After nearly a year of planning and deliberation, the Chapel Hill Town Council has approved a comprehensive guide for developers seeking to build along West Rosemary Street.

Speaking in her capacity as a municipal senior planner, Rae Buckley explained that the guide is intended to address the desires of both residents and developers.

“The recognition that what the community is looking for is lower density, more amenities, more community benefits,” she relayed. “What the market — because of the cost of land — is set to go after is more multifamily apartments and high-rise condos,”

The guide was requested by council members to keep all potential developments in the area congruent with town standards for aesthetics and heritage preservation.

Council Member Michael Parker explained that the benefits of development are also expected to be conferred upon Northside, an adjacent historic black neighborhood.

“I think the notion here is that West Rosemary Street is embedded in the Northside community, and so as there are benefits created as Rosemary Street develops, some of those benefits should be shared with the broader Northside community,” he figured.

Recommendations on architecture and accessibility are included in the guide, but it also obliges prospective developers to make community benefit agreements.

According to Council Member George Cianciolo, those agreements may confound the development process due to their ambiguity and the amount of time needed to secure them.

“The problem I have with the community benefit agreement is it’s a whole [other] negotiation, and very frankly, I think the guide is great, but I think any developer looking at this is going to say, ‘Well, I’m still not sure what it’s going to take to do development,'” he opined.

A public presentation on the guide was made in February to determine whether community members were comfortable with plans to manage the modernization of the area.

Those plans were criticized on Monday by local resident Clem Self, who urged council members to consider the needs of the community before the profits of developers.

“You need to remember first: this is a neighborhood,” she declared. “This is not just a bunch of people that are going to be behind a wall; we live there, day in and day out.”

Council members spent nearly two hours ruminating on the guide before voting to approve it, with Parker noting that the recommendations may be too idealistic.

“One of the recurring themes I hear is that promises are made to us but then they don’t get kept,” he relayed. “I’m just horribly concerned that this guide is making a number of promises […] to the community that we really don’t know if we can keep at this point.”

Potential upsets notwithstanding, Council Member Nancy Oates stressed the importance of formalizing the guide as part of the master municipal plan known as Chapel Hill 2020.

“The biggest points of contention come because the commissioners look at these guidelines […] as rules, and the applicants look at them as suggestions,” she stated. “If this is really what we’re thinking of, we need to codify it and put it as part of the comprehensive plan.”

The motion to approve the guide and incorporate it into that plan was approved by a seven-to-two vote, with council members George Cianciolo and Jessica Anderson dissenting.

Image by Lord Aeck Sargent.

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