Preserve Cahaba's Future.
Respect Its Past.

The "honorary" historic designation, explained.

The Cahaba Project was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2006. That listing is honorary — it's recognition of historic significance, but it does not, by itself, restrict what a property owner can do with their home. Federal designation gives Cahaba prestige; it does not give the City new powers over individual homes. The proposed overlay is what would create binding local restrictions for the first time.

Setbacks and building height already exist. The City already enforces them.

Before any home gets built in Cahaba today, Trussville's Engineering and Inspections Department verifies setback (the minimum distance a building must sit from the property line — Cahaba's are 40 feet front, 40 feet rear, 15 feet side, with corner lots observing front-yard setbacks on all street-facing sides) and height rules. Plans that break these rules don't get permits. Construction that violates them gets stopped by the inspector mid-build.

A note on what the eye actually sees. Setbacks are minimums — a home must sit at least 40 feet back from the front line, but it can sit farther, and many of the original cottages do. Most people cannot judge by eye whether a house is 40 feet back or 65; what they can notice is when one house sits forward of its neighbors. So when a newer home is built right at the 40-foot minimum between two original homes that happen to sit 60 or 65 feet back, it can look as though it is too close to the street — even though it follows the setback rules exactly. That impression is about alignment, not a violation: the home is fully legal, and the block still reads with reasonable flow and curb appeal. It is one more case where a home can look “off” to the eye while breaking no rule at all. And at that point the difference is a matter of subjective, individual taste — not a break in policy, and not something a building rule can fairly settle for everyone.

The new ordinance would add aesthetic mandates — roof shape, roof material, siding material, window proportions — on top of what is already enforced. The honest question for the council is whether the additional layer is warranted, not whether nothing exists today.

The City's own Public Works yard is in the Cahaba Project.

Roughly 50 yards from the back fence of multiple Cahaba Project homes — with the city-built walking trail running between them — sits the Trussville Public Works facility. Industrial metal building. Chain-link fence largely unscreened. A fleet of school buses parked behind the fence and visible from the community park. Concrete drainage pipes dumped in the woods nearby. It has looked like a construction zone for years.

The overlay would force private homeowners to meet detailed design standards. The City's own industrial facility — visible from a children's park, on land inside the Cahaba Project — would not. Screening a chain-link fence with an evergreen hedge runs roughly $15–$45 per linear foot. Before holding residents to binding design standards on their own homes, the City could meet that same standard on its own land — screening this fence and clearing the debris.

Photos taken from the Cahaba Project community park and walking trail · Spring 2025

88 years, and none of the feared "monstrosities."

A common worry is that without binding rules, someone will place a mobile home or metal barndominium on a Cahaba lot. In 88 years, that has never happened. Here's why:

The economics of the neighborhood make that outcome very unlikely. Buying a home here and clearing the lot to rebuild is a major investment, and people who invest at that level build accordingly. Placing a mobile home or metal barndominium on land worth $300,000 to $400,000 simply makes no financial sense — the value lies in constructing something substantial and lasting. In practice, the new homes going up in Cahaba are predominantly large, custom homes built by families who intend to live here, not by speculators or industrial users.

Could someone, in theory, build a boxy ultra-modern home that doesn't fit the neighborhood? Yes. In nearly nine decades, no one has. The cost of the land, prevailing neighborhood norms, and the existing (non-binding) Design Review Committee already steer builders toward designs that fit — and the track record bears that out.

The math: new construction grows the tax base.

Alabama assesses owner-occupied homes as Class III property at 10% of fair market value. Trussville's combined millage is 62.1 mills (state, county, school, and municipal levies combined). Recent sales of original Cahaba cottages cluster around $300,000. Large new custom homes in 35173 reach $600,000–$1,000,000.

That difference matters. Here's the annual property tax math:

Multiply across the rebuilds we'll see over the next decade and the City is looking at tens of thousands of additional dollars per year in recurring property tax revenue. That's funding for schools, roads, parks, and public safety — the things that make Trussville a great place to live. An overly restrictive overlay risks discouraging the very reinvestment that strengthens the tax base.

Renovation around an 80-year-old footprint can cost more than a new build.

Many original Cahaba homes have not been substantially updated in decades. When a new owner buys one and decides to renovate seriously rather than rebuild, the honest budget tends to include all of the following:

• Full home rewire (knob-and-tube to modern panel and circuits): commonly $15,000–$30,000.
• Asbestos and lead-paint abatement in 1938-era materials: $5,000–$20,000+ depending on scope.
• Replacement of terracotta sewage lines and cast-iron drain plumbing: $8,000–$25,000.
• Foundation stabilization for settled or shifted homes: $10,000–$40,000+.
• Structural repair of rotten floor joists, sill plates, and roof framing: highly variable, but often $15,000–$50,000 once you open the walls.
• Insulation added throughout (originals typically had none): $5,000–$15,000.
• Window replacement — 1938-era windows can lose 30–40% of household heating and cooling: $10,000–$30,000.
• Complete HVAC system (most original homes were built without one): $10,000–$25,000.
• Modern roofing and code-compliant electrical service: $10,000–$25,000.
• The footprint problem. Even after all of the above, you still have the original square footage and original room layout — small bathrooms, one-car driveway, no gathering space, no home office. To get a modern footprint, you're then adding an addition on top of the renovation budget.

Add it all up and a thorough renovation easily reaches $250,000–$400,000 on a home that, when complete, still has the original square footage and room layout. The same money will build a new home, to 2026 IRC standards, that uses 40–60% less energy per square foot, performs dramatically better in severe weather, has safer wiring and plumbing, accommodates a modern family's needs, and will last another 80 years.

That isn't disrespect for the past — it's construction reality. Some original homes are in good enough condition to renovate economically. Many are not. The preservation conversation should acknowledge this honestly. Homeowners who want to preserve their cottage should be supported and even financially helped through tax credits or grants. Homeowners who inherit or purchase a home requiring $300,000+ of deferred maintenance shouldn't be compelled into the more expensive path by ordinance.

Existing ordinances are not enforced. Why add new ones?

Trussville already has ordinances on the books that the City does not consistently enforce. The most visible example comes straight from the Zoning Ordinance (Article IX, §3.2(E), "Parking Prohibitions"): "no boats, trailers, commercial vehicles, recreational vehicles, campers and/or similar equipment … shall be kept within a residential district unless such vehicle is parked behind the front building line." Yet trailers and campers regularly sit in front yards along Cahaba streets, sometimes year-round. The City has every authority to address this today. It chooses not to.

The honest question to the council is this: if existing rules go unenforced, what makes anyone confident new aesthetic rules — far more complex, far more subjective — will be enforced fairly and consistently? Before adding layers, enforce what already exists.

Door-to-door solicitation is a safety risk the City could address today.

The City sells permits for door-to-door solicitation in Cahaba. In 2026, virtually no one shops via door-to-door sales — U.S. e-commerce now runs roughly $1.2 trillion a year — about 16% of all U.S. retail (U.S. Census Bureau). Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that "burglars frequently pose as canvassers" to scope out homes (Martin v. Struthers, quoted in Watchtower v. Stratton, 2002). Recent cases nationwide confirm the pattern: armed home invasions and burglaries staged by people posing as door-to-door salespeople.

The City cannot ban canvassing outright — the First Amendment protects it. But it can adopt a binding "Do Not Knock" registry that legitimate solicitors must honor, require background checks and photo ID badges, and restrict to narrow daytime hours. This is what other cities do. It's a safety improvement the council could pass this month — with bipartisan support and zero design-review committees.

The scale question: the setbacks are working — the contrast is what reads as "dwarfing."

The biggest complaint heard at the April 13 public hearing was not about roofs, windows, or siding. It was about size. Multiple speakers said the recently built homes are "dwarfing" the original 1938 cottages and breaking the visual rhythm of the streetscape. That concern is sincerely felt, and we do not dismiss it — but it is worth examining closely rather than accepting at face value, because the wrong diagnosis leads to the wrong policy response.

The setbacks themselves are good. They should not change.

The original New Deal designers of the Cahaba Project were genuine forward thinkers. They platted this neighborhood with lot sizes generous enough that, even at full buildout with every house built right to the setback lines, homes still have meaningful breathing room. The 40-foot front and rear, 15-foot side configuration produces a streetscape that doesn't feel crowded — a quality most modern subdivisions cannot replicate. Trussville inherited a piece of design wisdom from 1938 that deserves to be honored. Tightening the setbacks is not the answer.

So where does the "dwarfing" actually come from?

It comes from the size contrast between the original cottages and the new builds. The original 1938 cottages were roughly 1,000–1,300 square feet. Many of today's new homes are 3,000–5,000+ square feet — making the new homes 2 to 4 times the floor area of the originals, or roughly 35–60% larger in footprint depending on the lot. Even when both homes sit politely inside the same setback lines, the larger home reads visually as "bigger" because it is bigger. That contrast — not setback violations, not bad design — is what creates the impression people describe at the hearings.

It is also worth being clear that home size is not unlimited here. Two rules set the ceiling: the setbacks (illustrated in the setback diagram above) fix how much of the lot a building can cover, and the proposed two-story / 32-foot height cap fixes how tall it can be. Together with the size of the lot itself, they define the largest home that can physically be built — the “building envelope.” This hard ceiling is actually something the overlay would add: today’s R-CP sets no height or story limit at all, so the two-story cap is what makes a maximum size definable in the first place.

In plain terms for homeowners: picture leaving a 40-foot strip open across the front and back of your lot, plus a 15-foot strip down each side — whatever rectangle remains in the middle is where your home can sit, up to two floors. The bigger the lot, the bigger that rectangle, and the bigger the home the rules allow: a roughly 0.75-acre lot can legally hold a larger home than a 0.55-acre lot, even though both give up the same setback strips. To estimate your own lot’s ceiling, subtract 30 feet from its width and 80 feet from its depth, multiply the two, then double the result for the two-story cap — a theoretical maximum that lands far above the 3,000–5,000-square-foot homes actually being built. The takeaway: a home’s scale is already governed by your lot plus the height cap, not left wide open — which is exactly why the neighborhood’s generous original lots can hold homes so much larger than the 1938 cottages beside them.

A point worth saying directly.

The new homes being built in the Cahaba Project are, on the whole, beautifully designed. They flow, they have genuine curb appeal, and many would not look out of place in a design magazine — much as the lovingly restored original Cahaba Project homes do. They are not monstrosities in any aesthetic sense; they are simply larger than the cottages they sit beside. “Bigger” and “ugly” are not the same thing, and the public conversation has at times conflated the two.

The newer homes do use different materials, different colors, and slightly less boxy shapes than the 1938 originals — but a change in aesthetic is not a decline in it. No single design pleases every taste, and in a neighborhood with this much history, change is often met with hesitation simply because it is unfamiliar. Unfamiliar, however, is not the same as unattractive, and “different” is not the same as harmful to the neighborhood’s character. Whether a house is “beautiful” or “ugly” is an inherently subjective judgment, and debating the ordinance in those terms leads nowhere. The honest, useful approach is to separate the facts from matters of personal taste, and to weigh those facts rather than the adjectives no one will ever fully agree on.

What this means for the proposed ordinance.

If the Council's real goal is to address the size contrast, the policy tools for that look completely different from what's being proposed — direct floor-area caps, floor-area ratios, or tighter lot-coverage limits. None of those are in the draft ordinance — and, to be clear, none of them are what we are calling for, either. What's in the draft regulates aesthetics — roof shape, roof material, siding, window proportions, garage placement. A home built to comply with every aesthetic mandate in the ordinance can still be the maximum possible size that fits within the existing envelope.

That distinction matters: if "too big" is the real problem, the ordinance does not fix it. If "wrong style" is the problem, the ordinance does address that. These are two different conversations that have been conflated — and the Council should be clear about which one this ordinance is actually for.

And the aesthetic mandate could work against good design.

There is one more wrinkle, and it cuts against the ordinance’s own goal. To its credit, the draft says it “shall not impose any architectural style, traditional or modern, as a condition precedent to approval” — no one is required to copy the 1938 cottages. But by mandating the cottages’ building blocks — the roof shape and a narrow pitch band, metal-shingle roofing, a short list of siding materials, specific window proportions — the ordinance steers every new home toward the cottage look while doing nothing about size.

That is the tension. A 1938 cottage was designed as a whole: its roof pitch, sight lines, materials, and window and door proportions were all chosen so that a small home reads as balanced and graceful. Those cues do not automatically scale up. Take a home the ordinance still allows to be built large — out to the setbacks, up to two stories — and require it to wear cottage-scale rooflines, materials, and window proportions, and you do not get a cottage; you get a much larger house wearing details borrowed from a much smaller one. Today’s new homes generally look good precisely because their designers were free to choose proportions and materials suited to a larger home — force a cottage palette onto that footprint and the result can read as forced and mismatched, less “in character,” not more. Regulating the surface details while leaving size untouched risks working against the very design quality the ordinance is meant to protect.

To be clear, this is not an argument for the City to cap home size. Larger homes are a natural result of today’s construction costs, modern family needs, and the kind of investment that lifts property values for the whole neighborhood — that is a benefit, not a problem to be zoned away. The point is aimed squarely at the concern preservation-minded neighbors raised at the hearing: this ordinance does not shrink the larger homes they are worried about, and by requiring cottage-scale detailing on homes that will naturally be built larger, it could deepen the very “out of character” feeling it was meant to cure. If the goal is to protect the neighborhood’s charm, mandating small-cottage detailing on large homes is as likely to work against that charm as to preserve it.

Listening closely to what was actually said at the April hearing.

At the April 13 public hearing, several distinct voices came forward. Each of them deserves to be heard fairly. Here is what was said, and how a reasonable resident might respond to each.

The size-complaint speakers.

Multiple residents stood up and described feeling visually overwhelmed by the largest of the recent new builds. That reaction is sincere and deserves a respectful hearing — but it is only part of the picture: a neighborhood is the people in it, not a postcard to be frozen in 1938. Families in 2026 do not live the way families did in the New Deal era, and the original footprints were never large enough for how households live today — homes have to be able to evolve and grow, as explained in detail in the Growth-With-Respect case. Their concern about scale is honest, and it deserves an honest policy response — which, as Fact ix above shows, the current ordinance is not. A narrow, size-focused rule would look completely different from this broad design ordinance. And a larger home is not, in itself, a problem to be fixed — it is usually a family choosing to invest here. And to the extent visual scale and street rhythm are a genuine concern, the front- and side-yard setbacks the City already enforces keep new homes on the established street line and off their neighbors — protecting the block's rhythm and curb appeal far more directly than any design rule. This ordinance isn't about the size of homes at all; it governs appearance and materials, so it simply isn't the tool to address a scale concern.

The longtime residents.

Some speakers have lived in the Cahaba Project since the 1950s and spoke movingly about wanting the neighborhood to look the way it did when they were young. That feeling deserves real respect. The longtime families who stayed, raised children here, and kept the neighborhood's heart beating for three generations are part of what makes the Cahaba Project one of the most distinctive places in Alabama. We are deeply thankful they have stayed.

The honest reality is that 2026 cannot perfectly recreate the snapshot of 1955. Families today often live differently and need more room than the original footprints offered, and building materials and methods have naturally evolved — but evolved is not the same as inferior. A new home can echo the neighborhood’s historic character in its rooflines, proportions, and materials, and be built with craftsmanship and quality every bit as high as the originals — only safer, more efficient, and to modern code. What cannot be brought back is an original 1938 home once it is gone; what takes its place, though, can be both thoroughly modern and genuinely beautiful. But the love of the place behind that feeling is real, and any good ordinance has to honor it without pretending it can freeze time. And here is the part that is within reach: while no rule can return the streetscape to exactly the way it looked in 1955, the neighborhood can absolutely recover the way it once felt — neighbors who know one another, look out for one another, and treat each other with genuine warmth and respect. That old-time sense of community cannot be mandated by an ordinance or erased by a teardown; it is something residents choose to live out, and reviving it would do more to preserve the true spirit of the Cahaba Project than any design standard ever could.

The "move to Mountain Brook" comment.

More than one speaker suggested that residents wanting larger or modern homes should leave the Cahaba Project and "move to Mountain Brook" — a reference to the wealthy Birmingham suburb. That comment, said in frustration at a public hearing, is worth naming directly: it is unhelpful, it is dismissive, and it works against the very preservation cause the speakers care about.

The families building new homes in Cahaba pay two to three times the property tax of the cottages they replace. They chose to raise their children in Trussville over hundreds of other options. Many of them grew up here themselves. They are exactly the families this city says it wants. Telling them they don't belong is not a policy position; it is a tone problem that makes the substantive conversation about scale and character harder to have for everyone.

The "rebuild with original materials" view.

A small number of speakers expressed the position that when an original cottage must be rebuilt, the replacement should reuse the salvaged components of the original home — saved roof shingles, original floors, original doors, even original doorknobs. The position is sincere and reflects genuine love for the neighborhood.

It is also unworkable as a binding ordinance standard. Insurance adjusters cannot value salvaged 80-year-old hardware. Modern building code cannot certify reused 1938 wiring or pipe. Builders cannot warrant the structural performance of repurposed 1938 floor joists. Lenders cannot underwrite a home built to that standard. And a homeowner whose home was destroyed by fire or storm should not have to litigate the salvageability of every doorknob with a Design Review Board to be allowed to rebuild on their own lot. The right tool for this view is encouragement and incentive (see A Better Path Forward), not mandate.

The "just add onto the back" suggestion.

A frequent preservationist argument runs like this: instead of tearing down an original cottage to build a larger home, simply preserve the original house and add the additional square footage as a rear or side addition. Keep the original façade. Live in a larger home. Everyone wins. The argument is not wrong in principle. A small percentage of homeowners have pulled this off beautifully, where lot shape, lot size, and the homeowner's specific needs aligned with what an addition could provide. Those owners deserve genuine recognition for their work — and exactly the kind of incentive program described in A Better Path Forward below.

But for most homeowners, the "just add on" approach has real downsides that deserve honest acknowledgment:

• Cost can equal or exceed a new build. Adding onto a 1938 structure often costs as much as building new, because you're simultaneously remodeling the existing house (with all the rotten-joist, knob-and-tube, and abatement issues described in Fact vi) and building an addition that has to tie into a foundation, framing, and roofline designed for a smaller home.
• The interior gets chopped up. Preserving the exterior often forces compromises on the interior. The original 1938 floor plan — small bathrooms, narrow hallways, choppy room divisions — does not naturally accommodate modern family flow. Most additions either carve up the original interior to make it work with the new section, or leave an awkward transition between old and new.
• The "cookie-cutter add-on" aesthetic. Many additions, even thoughtful ones, read visually as bolt-on afterthoughts rather than integrated whole houses. From the street, you can spot the seam. The neighborhood preserves more original square footage but acquires a different kind of visual inconsistency.
• It is not the norm — it is the exception. The homeowners who have pulled this off elegantly had the right combination of lot, budget, and design vision. Most homeowners will not have all three. Forcing this path on everyone produces bad outcomes more often than good ones.

None of this is meant to dismiss the add-on approach. For the right homeowner, on the right lot, with the right needs, it can be a genuinely beautiful path — and one this site enthusiastically respects. That is precisely why it should be a rewarded option, not a mandated one. The City's job is to make the add-on path attractive enough that more homeowners choose it voluntarily — not to forbid the alternative for everyone else.

What's actually happened — and what hasn't — in the last two decades.

Some context worth understanding, because it shapes what kind of fix the neighborhood actually needs:

• Cahaba Project plans have gone through an advisory review for roughly 20 years. Under current code (R-CP §30.6), plans for new construction, demolition, or major renovation in the district are reviewed by the Cahaba Project advisory committee, which submits a written recommendation to Engineering & Inspections. Those recommendations are not legally binding. By design, the City has no authority to mandate aesthetic compliance on private property without an overlay ordinance — which is what is being proposed now, for the first time. The advisory framework has not "failed" or "collapsed." It has worked exactly the way an advisory body works: some owners follow the recommendations, some do not. That distinction matters when the question becomes whether to change the system from advisory to binding.
• Over the past few years, an estimated six to nine original homes have been demolished and replaced with significantly larger modern structures — some three to four times the size of the original cottages. These are real numbers, and they are part of the scale concern some residents raise, discussed in Fact ix.
• "Vacant" homes are usually pre-construction, not neglect. It is fair to acknowledge that some original homes have sat unoccupied for extended periods, and from the outside this can look like deliberate decline. The reality, for most projects, is the opposite. A thoughtful rebuild or major renovation typically requires 12 to 24 months of work before a single physical change happens on the lot: closing on the home, engaging an architect (3–6 months of design), refining the budget and selecting materials, choosing a builder, securing construction financing, and getting through permitting all happen in sequence — with the home appearing empty the entire time. By the time visible work starts, the family has already invested a year or more of planning. What looks like "letting it sit on purpose" is, in most cases, what serious construction planning actually looks like. The honest fix for this confusion is education, not regulation.
• The economics do not pencil for speculation. Original Cahaba Project cottages currently transact in the $275,000 to $500,000+ range — that is not "cheap inventory." Construction costs for a quality new build or major rebuild routinely run another $400,000 to $700,000+. The all-in cost of buying and rebuilding lands at $850,000 and up. No serious flipper buys a $350,000 home, invests 18 months of planning and another $600,000 of construction, and tries to exit at a margin large enough to justify the work. The math does not support a speculative thesis here. These are families investing in dream homes to live in, raise children in, and build a life in this community. They are exactly the kind of long-term investment the City of Trussville says it wants.
• Builders working in Cahaba do good work. Plenty of contractors building new homes in the district are designing with care, working with the lot, and producing homes the neighborhood is genuinely proud of. To whatever extent a small number of less-careful actors operate in the district, they can be addressed through targeted enforcement of existing nuisance and property-maintenance ordinances — not by imposing a binding aesthetic ordinance on every homeowner.

Honest reading of the facts: a binding aesthetic overlay aimed at every single homeowner is a very wide net for what is, in real numbers, a narrow problem. A more surgical approach — make the existing advisory standards more attractive to follow through incentives; address specific problem-property cases through existing nuisance ordinances; reward owners who genuinely preserve original homes (see A Better Path Forward) — would address the actual concerns without sweeping every renovating family into the same regulatory framework.

The 88-year picture: this is not a neighborhood in crisis.

The overlay itself solves a problem that isn't a crisis. By the City's own record, more than 90% of the original homes still stand after nearly 90 years; most losses came over decades from fire, weather, and age, not recent teardowns; and as original-cottage prices climb past $300,000–$500,000, buying one simply to demolish and rebuild is already becoming uneconomical.

Some perspective the current debate has been missing. Here is what the public record shows about how much the Cahaba Project has actually changed since 1938:

• 287 original homes were built 1936–1938 — 243 single-family houses and 44 duplexes, at a total construction cost of $2,661,981.26 (Alabama Historical Association marker, 1999).
• By 2006, when the Cahaba Project was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the official nomination documented 273 residential buildings standing in the district. That means roughly 14 of the original 287 homes had been lost to fire, severe weather, demolition, or other causes over the first 68 years — approximately 4.9%.
• Of those 273 buildings, 264 were classified as "contributing resources" — meaning they retained enough of their original character to count toward the district's historic listing. The other 9 were standing but had been altered beyond historic-integrity standards.
• Since 2006, an estimated six to nine more original homes have been demolished and replaced over the past few years, with an unspecified number in the years between. Conservatively combining the documented losses, somewhere between 8% and 9% of the original 287 homes have been replaced over 88 years.

Two honest things follow from those numbers:

One: by any reasonable historic-preservation standard, an 8–9% loss rate over nearly nine decades is remarkable preservation, not a crisis. Many New Deal-era resettlement communities have not survived at all; most have lost far more. The Cahaba Project remains one of the most intact such villages in the South. The 287 figure is still the right way to describe this neighborhood, and the streetscape that makes it special is still very much here.

Two: the recent pace has picked up — an estimated six to nine homes over the past three to five years, faster than the long-run trend — and some residents understandably want a thoughtful response to that. But "thoughtful response" does not have to mean "binding aesthetic ordinance applied to every household in the district." Surgical, targeted approaches — the kind described in A Better Path Forward — can address the pace without imposing a permission process on every homeowner.

One last honest observation worth making. Of the 273 homes standing in 2006, only 264 were counted as "contributing" to the National Register nomination — meaning 9 of them, about 3.3%, had already been altered enough to lose historic-integrity status. Twenty years later, that percentage is almost certainly higher. The deeper reality is that nearly every home in the Cahaba Project has been modified for modern life: central air, modern wiring, updated kitchens, replacement windows, new bathrooms, additions, garages, fences. The "1938 original" that many preservation arguments invoke largely does not exist anymore in pure form. Most of what is being preserved — and is worth preserving — is the exterior character and the streetscape. Both deserve honest discussion when policy uses the word "original."

What's actually driving property values up — and who's buying the original homes.

Two related claims worth examining honestly, because both have been used in the public conversation about this ordinance.

First, the property-value argument. Preservation advocates have cited research suggesting that historic designation can raise property values in historic districts. That research exists, and is often true in the contexts where it has been studied. But it is worth asking whether it actually applies here.

The Cahaba Project has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 2006. Honorary designation has been in place for twenty years. The dramatic property-value acceleration most residents have observed is recent — concentrated in roughly the past five to ten years. That timing does not line up with the 2006 designation. It lines up with a much broader transformation of Trussville:

• The expansion and beautification of the Cahaba Greenway and walking trail system.
• The growth of the Trussville Entertainment District into a regional destination.
• The renovation and reinvestment in Cahaba Elementary School (the historic Hewitt school building).
• Continued investment in the library, sports complex, and downtown business district.
• Broad citywide infrastructure and beautification improvements.

Cahaba Project property values are rising because the location is exceptional — walkable to amenities, in a strong school zone, in a city that is visibly investing in itself. Historic character contributes to that appeal. But the dominant driver is location and amenities, not the regulatory framework around historic preservation. That distinction matters when policy is being justified by appeal to property-value research that was conducted in very different contexts.

Second — the related point about who is actually buying. When buyers do purchase original cottages, the most common pattern is actually a positive one for the neighborhood. Young families specifically seek out the original homes. They often prefer the unrenovated ones because the price is more accessible, and because the buyer plans to either substantially renovate or rebuild a home they intend to live in long-term and raise children in. They are choosing this neighborhood deliberately. They are not flipping for profit; they are committing to the place.

Whether a young family ends up doing a major renovation or a full rebuild, the underlying outcome is the same: a household choosing to invest in Cahaba long-term. That is exactly the kind of household every neighborhood says it wants. The conversation about new-construction aesthetics is downstream of this more fundamental win.

The maintenance question the ordinance ignores — and the property-rights slope worth thinking about.

Worth raising directly. If the goal of the proposed ordinance is to preserve the historic character of the Cahaba Project, the rule does only one side of that job. It mandates strict aesthetic compliance on any homeowner who chooses to build new, rebuild after a fire or storm, or substantially renovate. It does not — and largely could not — require existing original-style homes to be maintained to a historic standard.

Anyone who walks the neighborhood today can see this for themselves. Many original 1938-style homes are in poor repair: peeling paint, rusting metal shingles, rotting wood window frames, weathered siding, sagging porches, neglected landscaping. The historic character those homes contribute to the streetscape is being degraded by neglect, not by replacement. The proposed ordinance does nothing about that. It regulates the visible-new while ignoring the visible-deteriorating.

If the honest question is "what most damages the historic character of the Cahaba Project today," neglect is a serious answer. A binding aesthetic ordinance on new construction does not address neglect. Incentives for preservation — the kind described in A Better Path Forward — actually do. Owners get rewarded for maintaining and restoring, not punished for adding a screened porch.

There is also a deeper principle worth naming. Once a city establishes that it can mandate aesthetic choices on private residential property — color, material, window style, roof line — there is no clean stopping point. Today it might be roofing materials and street-facing windows. The same logic could later extend to paint color, landscaping, porch furniture, holiday decorations, and any number of other personal choices. Government control over personal property does not tend to shrink once it has been established. It tends to expand. An inch of authority granted today is the foundation for a mile of authority claimed tomorrow.

Property rights are not absolute — there are legitimate restrictions a city can impose for genuine health, safety, and nuisance reasons. But the further restrictions reach into the aesthetic and personal, the more they conflict with what most American homeowners — across political lines — would consider basic ownership. That is a serious question worth weighing carefully before the precedent is set, not after.

The City hasn't kept up its own sidewalks — a real safety hazard. Fix the basics first.

The overlay is offered in the name of protecting the neighborhood — and, as the City frames it, the value of residents' homes. Fair enough. So it's worth asking what the City already owns and is already responsible for. Walk the Cahaba Project and you'll find public sidewalks — maintained by the City, not by homeowners — that have been left to deteriorate: concrete slabs heaved and split by tree roots, joints lifted inches out of alignment, crumbling edges. These are genuine trip hazards for children, older neighbors, and anyone pushing a stroller.

This isn't an aesthetic complaint. Uneven, displaced sidewalks are a recognized health-and-safety and accessibility (ADA) issue, and they sit squarely inside the City's existing duties — no new ordinance required. Repairing them protects residents in a concrete, immediate way that an aesthetic design-review board never will.

The honest question is one of priorities. Before holding homeowners to binding new standards on their own property, a City might first meet its own basic obligations in the same neighborhood: repair the hazardous sidewalks, screen the Public Works yard, and act on the maintenance-and-incentives approach in A Better Path Forward. Each delivers real benefit to Cahaba today — without reaching into anyone's property rights.

Heaved, root-lifted public sidewalk slabs in the Cahaba Project — trip hazards the City is responsible for maintaining.