April 10, 2025

Empire Cos. is rethinking its approach to developing a new residential neighborhood in Harrisburg.

Voters on Tuesday turned down a plan to rezone part of the 115-acre Birdie View development, leaving the entire property designated as single-family residential zoning.

The development was to include 60 to 70 lots in its first phase, a mix of single-family homes and owner-occupied townhomes and twin homes. A future phase included leased townhomes. The development is east of Louise Avenue near Adventure Elementary.

The referendum was voted down by a margin of 121 votes, or 58 percent to 42 percent.

“I feel like there was a fair amount of misinformation surrounding safety, which seems like it stuck,” Empire co-owner Brady Hyde said. “We’ll still come back with a plan and hopefully just be more proactive in the necessary steps and information and requirements to hopefully provide more people some comfort around safety.”

The development planned to use multiple access points that already exist, and Hyde said the company was working through the development process for approvals the way it typically would.

“We’ve gone through the regular development process in talking with the city engineering department and the Lincoln County highway superintendent. We’ve had those conversations and laid out a plan,” he said.

“This development went down the same process every other developer goes down. I was underestimating how much misinformation would take hold and how much alarm it would cause.”

One of those points involved an asphalt stretch of road that feeds traffic to the school, which Hyde said the city will require to be built as a street that meets city design standards no matter how the land is developed.

The property likely isn’t realistic for all single-family housing, at least for his company, he said.

“It’s not like we’re making the market. We’re following the market,” he said. “People have trended toward attached homes due to price points and lifestyle choices, so we’re doing nothing more than providing what the market wants, so that was our motivation.”

He owns the land and would need to go back through the process of seeking a zoning change to build what his company typically builds in an area such as this.

“I’m not patting ourselves on the back, but this was a nice multifamily product. Nicer than the product I lived in when I moved to Sioux Falls,” he said.

It was proposed as “the exact same neighborhood” his company is building in multiple areas of Sioux Falls, including 41st Street and Ellis Road, 57th Street and Veterans Parkway, 41st Street and Six Mile Road, and 69th Street and Southeastern Avenue.

“It’s nothing different than we’ve done over and over again,” he said. “Although we had way more open area percentage in this development relative to what we’ve done and what most developers do regardless of price point.”

There were about 35 to 40 acres of conservation or natural resource land that was envisioned as a partnership with the city to provide walking trails and nature area.

“I think (Harrisburg residents) would have been pleasantly happy with the exception of maybe a few of the loudest voices that were there from the onset,” Hyde said.

Without a plan for the entire development, it’s hard to make the numbers pencil out to begin only single-family homes, he added. The infrastructure needed to service them “gets a little front-loaded,” he added. “We can do it. I just don’t know if it’s the proper time.”

As for whether he would come back with a revised plan and look to adjust zoning again, “I’m definitely not ruling it out,” he said. “But we have to see what our options are and probably start scratching our heads against next week.”