to return to some kind of Town Gown commission.

“The success of this community very much hinges upon clear and consistent communication between the university and the city and our community members,” she said. “So many of the issues and the challenges we face today are similar to the challenges for near-campus neighborhoods that we faced 5-10 years ago.”

UK was a superlative neighbor during the COVID crisis, testing and vaccinating hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians with ease and efficiency. We’re lucky to have a medical enterprise of this quality in our backyard. It’s also true that most modern universities have decided that growth is the only way to stay in business. But that doesn’t mean their home cities should give them carte blanche or give up on accountability and communication.