photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

Construction work is underway on a new housing development called Beth's Ranch at the southeast corner of Sixth Street and George Williams Way.

News and notes from around town:

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There soon will be a new housing development in northwest Lawrence called Beth’s Ranch. It’s named as such because the site at the southeast corner of Sixth Street and George Williams Way for decades was home to a horse ranch.

I can’t say for certain what type of horses roamed the pastures there, but I’m guessing they weren’t race horses. It seems nothing on this property moves fast.

I first wrote about plans being filed for the Beth’s Ranch housing development in January 2022. Final approvals for the housing development were received a few weeks ago, and construction work on the streets and other infrastructure is now underway.

That means it has been essentially three years since the plans were first filed and the development on the property actually began. That is despite the fact that Lawrence real estate agents have been bemoaning a shortage of homes on the local market the entire time.

Developers might say that such a delay is instructive in understanding Lawrence’s affordable housing issues — it takes too long under the city’s approval processes to get a project from idea to reality.

City Hall leaders, though, also might say that a look at how the Beth’s Ranch project has changed during its three-year approval process might say something about how the city ultimately will improve housing affordability.

As approved, Beth’s Ranch will add 106 new housing units to Lawrence’s inventory — 24 of them single family homes and 82 of them townhomes, which are also known as duplexes.

When plans were filed for the property in early 2022, the idea was to have 80 homes — all of them single family houses. The number of acres in the development — about 20 acres — remained the same under both plans. What changed is the idea of density. City officials balked at the original plans, and asked the developer of Beth’s Ranch to come back with an idea that put more homes on the property.

In other words, people will be living closer together. That is a big strategy in Lawrence’s battle to make housing more affordable in the market.

At the time in 2022, the developer of the project — longtime Lawrence businessman Roger Johnson — told me decided to go with all single family homes because he thought buyers preferred those over duplexes. Now, the approved project has seen its number of single family homes reduced by 70%, with townhomes becoming the dominate type of housing.

This month, Johnson told me he expects the dominant type of buyer for the homes in Beth’s Ranch will be empty nesters, which are couples who are old enough that their kids have moved out of the house. Johnson said the development will have a homeowners association that will charge a fee to handle most of the maintenance duties in the development, which is often a selling point for empty nesters.

“I think we’ll get a lot of empty nesters because that seems to be the market right now,” Johnson said. “I’m not seeing a lot of families right now.”

Why that is the case is an important question for the housing market, and many other sectors of the community, with the school district likely topping the list of entities wanting an answer. It could be as simple as national demographic changes — couples having fewer children — or it could be a more local issue related to the type of jobs in the community, the price of housing in Lawrence, or perhaps, the type of housing that is being built. How important is the single family style of homes to families?

I didn’t get into such a philosophical discussion with Johnson. Instead, I just wanted to get an update on the project. On that front, construction is underway on the infrastructure, with the idea that homes could be under construction in the spring. Johnson said he expects multiple builders to buy lots in the new neighborhood. He anticipates homes being offered for sale, rather than the neighborhood becoming a rental community. At 106 housing units, Johnson said he thinks it is the largest housing development underway in Lawrence, currently.

However, it is not the largest housing development Johnson is working on. Johnson has a 125-lot housing development in the works in Eudora, which his two sons will take the lead on bringing to the market in the coming months. That project, which is in south Eudora on farm land that is west of Eudora High School, is planned to include a mix of single family homes, duplexes and a small retirement community, he said.

“I think Eudora is a better market than Lawrence, right now,” Johnson said. “There are just more jobs going to the east.”

Eudora is the closest Douglas County community to the new $5 billion, 5,000-job Panasonic factory in De Soto that will produce batteries for electric vehicles. That plant, which starts production soon, hasn’t produced a boom in new residents for Eudora, as many of the plant’s jobs are expected to be filled by residents who already live in the greater Kansas City metro area. But Johnson said he still thinks the community will see steady and longterm growth as more businesses locate near the plant, and as workers at the plant eventually decide they want to live closer to where they work.

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Talking about longterm projects, there’s one local restaurant owner who has been involved in a Christmas day labor for more than 20 years — and this Christmas he got some national recognition for it.

Doug Holiday — owner of Lawrence’s Biggs BBQ and Burgers by Biggs — was featured in a national Fox News story on Christmas Day. Holiday is on year 21 of preparing turkeys for the annual Community Christmas Dinner at the First United Methodist Church.

Holiday and family members have prepared and cooked an estimated 1,300 turkeys that have helped feed about 20,000 people, Holiday said in the Fox News article.

“So that’s a pretty good record, I think,” Holiday told Fox.

But it is a record that has had its share of adversity, including this year. Holiday was diagnosed with prostate cancer at the beginning of 2024, he told Fox. It is his third bout with cancer. We wrote about Holiday in 2013, when he was battling non-Hodgkins’ lymphoma, which did not stop him from leading the turkey-cooking efforts.

We highlighted Holiday and his efforts in an article that year, which included a photo of Holiday with his then-teenage sons who had shaved their heads in solidarity with their dad, who had undergone 600 hours of chemotherapy treatment.

Mike Yoder/Journal-World Photo.Doug Holiday, owner of Biggs BBQ, 2429 Iowa, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in the summer of 2013. After treatments over the past 4 months, he has had positive test results. Holiday and his family will continue their tradition of cooking turkeys on Christmas eve for the Lawrence Community Christmas Wednesday, at First United Methodist Church, 946 Vermont St. In the photo at left, Doug’s sons shaved their heads to match his bare scalp on his birthday, after treatments this last August. From left are sons Jacob, 16, Seth, 19, Ben 13, and Doug.

Those sons are now adults, but return each year to help with the turkey tradition, Holiday told Fox.

“And it means a lot to me,” he said in the piece.

Holiday’s wife, Shawn Holiday, also told the Fox crew that the support from the community continues to be amazing.

“It’s really nice that everybody does jump in to help out the people that need it,” Shawn Holiday said. “I mean, we’ve had things in our personal lives that have, you know, gone sideways. But even if Doug is not feeling well, he would never let the community down.”