Update: 3/06/2025 — This story was updated to include residents’ votes on the rezoning plan, which were counted later.

Residents of Birmingham’s Red Mountain, Crestline and Crestwood communities turned out Monday night for a standing-room-only meeting during which they questioned proposed rezoning plans for their neighborhoods.

In votes cast that night and counted later, the residents overwhelmingly opposed the proposal. Of those present, 110 residents voted against the plan, while 10 people voted in favor and one person abstained. The residents’ recommendation will now move to the City Council’s Planning and Zoning Committee as an accompaniment to the rezoning proposal from the Birmingham Planning, Engineering and Permits Department. The committee could refer the rezoning plans to the full council for adoption.

The changes the PEP Department recommended would bring the Southern area in line with a zoning ordinance and classification system the city established in 2015, said Tracey Hayes, deputy director of planning, urban design and watershed management for the city. While many zoning districts would change in name only — from R1 to D1, for instance, both of which are single-family districts — some new zoning districts would apply, and some parts of the area would change to zoning that would allow additional or fewer uses.

“We’re just updating the current zoning to match our ordinance,” Hayes said. “Most of the properties are moving to just the new zoning class. But there are some areas that have been downzoned, there are some areas that the recommendation from staff is to change them to multi-family or mixed-use districts.” Downzoning means to reduce or limit development or the number or density of buildings permitted.

 

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See an interactive map of the Southern Area Framework Plan.

See the full document for the Southern Area Framework Plan

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City staff gave an overview of the proposed zoning changes and a presentation on historic preservation. Maps showing the planned zoning were stationed on easels and tables, and part of the meeting was devoted to audience members evaluating the maps and talking one-on-one with city staff about them.

In informal conversations, residents and property owners, many of whom live in the Highland Park neighborhood, expressed concerns about traffic and the possibility of developers replacing houses with high-rise apartment and condo buildings.

“A lot of these decisions allow doors to open to have things built that don’t need to be built — like really large apartment complexes, like condos stuffed on lots that are too small,” said Crawford Miller, a Highland Park resident. “When you look at Highland Park, there’s a number of houses that are on the edge of being torn down, and I’m sure developers are like, ‘What do we have to do to get some rezoning to allow a building?’ Even though they stood up there and said that’s not what this is about, the reality is, this lays the groundwork for those things to happen.”

Jess Mays, senior planner for the city of Birmingham, said Highland Park has a zoning overlay and historic districts that offer significant protection for historic properties.

“In addition to that, if someone did want to buy property and rezone it and demo it, that would also trigger our regulatory processes where they would have to come to the neighborhood, they would have to go to our regulatory committees and, for rezoning, they would eventually end up at City Council,” Mays said.

City employees distributed a 10-page document with questions and comments from Highland Park residents about particular streets, blocks and addresses and responses from the PEP department.

 More Mixed-Use Zoning

Mays said the proposed rezoning for the southern area of the city is part of rezoning happening in about half of the city and represents implementation of a Southern Area Framework Plan adopted in 2023 as well as Birmingham’s 2013 comprehensive land-use plan.

“That plan is our guiding document for this rezoning that has our future land use in it, and that is what sets the stage for our proposed rezoning categories,” Mays said. “The key component of the comprehensive plan is that long-range land use plan, and this is what’s going to guide development over the next 10 to 20 years in Birmingham.”

Mays noted three overarching goals related to the rezoning efforts: downzoning heavily industrial areas where, historically, there have been environmental-justice concerns; establishing mixed-use districts “to create vibrant, walkable communities;” and introducing the urban-neighborhood district, which the City Council created in 2023, to develop walkable neighborhoods with a variety of housing types.

“Since this is the southern area, y’all are a bit unique in that you are made up of very healthy neighborhoods,” Mays said. “You don’t have a lot of heavy industrial, and we scaled back on the urban neighborhood for y’all. So, our main goal here was implementing those mixed-use districts.”

Melissa Beck said the overall plan — the addition of multi-use zones in particular — would make her Highland Park neighborhood more of a main-street area, and the neighborhood doesn’t have the bandwidth to handle that because it was not designed for significant automobile traffic.

“I don’t think it is keeping with the spirit of a historical area,” Beck said. “I’m a capitalist. I’m all for growth. I don’t think this is smart or strategic growth.”

Mays said the Planning Division has received many requests for downzoning since the planning process for southern-area rezoning began. Downzoning in Highland Park in 1990 resulted in litigation, and the city had to reverse the zoning changes and pay to settle the lawsuit, she said.

“When you change someone’s current zoning classification to a downzoning that doesn’t allow all of their current uses, that can be seen as arbitrary and capricious, especially if the surrounding land use and existing land use is already multi-family,” Mays said. “It can be seen as a taking of property rights if it negatively impacts the property value without offering just compensation.”

Hannah Garmon, historic preservation manager for the city, said during her presentation that Highland Park was a streetcar neighborhood designed to be walkable, with a mix of uses and housing types.

Apartments built during the 1960s and 1970s are now considered historic because they are more than 50 years old, and they contribute to the area’s narrative, Garmon said.

A flyer Highland Park residents distributed before the meeting states that voting no to the city’s proposed rezoning is an opportunity to “correct zoning mistakes made in the 1970s.”

“Development patterns in Birmingham changed significantly in the 1960s due to white flight and suburbanization of the city,” Garmon said. “Landowners left, they sold property to developers, who then came in and tore down historic homes and built apartment buildings. That’s a development pattern and a trend, not just in your neighborhood, but in Norwood, in Druid Hills and Bush Hills.

“They (apartment buildings) contribute to the story of your district because they tell that collective story of the people who left, of the people who came in, of the people who lived there.”

Larger-Than-Expected Crowd

The meeting began almost half an hour later than scheduled because the crowd overflowed the room originally designated for it and had to be moved to the auditorium at Birmingham Botanical Gardens.

“If this is a planning commission and they kept us 30 minutes outside and weren’t even prepared for the crowd that came, this doesn’t bode well for planning in general,” Beck said.

An agenda item giving time for questions and comments from residents and property owners was skipped after members of the audience demanded to vote, saying they didn’t have any more questions or comments.

Monday’s meeting was the last of multiple public meetings the city has held about southern-area rezoning.

Four areas of the city have already been rezoned. Those are in the Western, Southwest, Titusville, Northeast and North Birmingham Framework Plans. Hayes said the city plans to rezone the remaining areas — which are in the Southern, Eastern, Pratt Ensley, and Northside Southside Framework Plans — by the end of the year. The city’s website with information about the process is imaginebham.com.