The Board of Zoning Appeals is meeting later this evening 05/19/2025 at 7PM.
They will be taking up one variance request.
A homeowner on Memorial Drive is requesting a variance to allow them to keep a 6 foot tall fence that they erected along the front yard property line. The fence they installed replaced a previous fence that had been in place for decades. Appleton’s Zoning Ordinance allows fences along the front property line to be no more than 3 feet tall.
The applicant indicates that the variance is needed because there are registered sex offenders living in the area and drug use and alcohol consumption occurs in the area, all of which necessitate a high fence in order to shield children. Additionally, the lot is a corner lot, so it has two front yard property lines which limits their ability to have a usable yard an also erect a 6-foot fence, and the property was originally built in the 1880s.
City staff oppose the granting of a variance, indicating that the lot is a normal sized residential lot and the hardships outlined in the application “are general in nature, based on personal preference, self-created, and not based on dimensional limitations of the property.”
The staff report includes the following, somewhat odd sentence. “The amount of crime and security in this specific neighborhood appears to be based on persecution and is too general in nature to be used in the context of meeting the hardship criteria for this particular property.” I don’t know if they intended to use the word “perception” instead of “persecution”, but it’s hard for me to see how “persecution” could be directed against the owner of the property but also be “general in nature”.
View full meeting details here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1308717&GUID=EB88AC85-2514-407E-A87E-33F738345E7E
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