FARGO – The subfloors were rotten and the walls had black mold when Lon Johnston moved into the 110-year-old house in the Oak Grove area a year ago.

It looked like hell, but it's where the Vietnam vet suffering from chronic pain thought he could get a new start.

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"I'm trying to save the house," he recently said from his living room, which, like all the other rooms, he and his daughter Paige had gutted and renovated. "That's what I want to do. It's my goal. I've moved so many times now I'm tired of it."

Johnston said he feels like he might have inspired others on his block to improve their properties. After he cleaned his yard, he noticed they did, too.

But now he's worried his effort at reviving his corner of the neighborhood may come to naught.

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Developers are proposing a four-story apartment building one house to the north and a five-story apartment building to the east behind his house. Johnston soon joined neighbors in protest, hoping to reduce the projects' impact on their community.

They're not alone. Residents in two other north-end neighborhoods are also protesting big proposed apartment buildings. These are neighborhoods traditionally dominated by single-family homes and built around elementary schools. Many longtime residents fear that as developers and landlords buy up houses, families will leave to avoid problems with parking and other disturbances, schools already struggling with enrollment will be forced to close, and community ties will unravel.

They've asked the city for help, but city leaders are unsure on how they should intervene to preserve neighborhoods.

City Commissioner Melissa Sobolik, who is also on the Planning Commission, said the city is entering new territory as it emphasizes infill, meaning redevelopment of existing land, over sprawl. "The challenge is finding that balance between what the market wants and what the neighborhoods want - what their culture and their character is and how to preserve that," she said. "And I don't know if we've figured that out yet."

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Profit motive

Residents are opposing four major projects. All would bring significantly higher population density to their neighborhoods.

Two are in the Oak Grove area of the Horace Mann neighborhood where Johnston lives, not far from the city's booming downtown. One is in the old Ponyland area just north of the Northport neighborhood. And one is at the edge of the Roosevelt neighborhood near North Dakota State University, which has seen enrollment boom 20 percent in the past 10 years.

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In some cases, there are already apartment buildings in the area, but the ones developers want to build have two to four times the density of surrounding land. One of the Oak Grove apartment buildings, for example, would have the equivalent of 100 residential units per acre while the most that now exists is 25 per acre. Some would replace existing single-family homes and some would be built on vacant lots.

When residents ask why single-family homes aren't being built to complement what's already there, developers say it doesn't make financial sense when the cost of buying properties and of construction are considered. Many residents have urged developers to at least reduce the size of the buildings to reduce the impact.

City Planner Jim Gilmour said the market favors apartments in these areas because developers can earn more from one piece of land by stacking dozens of renters on it than to build a house for one family. Apartment builders, as a result, can afford to spend more on land than anyone else can and that drives prices up, he said.

New conflicts

Most city leaders and city staff agree that neighborhood preservation is a goal, but it's not clear how important.

"The city absolutely has a role in neighborhood preservation," Sobolik said. "The heart of our city are strong neighborhoods. At the same time, neighborhoods do change. Things change. Homeownership changes. The culture of the neighborhood changes. I think what the city is going through now is some growing pain."

For most of its history, Fargo has grown outward into farmland where there are few conflicts. In recent years, city leaders concerned with the cost of providing services to lower-density sprawl, have focused on growing inward. But that can cause conflict with existing residents and the city doesn't yet have a very clear mechanism for resolving those conflicts, said Planning Administrator Nicole Crutchfield.

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For example, three of the four big north-end apartment buildings will require zoning changes to come to fruition, but the law laying out the criteria for such changes is vague and possibly contradictory. One criteria is zoning changes must align with the city's vision for growth. But that vision includes neighborhood preservation, infill, higher-density growth and mixing apartments and single-family homes, values that can come into conflict as city leaders are finding.

Commissioner Dave Piepkorn, who lives in the north end, said it's a lot easier to vote for outward growth than inward growth. "Because of all the infill things, there's neighbors that come out, which is good for them, but it's almost an incentive for sprawl."

City leaders also need to keep in mind that the city's population is growing rapidly, as a recent Census estimate shows, and all these people need affordable housing, Mayor Tim Mahoney said.

What can the city do?

As challenging as conflict resolution can be, the city is not without tools for neighborhood preservation, including some from the recent past.

When Roosevelt residents were fighting other high-density apartment buildings in 2009, the city created a special "university mixed-use" zoning in the neighborhood's western half that already had a lot of rental units. The idea was to drive high-density apartments there and spare the rest of the neighborhood. Residents protesting the latest apartment proposal said the developer should have put his project in the UMU instead.

In 2003 and 2004, the city worked to revitalize several older neighborhoods, including Roosevelt and Horace Mann in the north end, using tax incentives to encourage replacement of dilapidated houses with new houses aimed at families.

Commissioner Mike Williams, who has been a champion for infill development, said the city is now looking to overhaul its zoning code, at least for older neighborhoods experiencing high-density growth. New buildings should fit in the context of existing buildings rather than overwhelm them, he said. "All growth isn't good. All infill isn't good."