Here's a question from @KentuckyNativeGardens on YouTube. They ask: how many acres were added in the nineteen ninety-six urban service area expansion?

About eight square miles, which works out to around forty-two hundred acres. That expansion in ninety-six was actually the last time Lexington touched the Urban Service Boundary until just recently. It included the Hamburg Area, along with a couple other spots around the county.

That's a pretty big chunk of land. How much of it actually got developed?

Only about fifty percent of those forty-two hundred acres have been developed over the past twenty-five years. Nearly half of it remains undeveloped. And here's something interesting that came up during all the recent debates about expansion - none of the development that did happen provided the affordable housing that was promised back then.

So there's still a lot of room to grow from that original expansion before we'd even need more land?

Exactly. That's been one of the big talking points. There are over seventeen thousand acres inside the current boundary that can still be developed or redeveloped. The whole debate about whether to expand again really centers around whether we should be looking outward or focusing on infill development in areas that are already served by city infrastructure.

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