Fairfield council hopes to spur west end construction

FAIRFIELD - The Fairfield City Council is poised to make changes to a residential district on the west side of town that it hopes will spur home construction.

The area is known as the West End Parsons College Addition on South 17th Street and the surrounding blocks. That part of town contains a number of mobile homes and smaller-than-average houses. Fairfield City Engineer Melanie Carlson said the area is ripe for development, with about half of the lots vacant.

At its next meeting on Monday, the council will consider the third and final reading of an ordinance to ease restrictions on new construction. For instance, the proposed ordinance would allow slightly smaller homes than is currently allowed, with a 720-square-foot minimum area instead of the 750-square-foot minimum under the current code.

The proposed ordinance would make it easier to build on corner lots by allowing the property owner to count the longer street side yard as a side yard instead of a front yard, which reduces the setback requirement from the house to the property line. Furthermore, the city will allow a duplex on every lot provided it meets the setback requirements.

Developer Don Hoelting has taken a special interest in developing the west end and owns several of the lots in the area. He bought his first property there about 30 years ago, and brought a modular home onto one of the properties, which he lived in for three years.

'There are probably close to 60 lots there that could be built upon,” he said. 'Plus there are quite a number of mobile homes whose life will come to an end soon because they're not energy efficient and they're very old.”

In the west end, nearly every lot is 55 feet wide by 125 feet long, smaller than the typical plot in Fairfield which is 66 by 132. Hoelting said the small lot sizes made it difficult to build homes while adhering to the setback requirements.

Fairfield City Administrator Aaron Kooiker said the city hopes that by allowing narrower and smaller homes in that district, it will encourage developers to build there rather than 'let those lots sit empty or collect junk.”

Hoelting said he wishes the city would reduce the minimum size of homes even further to 600 square feet, because he'd like to build some of that size but can't. Kooiker said the council considered lowering the minimum square footage below the proposed 720 square feet but decided it wasn't ready to go that far.