It’s September, which means Carrboro and Chapel Hill Town Council season is starting up again, which means a bunch of letters are rolling into the town council public inbox trying to stop proposals to build new housing.
The project in question is at 860 Weaver Dairy Road and was previously called Lullwater. Next week, the developer plans to present it to the Chapel Hill Town Council for feedback. That’s the first step before it would become a more formal proposal.
One letter writer says he doesn’t like the proposal because it’s “just rectangles on a piece of land,” which describes almost every house in existence and most other buildings (except of course for the octagonal Dean Dome), and which is what you do at the concept plan stage where an applicant is showing a general, um, “concept.” One writer cites Yogi Berra, another compares this project to a bad penny. The other complaints are the usuals: stormwater, traffic, noise pollution, fire, “not in the best interest of Chapel Hill residents,” density (e.g. townhomes), the proximity of I-40.
Here’s the thing: The single family homes down the street are closer to the interstate than this proposed project.
And presumably, some number of trees were cut down for every single one of the letter writers’ homes and they, too, live in structures that look rectangular from above. (We don’t have a lot of local yurts.) Moreover, a lot of the complaints in these letters have solutions already mapped out in the conceptual plan, which will certainly evolve after council feedback.
There are challenges with this site and improvements that can be made to this property–we’ll get to those in a minute–but there are also things that are decent about what’s on the table. Let’s start there:
It’s a proposal from a local developer who has listened to council and communities before
The project is being headed up by Ernie Brown, who lives in Chapel Hill. We often hear complaints about “out of town” developers–this guy is a local and he has a track record of incorporating council and community feedback in his previous projects.
It’s along the planned BRT line
This is exactly the corridor where dense housing should go, because the North-South Bus Rapid Transit station will be built along the corridor and transport people directly to UNC. Ideally, you want lots of people along that route so they have easy access to work.
The project proposes a greenway, so people who live there will be able to safely get around
Having non-car transportation options inside a neighborhood means more people will walk and bike safely. It’s within walking distance of a grocery store.
We need housing. This provides different types of housing which would presumably attract people at different stages in life who will be closer to their jobs. That’s good.
Our school district’s enrollment trend is a housing problem, as many people have pointed out. There will be units geared towards small families, as well as duplexes that would work for senior citizens. 15% of for-sale units would be available to households with income levels at 80% AMI; 10% of rentals will do the same.
Things that we’d like to see spelled out more
Stormwater mitigation
There’s no floodplain on the site, but there are floodplains south and east of the project. The proposal “intends to keep existing forest vegetation in much of the stream buffers.” But in a very reasonable letter to Town Council, resident Mia Burroughs asks that more details be provided about the eastern section of the project.
This is a project close to I-40
The initial plans state they will keep the tree barrier, which is good. We’d like more attention paid to potential noise and particle pollution. Current plans are to have a parking deck work as a barrier–that seems good. Are there other options as well?
Ensure walkability to grocery store
We’d love to see the greenway connect to the grocery store next door, so that people from this development (as well as the existing developments on each side of it) can more easily walk or bike to their errands and not have to get in their car for small trips.
Think big about the flex space
There’s a large piece of land currently labeled flex space, which the proposal says could become a hotel, small retail, or small service providers. There may be opportunities to think about raising the height of some parts of the structure to make this flex space larger and greener–we’d like to see more communal space for residents to relax and play.