City Council Approves Ninth Street Development Plan

Following a strong show of support from OWDNA and the community at large, the City Council has approved the Ninth Street Development Plan in its original form. The vote was unanimous 5-0. This is great news for our community and shows that power of action by citizens who are concerned about the impact unrestricted development can have on their community can have. The article from the Herald Sun describing the issue in more detail is reprinted after the break.

Council approves Ninth Street rezoning

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By Ray Gronberg

gronberg@heraldsun.com; 419-6648

DURHAM — A 5-0 City Council vote on Monday completed work on a zoning proposal that officials hope spurs dense, transit-friendly development in a 115-acre portion of the Ninth Street commercial district.

Monday’s vote approved new land-use regulations for the district and applied them specifically to the properties there.

It came more than three years after the council OK’d policy guidelines for the district that planners used as the framework for the new regulations.

Members old and new of the council were pleased to see the job finished. “I am going to vote for this, and happily so,” said Councilman Steve Schewel, who took office in December. “We’re making a major step.”

The one dispute the council had to settle on Monday was settled in favor of neighborhood groups who wanted something of a buffer zone set up on the south side of Green Street.

That drew opposition from developer Glenn Dickson, who’s planning a large mixed-use project on the corners of Green, Ninth and Iredell streets.

Dickson has a city approval for the project in hand and in theory wouldn’t be affected by Monday’s decision.

But he dispatched a representative, landscape architect George Stanziale, to signal opposition to a restriction on building height within the buffer zone.

City/County Planning Director Steve Medlin said after the meeting that Dickson will have to follow the new rules if he doesn’t secure building permits by the start of 2016, or if he asks officials before then to change the approved plan.

Neighborhood groups insisted that the new zoning rules include a 45-foot height limit on the edge of Green Street, on the theory that because of differences in residential and commercial architectural standards that would be more likely to encourage developers to include homes in a mixed-use project.

Dickson in a 2009 deal with neighborhood groups and city officials agreed to include homes in his project and in return got neighborhood support for a 50-foot height limit along Green Street.

But that deal, formerly sealed in a zoning vote specifically for the project, was washed away by Monday’s blanket zoning change for the Ninth Street area.

Medlin’s staff and city lawyers said there was no way, under local and North Carolina law, to retain the 2009 deal as the council was rezoning the entire district.

The lower, 45-foot limit on Green Street was the price neighborhood activists like Watts Hospital-Hillandale’s Tom Miller wanted for seeing the 2009 bargain swept aside.

Stanziale, in lobbying council members in the weeks leading up to the meeting, said the difference between 45 and 50 feet would be “imperceptible from the ground.”

He also sought to fend off a stipulation of Monday’s package that requires a small amount of housing in projects like Dickson’s.

Stanziale argued that such prescriptions in other communities had rendered many projects in them “no goes” because of the “financial landscape we are living in” following 2008’s real-estate crash.

Council members were dubious. Schewel noted that Dickson has an out, as the housing requirement wouldn’t kick in unless his project tops 200,000 square feet.

“If this was a problem, I could say build a 199,000 square foot building and don’t have residential,” Schewel said. “The areas of dispute are relatively minor.”

Monday’s vote occurred in the absence of Mayor Bill Bell and Councilman Howard Clement. Bell was away on what his main ally, Councilwoman Cora Cole-McFadden, termed “city business.” Clement has been ailing and asked for an excused absence.

Read more: The Herald-Sun - Council approves Ninth Street rezoning