Mayor breaks ground on Davis Park Community Center

The center is scheduled for completion by the end of 2024. 

Lexington, Ky (WTVQ): Mayor Linda Gorton joined the Community Land Trust Wednesday morning to break ground on a new community center located in the Davis Park neighborhood.

Byron Mitchell, the president of Community Land Trust, lived in the Davis Park neighborhood his whole life. “We’ve been on waiting on this area to be redeveloped for over 60 years,” he said. “When you think about things in that nature for it come to fruition is a great thing to see for this neighborhood.”

The community center is part of a wide-ranging project that the community has been working on for more than 25 years. The project addresses environmental transportation, housing, and social justice issues in the heart of Lexington. This community center will be the hub for the Davis Park Neighborhood.

“Now, when we have this community center right here in the middle of the neighborhood,” Mitchell said. “When you have kids, you have a park going in it’s a whole lot of things for them to do to keep them off the street.”

Once construction is complete, the community center will be a 3,800 square foot building that will house conference rooms, a technology room, and a room dedicated to the unique history of the neighborhood.

Mitchell says this is a part of land trust to attract affordable housing and a new five-acre park, that’s currently under construction. He says this construction gives people folks a sense of pride. “This groundbreaking is more than construction of a community, it’s about building a community that in the past was overlooked and forgotten,” he said.

The center is scheduled for completion by the end of 2024.