Peoria Pundit

By way of Paul Gordon, we learn that a company called “Lepomis Inc.” has bought two homes on Maplewood Avenue for $500,000 each. PeoriaIllinoisan says that sales of four additional homes are about ready to close.

Of course, Lepomis — owned by Peoria attorney Richard Joseph — is buying them of behalf of Bradley University, which wants to build a sports complex.

I’ve been aware of that negotiations with homeowners were at the serious stage for about five months now. I’m not surprised it took this long to complete.

Like PeoriaIllinoisan and Mahkno, I think it’s sad to see these fine old homes go. But I can’t argue with the fact that BU negotiated in good faith and the homeowners decided to sell on their own, without coercion and without crying to the city for them to use eminent domain BU was told quite clearly that it needn’t bother asking for eminent domain. Which is probably why the homeowners are getting more than five times fair market value. Good for them.

I’ve blogged about this topic quite a bit. If anyone is surprised that I’m not jumping up and down screaming about this, don’t be. My major concern was that homeowners were going to be steamrolled by a system in Peoria that has too often in the past been perfectly to run all over the rights of property owners on behalf of powerful and “popular” institutions. This is exactly the situation I have said should happen when an institution wants to assume ownership of someone else’s land. They should have to pay the price the owner is asking.

I hope those folks who are selling decide to buy again in Peoria, south of War Memorial Drive.

The only question remaining (pending final sale, of course) is whether or not the city will amend its institutional use ordinance to allow BU to expand past its current boundary. I’d say let them, provided they agree to play well with the homeowners whose property would now abut their new buildings.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 9th, 2006 at 1:11 pm and is filed under Overset. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.