DECATUR, Ala. — The city of Decatur passed a motion today that would regulate how build to rent communities in the area are constructed. Build to rent communities allow contractors to provide single family housing for long term rental.
In order to better set those regulations for BTR's the definition of family came into to question. "We have the word family in there (code) a lot," Council President Jacob Ladner shares. "There's not a lot of it just …. you don't really know what we mean by family. So, we tried to put a definition there basically that anyone that's related is a relative you can have as many people living there if they're related. however, if you're unrelated and that's what we passed today as, you could only have three people that are unrelated."
Some residents share that the current definition doesn't need change. "There is nothing wrong with the current definition," one resident spoke. "In an era where Athens recently received national headlines for fear mongering against Haitian immigrants, maybe we ought to proactively not create conditions for enforcing a law that is neither needed or desired in a Christ loving community."
Another resident shares it could be bad for business. "I just feel like what you're doing with this family initiative thing is you're trying to target a group of people, but what you're really doing is you're hurting the masses at the same time. I just want you to be cognitive of that and if that's what you still want to do, then do it, but you're going to be hurting business on the river. You're going to be hurting corporations that are going to be coming."
Ladner says this isn't about targeting a specific group. It's more about helping set a definition to avoid further problems. "This has totally been about we've had some issues in some neighborhoods where you just had a bunch of people living in one single family house. It is not targeted at anyone or any group of people," Ladner explains. "It's just really what it's about more than anything is we have the word family in our zoning code, and we don't have a definition for it and so what today was about is let's give that a definition that's used all in our zoning is used in our code, and now we have one."
The code is set to be adopted in late spring.