Urbana City Council

From the News-Gazette a couple weeks back:

Urbana council keeps proposal for housing development in committee
The city council voted Monday night to keep a rezoning and annexation proposal for a housing development in the northern part of the city in committee for two weeks.

The development, Union Gardens by Lafayette-based Trinitas Ventures, will include 406 units of duplexes and townhouses aimed primarily at students and young professionals.

It's planned to be built in a 40-acre lot of farmland just north of Bradley Avenue, straddling the Champaign-Urbana city line.

More information on that at the full article, including about concerns about housing options for people with felony convictions. The Champaign side of the Union Gardens issue will be taken up this Tuesday by the Champaign City Council according to its agenda (which may have been moved since this article came out). There was an additional bit of information about community input:

At two public hearings in April and May, held at the Church of the Living God — which would end up being wedged between the development and Carver Park neighborhood — only six people attended each meeting, with all of them saying they supported the plan.

Dr. Evelyn Underwood, who spoke during the public-comment portion of Monday's meeting, said that if the developers had talked to more people, they would've gotten a different response to the project.

She also called this new development another example of something bigger.

"This is the first African-American neighborhood in Urbana," she said. "Carver Park will now be surrounded. I don't know where they're going to put all of us. They call it progress, but to us, we're being sucked up and taken out of our communities."