West Lawrence apartment proposal returns to site denied last year

A 176-unit apartment plan is back for one of west Lawrence’s most sensitive tracts, tucked between The Jayhawk Club’s fairways and a row of existing homes near Quail Run and Crossgate Drive. The new filing returns to the same 17-acre site south of the club’s main parking lot after the Lawrence City Commission rejected a 200-unit version on Dec. 9, 2025.

The latest plan is smaller than the one turned down last year, and smaller than an earlier May 2025 version that called for 204 apartments, 408 bedrooms and about 370 parking spaces. The rejected design would have filled the site with 17 buildings, a clubhouse and a pool, with three-story structures about 30 feet tall. It also would have required the tee boxes for hole No. 7 to be moved. Even with fewer units, the project still reaches across the same ground beside the No. 7 fairway and toward hole No. 13, leaving the basic neighborhood question unchanged: how much apartment density fits on a golf-course edge surrounded by established homes?

That question already worked its way through city hall once. The Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commission voted 4-3 against the earlier plan in September 2025, and the City Commission followed with a 4-1 denial in December after more than 20 people spoke against it. Commissioners focused on neighborhood impacts, especially stormwater concerns, and nearby residents raised flooding and drainage worries tied to the sloping site. Some also pointed to Thomas Fritzel’s public record, including convictions tied to asbestos disposal work at The Jayhawk Club and a guilty plea in a separate Oread Hotel tax-refund conspiracy case.

The new filing revives the same tension that has shaped Lawrence’s housing debate for years. A City of Lawrence affordable housing study found that more than half of renters and many homebuyers cannot afford current prices, and Lawrence issued just 36 single-family home permits in 2025. That shortage gives the proposal real weight, especially in a city that needs more places for people to live. But the location still puts traffic, drainage, golf-course views and neighborhood character at the center of the review, and those are the same issues that stopped the first attempt.