The Sevier Ave rezoning is dead — and the Kerbela apartments got sent back
The Planning Commission followed its staff and denied all three actions on 2704 Sevier Avenue. The 220-unit Kerbela project didn't get a yes or a no. It got a remand.
We flagged this one in June, when it was still a quiet request to take a single house at 2704 Sevier Avenue from residential to neighborhood commercial. Last week we told you it was finally getting its hearing and that Planning staff was recommending denial. Here's the payoff: the Commission denied it. Not just the rezoning — all three linked actions went down together. The sector plan amendment, the one-year plan amendment, and the rezoning itself.
- Heard
- Thu, Jul 9 · Planning Commission
- 2704 Sevier Ave
- Denied — all three actions
- 315 Kerbela Ave
- Remanded to committee
The reasoning in the record is blunt. The rezoning "does not meet all of the criteria," and the land-use change would be "an encroachment of a commercial land use classification in a residential area" — a block that already has commercial corners within six hundred feet in both directions. Three for three, staff's language straight through.
The bigger item on the same agenda went sideways instead. The roughly 220-unit, 55-and-up apartment complex proposed for the old Kerbela Shriners Temple site on the bluff — the one that drew nine public comments, seven of them opposed — didn't get approved and didn't get denied. It got remanded back to the Administrative Review Committee, which was the third door staff had left open. The project's seven requests to bend the South Waterfront code go back to committee, and the bluff stays undecided a while longer.
Two developments, two very different kinds of no. The applicant on the rezoning can appeal to City Council; we couldn't confirm a filing deadline, so don't take a date from us on that one.
