VALPARAISO | City officials have heard the public hue and cry that the city already has too many apartments, but Valparaiso City Administrator Bill Hanna and Planning Director Craig Phillips say they still have a place in the housing picture in Valparaiso.

"Our position has been that we want to focus on all the rungs of the housing ladder, and apartments have to be a part of that," Hanna said. "It's difficult to make a blanket statement about apartments being good or bad. What we've focused on is keeping them out of the greenspace areas and putting them in the downtown or areas like around Valparaiso University."

He said a complex needs to "fit into the character and the economic goals of the community."

Hanna said officials look at a variety of worries when it comes to apartments.

"How do they look and act economically in a 25-year scenario? Is the owner going to keep them and will he continue to make the investment to keep them attractive? Those are the considerations for greenfield areas along with the impact on the adjacent properties," he said.

Although the council has resisted some multifamily development as a result of resident protests, that doesn't mean the city is opposed to all multifamily housing.

In addition to apartments fulfilling certain redevelopment strategies, condominiums provide people just starting out with a chance to build equity that eventually can lead to buying a home.

Two types of apartment projects are proving popular right now in the city. Uptown East, a combination commercial and apartment development in the city's Eastgate commercial corridor includes about 185 apartments that will be marketed for students at nearby Valparaiso University. The other type of project receiving a lot of support is living space for the elderly.

"We want to consider everybody's needs but in a sensible way," Hanna said. "We want to be a welcoming community and one that welcomes its children, and to do that, you need apartments, too."

It's believed the city's housing stock is about evenly divided between single-family homes and apartments or condos. The city intends to get a more exact tally as part of the planned rental registration program it hopes to implement during the next couple of years. Phillips said there's no magic formula for calculating the right mix of housing types.

"We are a central city with a government center, so we have more variety than some outlying towns," Phillips said. "We might not have as much as urban areas. We have a balance of rental and home ownership opportunities, but we need to be cautious where the market appears to be saturated as opposed to developing in green space areas.

"Our planning ordinances are aligned to further that objective of encouraging apartments in the downtown areas where there is a central business district and transit to support them. There are provisions to develop a planned community where apartments would be part of the overall mix, but we are not looking to develop hundreds of apartments in a greenfield site like in the 1980s and 1990s."

The city's new unified development ordinance not only focuses on rental units in the downtown, it also raises the aesthetic bar to require a minimum use of higher quality materials.

"Apartments provide living opportunities all across the board and are not just for low-income people," Phillips said. "There is the perception that certain types of apartments are oversaturated, but it is more an issue of the number than of the apartments themselves."

As to whether apartments are more prone to crime problems, both Phillips and the police said it's a matter of having a large number of people in a small area that makes it seem that way. Police are called to shopping centers and college campuses more often than they are to homes because of people's proximity to each other.

"Code enforcement is the same challenge with apartments as it is with homeowners," Phillips said. "Communication with absentee landlords sometimes makes it more difficult. We use the same tools we do for homeowners, and eventually we get through. There are not too many cases where we don't get compliance."