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At the April 25th Town Council meeting, CHALT presented vigorous arguments why the Town needs to delay giving final approval to the design of a new road in the district. However, by a disappointing vote of 5 to 3, the new Council voted to approve extending Elliott Road through a flood zone to join up with Ephesus Road.
Mayor Hemminger and Council Member Nancy Oates voted to proceed along with Council members Michael Parker, Donna Bell and Karen Stegman, despite ample evidence that many elements of the planned extension will cause serious adverse consequences, including worsened flooding, major traffic difficulties, reduced pedestrian safety, and the unrecoverable loss of affordable housing. Council Members Allen Buansi, Hongbin Gu, and Rachel Schaevitz counseled caution and voted no. See the area flood map.
- More Affordable Housing Lost. In one fell swoop, the vote guaranteed the destruction of the affordable Park Apartments (200 units including many families), replacing them with precisely what we don’t need: more luxury rentals in a flood plain. Letter re Park Apartments
- Stormwater and flooding challenges remain. We requested more review to evaluate stormwater issues related to the road extension.
- Traffic issues on 15-501 remain unaddressed. Letter re traffic.
With this vote, the Town Council majority continues the disastrous legacy of the Mark Kleinschmidt – Sally Greene Council, whose members adopted the code in 2014. That was the Council that put in place the fast track approvals and weakened standards which have attracted the out-of-town investors who built the Berkshire Apartments on Elliott Road. Other developers are building three more similarly designed “Texas Donut” apartments that are antithetical to the kind of green, lively, pedestrian-oriented, district Town leaders said they had hoped to create in this part of town.
Read about the Council votes here. See list of Ephesus-Fordham, aka Blue Hill projects in the pipeline here.
Improving or abandoning the Code – a major CHALT goal. Improving the Ephesus Fordham (aka “Blue Hill”) form-based code has been a central focus of CHALT since the organization’s inception in 2015. As we feared at the time it was adopted, the form-based building code, which lowered standards for new development and excluded the public from the permit review process, has failed to deliver on the goals of bringing significant new retail and commercial development, moderately-priced housing, improved mobility for cars and people, and reduced flooding. In fact, 98% of the new development approved so far has been high-density apartments and parking decks, almost all of it priced for the most affluent households.
Before the code was approved in 2014, its proponents referred to the affordable retail and useful services in this part of town as a “blighted” area. Now, unfortunately, the description rings true, as we see the new but mostly empty apartments and storefronts the code has produced and our beloved merchants, such as Plaza Cleaners, Twig, Tarheel Barber Shop, and Grimball’s Jewelers, have fled or been forced out.
Form-based codes don’t address many important planning issues, such as how to obtain a desirable mix of uses (e.g., residential and commercial) in a given area, or providing transit. If the Town continues to side-step these major planning problems, we have a troubled future in store. These are the major planning issue that need to be addressed by the Council and the new manager.
- Transportation infrastructure is lagging behind town growth. Responding to citizen and advisory board encouragement, the Town of late has done some good work to get a town-wide mobility study up and running, but the model has deficiencies that have not been addressed. The most recent mobility study predicts gridlock on 15 – 501 (Fordham Blvd) by 2030. But to date, no measures have been taken to address the increase of people and cars townwide, and the immediate impacts of adding thousands of units to the Ephesus-Fordham District. The proposed Durham-Orange light rail line won’t help congestion on 15-501. In one short decade it will likely be physically impossible for pedestrians to cross the road.
See Del Snow’s letter to the Town Council.
- Flooding incidences will get worse. Initial promises from the Town that the form-based code district would reduce flooding problems in the lower Booker Creek watershed, one of the redevelopment’s major selling points, have not materialized. The code does require water quality treatment, but a number of factors guarantee that flooding will increase: (1) Adding impervious surface near the lowest point of the subwatershed; (2) thousands of square feet in the upper Booker Creek watershed have been permitted but not yet built; (3) a lack of resources, which are preventing the Town from implementing most of the measures recommended in a recent Lower Booker Creek watershed study; and (4) taking into account the reduced size of the water storage impoundment, additional impervious surface in the RCD resulting from the construction of Fordham Apartments, and the new buildings that will be added along the new road.
- The proposed affordable housing plan does not meet needs of those pushed out of Park Apartments. District wide, we are on track to lose more affordable units than we gain, despite the addition of the town subsidized affordable units on Legion Road. We had asked the counicl The Council needs to rectify a problem made by a past Town Council when they opted not to include in the form-based code (FBC) the requirement to build affordable for sale housing and denied the use of density bonuses to create incentives for developers to provide affordable rentals. The current Town Council, therefore should delay construction of the Elliott Rd Extension until we address the lost housing stock. $1000/mo is not affordable for the tenants now residing in the Park Apartments. The numbers cited by the Manager don’t add up. Greenfield Place and Greenfield Commons will provide 149 affordable units and Park Apartments 201 (net total 350). If the latter are gone, 200 families and over 400-500 people will be displaced. Proceeding with this proposal would not exceed the goal of creating 300 new affordable housing units within the Blue Hill District because the Manager has ignored the loss of units! By supplying 155 at higher AMIs we are still 46 units short, in addition to all the people who can’t afford the new rents. The new net total will be 103 new units, less than those supplied by Greenfield.
Molly McConnell shares the details of how we can do better.
Conclusion. As a result of the past two municipal elections, only two council members, Donna Bell and Michael Parker, remain on the town council who either voted for or promoted the code at the time of its adoption. This gives the new Council members an opportunity to make a clean break with the mistakes of the past and, with the benefit of experience, create the conditions for the kind of redevelopment in Ephesus-Fordham that the community has long said it wants.
Calling the Ephesus-Fordham redevelopment so far a “train wreck” is not an exaggeration because our Town Manager and his staff have dragged their feet on long-range planning for nearly a decade. Form-based code is a planning tool which, when well designed, can encourage the type of new development a community wants. Chapel Hill’s form-based code, however, still needs a major overhaul.