By Kirk Ross
Staff Writer
In their first meeting back after the summer break, members of the Carrboro Board of Aldermen picked up where they left off, reviewing another large downtown project and considering the best means of adding the town’s stock of affordable housing.
Tuesday night at Town Hall, the board, all sporting recently acquired Carrboro Jaguars T-shirt, opted to continue deliberation on the proposed Alberta project — a four-story residential and retail building on the corner of Roberson Street and Sweet Bay Place.
The project by Carr Mill Investment Limited Partnership totals 46,340 square feet, with 6,772 square feet of retail on the ground floor, 23 residential units and 69 parking spaces. Of the residential units, there will be three one-bedroom units, 17 two-bedroom units and three three-bedroom units.
While the project has received favorable reviews as it’s made its way through the town advisory board process, residents in the area, especially those along nearby Carr Street and Maple Avenue, are worried about the construction phase and the long-term impacts of it and other multi-story downtown projects.
“We already have big traffic nightmares in Carrboro,†Maple Avenue resident Mitch Virchick said in an interview Wednesday. “As walkable as Carrboro is and as walkable as [the board] wants Carrboro to be, cars are a fact of life.â€
Virchick said that with several large projects planned for downtown, the hundreds of new residents will add to an already serious congestion problem.
“Downtown Carrboro’s already a bottleneck,†he said. Virchick said he’d like to see the town revisit opening a connection to the Roberson Place neighborhood through the town-owned Rand Road as part of an effort to expand connectivity to downtown.
Even though he’s concerned about the impact, Virchick said he’s not opposed to the Alberta project.
At the board meeting Tuesday, Martha Arnold, also of Maple Avenue, asked the town to maintain the screening along the edge of the property. The plants that make up the screen, she said, are beginning to die off. She also asked that the town think carefully about the proper mix of retail and residential when it comes to downtown properties. “I sure would like to see mixed use mean more than one to eight commercial to residential,†Arnold said.
The board is scheduled to take up the Alberta project again at its meeting next, Tuesday at Town Hall. The meeting begins at 7:30 p.m.
One item the board will have to decide before the project can move forward is how to deal with affordable housing. Town rules require that four units in the project meet affordability criteria. Instead of offering the units through the Orange County Land Trust, though, Alberta’s developer wants to submit a payment in lieu, something the board has been increasingly reluctant to do.
But Land Trust executive director Robert Dowling asked the board to consider the idea since the Land Trust is looking at an influx of roughly 100 condominiums through projects recently approved in Chapel Hill.
“How many condos do we need and how many condos can we possibly sell?†he said.
Dowling told board members that one-bedroom condos may prove harder to move than homes and town homes with multiple bedrooms and that it’s more complicated due to fees and assessments to ensure that condos will remain affordable over time.
The amount of money the payment in lieu option would yield has not been determined as yet, but Dowling offered an estimate of roughly $30,000 per unit.
Carrboro Mayor Mark Chilton said Wednesday that it’s clear the board will need to set up some guidelines and procedures for dealing with payments in lieu.
While the board will take the Land Trust’s situation into account, Chilton said there is a strong desire to make sure affordable housing is being built.
“This is the first time we’ve dealt with affordable condos downtown,†he said. “It’s hard to say how hard or how easy they are to sell.â€
Chilton said one argument in favor of not accepting the payment in lieu and requiring that Alberta include the affordable units is that board members have consistently heard concerns raised about how expensive it is to live downtown.