In 1958, Fayette County created an urban services boundary outside of it.

Development is restricted.

Recently, the Lexington Urban County Council voted to expand the boundary, allowing more land to be developed.

This has people asking Will adding more land for development provide more affordable housing options?

We spoke with two organizations one in favor of the expansion and one opposed to help us understand both sides of the decision.

So we were advocate for expansion, and the obvious reason was we wanted to be the organization that had more of a common sense approach to create a inclusive conversation for everyone to be involved in how we grow, how the city grows specifically, and not create an atmosphere where we pitted communities against each other.

The plan before this plan was enacted was for there to be re re infill development, which will triple the housing inside the boundary.

And what that did was pit neighborhoods against neighborhoods.

People didn't want developments or want developers necessarily inside of their neighborhoods.

So we wanted to create a conversation around where could we grow our medium housing has risen over the last ten years 100%.

So that medium housing now is $322,000, which you can imagine is very hard for creates a lot of affordable issues.

So we need to create housing in all of the housing prices that you can think of specifically in the $200,000 housing where we have not built any new housing.

Now we build about 550 houses a year and then we need to build 1500 houses a year to keep pace in all prices of housing.

By painting the urban service boundary with a broad brush as a solution to equity and affordability challenges.

I think that it is a false solution, if you will.

We have to say what kind of housing does our community need?

What kind of housing can we build at the the price points and the levels that we need?

And so all of these questions have to be factored in to the way that we grow.

A study was done in 2017 by the University of Kentucky, and that study asked what is the impact of the urban service boundary on the cost of housing?

The University of Kentucky economist found that word the urban service boundary to be expanded.

There would be little to no effect on the cost of housing in Fayette County.

I think that's incredibly significant.

So we have to ask then, why is expansion of the urban service boundary by a certain amount of acres being touted as the solution when there's no correlation proved by research that that is going to create affordable housing?

So when you talk about equity and you focus just on infill development, you are basically putting yourself in a situation where people who are currently living in neighborhoods because of the lack of growth will be gentrified out of those neighborhoods.

So it's not very equitable.

This is just common sense growth to the corridors where we can grow.

There's some obvious areas where growth is permissible.

So if you create more opportunities, maybe we can decrease those costs and create more housing.

We are going to be allocating a significant amount of resources outside of our existing city.

We're going to be looking at spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on building infrastructure, sewer systems, roads, schools, fire and police in by allocating resources outside our existing community.

We also have to recognize that pulls away from the resources that are going to be allocated within our community.

And so are we willing as a community to put policies in place that ensure affordable housing, that ensure housing is built at price points that our working families can afford?

The market doesn't do that.

Policy does.

And so moving forward, it's going to take all of us working together to really make policies that enable housing affordability to be improved, that enable economic growth, and that enables the success of our communities.

The Lexington Planning Commission recently approved a map that adds 2000 acres to that urban services boundary.