A South Carolina developer, OTO Development, is proposing the construction of a new 4-story hotel on West Rosemary Street in Chapel Hill.
While the developer has not yet announced which brand would label this particular hotel, there is a desire to make this location more upscale and make it accessible to the many of the retail and dining spots found downtown.
OTO told the Community Design Commission that the creation of this new hotel would serve as a positive addition to the town for a number of reasons, including numerous job opportunities, both for construction and for the hotel itself; creating thousands of dollars in tax revenue annually; and will be another piece to the Chapel Hill Downtown Partnership’s project called Rosemary Imagined, which is a conceptualized area of Rosemary Street that seeks to bring further entrepreneurial and technological expansions.
Executive Director of the Chapel Hill Downtown Partnership, Meg McGurk, says she is in complete support of the new hotel as it will help realize their plans of making Rosemary Street the new hotspot in downtown Chapel Hill.
“We know that the community has already said that it should be the entrepreneurial and innovative hub for our entire community,” McGurk says. “More retail opportunities, more multi-family housing: those are some of the visions that have come out of that process, and now we have expanded it to all of downtown. But that particular site where this hotel is proposed was one of the opportunity sites that came out of the Rosemary Imagined plan.”
McGurk also lists the number of reasons as to why this new proposed hotel at this location would impact the community in a variety of positive ways.
“Having another fantastic hotel downtown adds to our commercial tax base. We see it adds jobs to downtown. It adds vitality and more visitors downtown. We see tourism increasing here in Orange County. We want to capture those folks that are coming to Chapel Hill and Carrboro so that they are not staying in hotels in Durham or Wake; we want them here. It’s a good location for a hotel downtown.”
For more information on the Rosemary Imagined plan, click here.
