by KIRK ROSS
Very early on, it was evident that the effort to create Chapel Hill’s first Neighborhood Conservation District for the Northside neighborhood was not going to be easy. The meetings, held around a big conference table in the basement of Town Hall, were driven by a long-sought vision that somehow Northside could, through public policy, be protected. Specifically, that meant protection from the growing influx of students and the steady conversion of what were once family homes into off-campus housing.
With UNC growing rapidly, it meant, in short, swimming briskly against the tide. Driving the urgency at the time was a gross exaggeration of the term “duplex.â€
There were duplexes under construction that were aptly described by neighborhood advocates as “monstrosities.†They had four or five bedrooms a side and were designed to be built as big as the town would allow on the neighborhood’s relatively small plots. With shared kitchens, these large student-housing units were effectively mini-dorms. The neighbors and their allies saw them as a disconcerting signal that change was suddenly on a very fast track. To buy the new committee time to work, the town council imposed a moratorium on duplexes throughout Chapel Hill.
The group that met at Town Hall in 2003 was charged with charting a new course for the neighborhood and, through the new conservation-district process, a new course for the town in terms of neighborhood protection. Under the conservation-district process, the committee included representation of property owners, including people who either owned these new monstrosities or planned to do something like that on their own. That meant consensus was not going to be easy.
Usually when a neighborhood gets together and petitions the town, the people doing the organizing, gathering petitions getting people out to meetings and so on, are the actual residents – homeowners and renters. With the advent of the neighborhood-conservation process, we saw a very different constituency joining residents in the public discussions. Landlords and property investors were also at the table, protecting their interests. It’s a group that has always wielded some serious clout in Chapel Hill, but often behind the scenes. This time, they were doing so right out in the open.
For much of what the proponents of the conservation district aimed to do, there was consensus. But when it came to constraints on what a person could build on their property, there were clashes – and in the end, while the district rules that emerged were indeed a breakthrough, they were not nearly as stringent as many had hoped starting out.
So it is not so surprising to hear that almost a decade down the road the rules aren’t cutting it and that the constraints imposed and the town’s own extensive requirements for development are not deterring developers and speculators intent on carving up the neighborhood into more and more student-oriented rentals.
It’s right for the town council to take up a revision of the plan, just as it’s right, again, to call for a moratorium on new projects in the area.
Not only should the neighborhood-conservation rules particular to this area be fixed, but the lessons learned in how a plan plays out over time should also be incorporated into the way the town approaches all of its conservation districts.
And the new rules for Northside will have to take into account a different reality than that in 2003. With a new elementary school in the pipeline, Northside is about to change in even more dramatic ways.
History has that strange way of repeating itself. We are about to take a hard look at Northside again while the town is in the process of rewriting its comprehensive plan. The problems confronted today are very close to the same as the ones seen almost a decade ago and decades prior, long into our history.