A request to the North Little Rock Board of Adjustment this week will provide the first test of a recent city zoning change meant to allow a process for unrelated disabled people to share a home.
Applicant Koy Butler says the city is violating state and federal fair housing laws by requiring him to even go through the process to open a House of Three in North Little Rock. Butler already operates such a home for three elderly or disabled roommates in a Little Rock neighborhood.
City officials counter that the issue is Butler's request to run a business and not about unrelated roommates who have disabilities.
The North Little Rock Board of Adjustment will hear Butler's request at 1:30 p.m. Thursday to provide "reasonable accommodation" for up to five disabled people at 4404 Arlington Drive in the Lakewood residential neighborhood. The meeting is being moved from a community planning conference room to the larger City Council Chambers at North Little Rock City Hall to accommodate a crowd.
The North Little Rock City Council denied Butler's requests in December for a rezoning and special-use permit to operate a House of Three at the Arlington Drive address. The House of Three's proposal would have allowed three elderly or disabled residents to live in the house with a full-time caretaker. Butler filed a complaint with the state Fair Housing Commission.
In March, the City Council amended the city's zoning ordinance to create the reasonable accommodation process -- a federal requirement the city didn't meet until then. Applicants now must go through the Board of Adjustment and comply with a list of guidelines. Reasonable accommodation means alleviating specific regulations, policies and procedures that restrict fair housing opportunities from people with handicaps as defined by law.
Deputy City Attorney Matt Fleming said that he and other staff met with representatives of the state attorney general's office, referred by the Fair Housing Commission, regarding the city's ordinance. The only concern discussed, Fleming said, was a fee the city would charge for applications made to the Board of Adjustment.
The fee language will be amended out of the ordinance at a future City Council meeting, Fleming said, and no fees will be charged in the meantime. Butler said that the city waived his fee.
Butler had said after the City Council's March vote that the house had been "poisoned" by the city's initial process and that he didn't know whether he would make a new request. Butler purchased the house last year after initially being told by the city that the business would be an allowed use.
"I hate for the house to just sit there unoccupied," Butler said last week. "There are certainly disabled people in North Little Rock that need housing, and hopefully North Little Rock will do the right thing."
The city's new process required Butler to post a notice on the property and notify neighboring residents by certified mail of the request, much like a rezoning request.
"They're still making people with disabilities who want to live together as roommates do it differently than those without disabilities," Butler said.
The difference, Fleming said, is that Butler wants to operate a business inside the residence. The home's zoning doesn't allow for the special permit to have a home-based business, so the initial rezoning request met with resistance for neighbors.
"This is not about a landlord wanting to rent a place to five disabled people," Fleming said. "Our argument was that he was conducting a business."
The North Little Rock zoning code allows for "one or more persons occupying a premises and living as a single, nonprofit housekeeping unit, provided that, unless all members are related by blood or marriage, the number of persons should not exceed five."
The residence would become "a mini-nursing home" because meals, health care and a live-in caretaker would be provided for a charge, Fleming said.
Dana McClain, Butler's attorney, said the North Little Rock ordinance's requirements "encourage community opposition."
"It really creates a hostile environment," McClain said. "They're not supposed to do what they're doing, having to have a sign-up and hold a public hearing."
Fair housing laws are set up, she said, "to create situations that allow people with disabilities to have what we all can have."
"Koy's [House of Three] in Little Rock is in my neighborhood," she added. "You don't even know that it's there. It's interesting to me that this is a battle. It never should have been one."
Metro on 07/27/2014