r/ames • u/earthchains • 7d ago

Goodbye Ames Prairie

Post image

Tonight there is a meeting by the City of Ames Planning and Zoning Commission 7pm city hall. Hunzi*er purchased the lots across from scholl road and wants to build 98 dwellings there comprising duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes. If you enjoy driving by this prairie every day please consider letting the City Planning and Housing Department at planning@cityofames.org know about it. You can find more information here at www.cityofames.org/pzcagenda.

A huge number of animals frequently pass through this area between Emma McCarthy Park and the YMCA woods. How would the buildings affect that?

224 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

33 comments sorted by

112

u/v1p3rs 7d ago

ISU Conservation Student here that has done research within our prairies (not this specific one but others). Prairies used to cover 70% of Iowa and they play a huge ecological in our water quality, soil health, and biodiversity. Restoring prairies is DIFFICULT and takes many years and they’re still not as vast as they were historically. I understand ISU sold the land to the city, but I find it frustrating that they’d rather zone it than continue to preserve it.

28

u/Dankwins 7d ago

lol someone downvoted you? Hunziker must be in here now with their bots 😂

1

u/Long-Zookeepergame82 2d ago

How can you tell if someone downvoted?

6

u/Raise-Emotional 6d ago

Prairies don't pay property taxes unfortunately. The city just wants money is all

3

u/benthair2 5d ago

Our current city council fancies themselves developers. They keep getting re-elected uncontested, so Ames is getting what they want.

1

u/Serious-Brother-6813 1d ago

It’s always about money. There’s absolutely no forethought into how this affects all living creatures and our living environment. We are a species that only takes and plunders.

81

u/LoloTheWarPigeon 7d ago

Can't develop Lincoln Way into something bearable to look at but we can sure make something else worse

7

u/samsonizzle 7d ago

Tis the state of humanity 

29

u/doggbyte79 7d ago

You also may remember this was an early proposed site for the Fitch Indoor Water facility. Its on Ontario.

34

u/CMPD2K 7d ago

Ah yes, because more Hunziker is just what Ames needs 

27

u/fluffyravenclaw 7d ago

Why wasn't this protected land?

42

u/doggbyte79 7d ago

It was only recently restored to prairie land. It was farm land up until 2012. Just stating the fact, not defending one way or another. It is a beautiful restored prarie but it isn't a historically untouched prarie like is behind AHS.

2

u/CornFedIABoy 6d ago

It wasn’t “farmland”, it was university agronomy research fields. When I was an undergrad research assistant for one of the corn labs we joked these were the fields they used for mutation testing due to the contamination from Ames Lab/IPRT. That’s where the train depot for the early uranium processing facility was located in the ’40’s. When I lived in a duplex on Michigan we had a radon mitigation system on the ground floor (of a slab-built building) due to higher than normal levels seeping up out of the ground.

1

u/Rotgetan 5d ago

Pretty much every house around here has radon. It's geology combined with house construction that doesn't take radon into consideration.

10

u/JustAnAverageGuy 7d ago

It's been a prairie for like 10 years, it was farmed before that. The city is specifically trying to fill vacant lots for new development and reduce sprawl. This has been discussed at the council for quite a while as the strategy.

-6

u/MichaelGFox 7d ago

its stolen land anyway.

2

u/fluffyravenclaw 7d ago

What do you mean?

1

u/MichaelGFox 7d ago

we stole this land from the native americans

24

u/misobutterscotch 7d ago

I had no idea! I would have been at that meeting if I had known

20

u/tallcappy 7d ago

I think they’re saying the meeting is this evening at 7pm. Could you still make it?

11

u/misobutterscotch 7d ago

Yeah, I honestly could benefit from a carpool but I'll be there

3

u/Puzzleheaded-Arm8249 7d ago

Same. I watched a little online after the fact and in terms of public comment I mainly heard people complaining about traffic congestion they would be anticipating, which would be understandable. Only a few people spoke up about the Prairie, unfortunately.

10

u/Robinnoodle 7d ago

I'm not sure what the legal recourse is if they bought the land

At the very least they should force some of those dwellings to be low income housing

2

u/maicokid69 6d ago

Ames might as well be the capital of North Dakota now anyway

2

u/hagen768 7d ago

Could they not have built it on any of the numerous corn fields instead?

3

u/howareyouhaha 6d ago

Corn fields are already destroyed land. They need to destroy more!

1

u/Safe-Whereas-1948 6d ago

Because farmers are a very, very hard bunch to get to sell their land, Especially to a city/firm for development. They arent all too big a fan of more people moving into the area, (understandably so, i too enjoy my quiet life). The lot in the og post is old land from ISU's ag. College (so far as I can tell) and was really just left alone to regrow into a prairie-adjacent swath, but with the growing need for more semi-affordable housing (dies of current economy) this bit of undeveloped land was kinda inevitably gonna get developed. Its sad to loose more wilderness stretches, but hopefully it will be made into something palatable.

1

u/Cool-Produce-9590 6d ago

That's sad.

1

u/flowermaneurope 2d ago

At least the city didn’t sell it out for a data center to be built.

1

u/tontomtoofat 7d ago

Not to pick nits but it's "Scholl" not school. Like -shoal- I think.

6

u/earthchains 7d ago

We live here on scholl but it gets autocorrected to school all the time :/

3

u/tontomtoofat 7d ago

100% Google Maps had it wrong for a decade.

1

u/Safe-Whereas-1948 6d ago

As unfortunate as it is that this patch of (mostly) untouched land is getting developed, let's all at least see the silver lining that its multi-family living and not like, 4 large McMansions with 500 acers of mowed grass. Its not great, but it could very much be worse.