From the beginning: Hoover spreads its wings

When the city of Hoover first tried to incorporate in 1964, the effort failed by a vote of 119 to 87.

But tenacity won out. A second vote taken in 1967 with a smaller tract of land just west of U.S. 31 in the Green Valley area proved successful, and with a vote of 100 to 45, the town of Hoover was born with 406 residents.

Now in its 50th year, the city has blossomed through annexations and aggressive home building to a population estimated to exceed 87,000. Hoover has grown into the second largest city in the Birmingham metro area and the sixth largest in the state. It has developed into a destination for jobs, retail shopping and recreation.

The city began as the dream of William Hoover Sr., an insurance man who started buying property along U.S. 31 in the 1950s when he learned the state was going to widen the highway to four lanes.

He helped establish the Green Valley Country Club in 1959, and more homes and businesses followed.

Frank Skinner Jr., who moved to Hoover in 1963 and later became the city’s longest-serving mayor, said some of the early homes built in the Green Valley area sat empty for quite a while until South Central Bell split off from Southern Bell and moved to Birmingham.

A lot of those families chose to locate in the Green Valley area, creating a demand for new homes, Skinner said.

Once the city incorporated, city fathers sought to keep property values high and property taxes low and to pay for city services with sales taxes from a growing retail base, Skinner said.

Aggressive annexations

In the 1970s, more shopping centers, car dealerships and other businesses popped up along U.S. 31, but perhaps the biggest shot in the arm came to Hoover in 1980 with the annexation of the 3,000-acre Riverchase community, which former city attorney Jack Harrison called “a gnat swallowing an elephant.”

Current Hoover Mayor Frank Brocato said the city owes a great deal of gratitude to businessman John Harbert for having the vision for the Riverchase community and bringing it into Hoover.

The Riverchase development had more than 4,800 home sites but also nearly 900 acres of commercial property. That included land for a corporate office park that has attracted thousands of jobs and the Riverchase Galleria campus, which made Hoover a retail shopping mecca for visitors throughout the Southeast.

The Galleria opened in 1986 with four anchor stores, a 17-story office tower and a 339-room hotel. Within 10 months, the mall increased the city of Hoover’s sales tax revenues by 61 percent. The city in 2016 received about $12.7 million in sales tax revenues from the Galleria, which accounts for about 18 percent of the city’s total sales tax revenues, records show. Total annual sales volume on the mall campus has grown from $195 million in 1987 to more than $423 million in 2016.

Hoover also grew significantly with the annexation of the Bluff Park and Shades Mountain communities in 1985. Those annexations were not as financially rewarding as some others, but they put Hoover’s population at a point where it could operate under the same annexation rules as Birmingham, Skinner said.

Hoover spread its wings to the east and the west. To the east, Hoover snatched up about 1,000 acres of prime commercial land in Inverness, plus 4,000 acres in Meadow Brook and Greystone. To the west, the city annexed thousands of acres off Alabama 150 and South Shades Crest Road, with most of it owned by U.S. Steel.

That included Trace Crossings, which started out with 1,200 acres and now has more than 2,200 acres, and the 1,600-acre Ross Bridge development, for which land was annexed in 2002.

U.S. Steel still has an annexation agreement that will allow more than 2,000 additional houses south of Shelby County 52.

Home building has flourished in Hoover. During the past 20 years, the city has approved 9,906 single-family building permits, with an average of 495 per year, city records show. The peak year during that 20-year period was 2005, when 823 single-family permits were approved. Home building slowed when the Great Recession hit in 2008, but Hoover was not hit as hard as other areas. There were between 310 and 380 single-family building permits issued every year but one since 2010, including 358 permits in 2016.

The city has also added 481 townhomes and 1,562 apartments since the beginning of 1999, records show.

Growth philosophy

Skinner, who oversaw much of Hoover’s expansion, insists U.S. Steel didn’t get sweetheart deals. He only favored annexations when they made business sense, he said.

Skinner said he wanted to see Hoover get bigger for economic growth, strength and vitality.

“We could have had a very small, little city with 500 people and control of U.S. 31,” he said.

But the purpose of a city is to support the neighborhoods around it as much as possible and increase the quality of life for people, Skinner said. Developers wanted their homes to be in Hoover because of the amenities the city offers, and the city has gained by having quality housing developments and commercial developments that support them, he said.

And sometimes, it’s good to annex property to keep it from harming the city, Skinner said. People don’t want to be next to something undesirable, he said.

“I always thought if you can see it, hear it or smell it, you need to annex it and try to control it,” Skinner said.

Harrison, who was Hoover’s city attorney from 1967-98, wanted to annex a 10-foot-wide strip of land 30 to 35 miles through the woods to land near the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance to take advantage of spinoff business from the auto plant. But Skinner said he felt it was too far away from the city’s base.

Some people have criticized the city’s fast growth, but Skinner said sometimes when the door of opportunity opens, you either go through it or lose it.

“Sometimes it’s not always when you’d like to do something; it’s when you can do something,” he said.

Numerous people have complained that Hoover has too many apartments and rental properties (61 percent of the housing is owner-occupied). Skinner said much of the apartment land in Hoover was already zoned for apartments before it came into the city.

Numerous amenities

So what’s drawing all these people to Hoover?

Brocato said it’s a combination of a lot of things, including a great school system, low crime rate, strong public safety and other city services, housing availability and affordability, and access to great parks and natural resources such as the Cahaba River, 350-acre Moss Rock Preserve nature park and Veterans Park off Valleydale Road.

Mary Milton, a Realtor who moved to Hoover in 1970 at age 12 and who does at least 30 percent of her business in the city, agreed. The school system is the No. 1 reason she hears people give for moving to Hoover, but it’s also affordable, she said.

“You find a lot of different price ranges,” Milton said.

A lot of people love the schools in Mountain Brook and Vestavia Hills, but homes there tend to be more expensive, she said. A first-time homebuyer in Hoover can find something under $150,000 and still get quality schools, she said. Homewood has good schools, too, but homes there are overpriced, she said. “You can’t go to Homewood now and buy anything. It’s ridiculous.”

There are affordable homes in Shelby County communities such as Helena, Pelham and Alabaster, but they’re farther away from downtown Birmingham, where many people work, Milton said. Hoover also is convenient to shopping and a variety of churches and has a diverse population in terms of age and race, she said.

In 1980, U.S. Census data showed Hoover was 97 white, 2 percent black and less than 1 percent Asian. By 2016, the city had changed to 73 percent white, 17 percent black and 6 percent Asian, according to estimates by the Environmental Systems Research Institute. Hoover’s Hispanic population has grown from less than 1 percent in 1990 to an estimated 5.7 percent in 2016, according to ESRI.

Brocato said he and many others consider that diversity to be a strength. 

“We’re doing it right. We look like America,” he said. “We live next door to each other, attend school with each other.”

Hoover home values also have held up, Milton said. She now lives in the same home her parents bought for about $40,000 in the 1970s, and it’s now worth about $300,000, she said.

The median home value in 2016 was $267,330, and the median household income was $74,717, according to ESRI.

Charles Ball, executive director for the Regional Planning Commission of Greater Birmingham, said he grew up in Birmingham and remembers taking Sunday drives to Hoover with his parents as a child in the 1970s and working at the Galleria for three years right after it opened.

“It’s been pretty phenomenal,” he said of the city’s growth over the decades.

Numerous larger cities such as Birmingham have seen cities similar to Hoover spring up next to them that serve as large employment bases and more than just a suburb, Ball said. Hoover’s strong school system and available land and jobs have all been a part of that growth, and the highway network that includes Interstate 459, Interstate 65 and U.S. 31 doesn’t hurt at all, he said. “It’s just an extremely convenient location.”

Hoover’s growth has allowed it to gain influence on decision-making bodies for the metro area, including the Metropolitan Planning Organization (which decides how federal highway dollars are spent), the Birmingham Water Works Board and the Birmingham-Jefferson County Transit Authority, Ball said. “I just see that influence in the region continuing to grow.”