Chapel Hill faced an affordable housing choice. Consultant says nothing’s been done.

The story was updated at 1 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024.

In 2021, a planning consultant gave Chapel Hill a choice: Change the town’s approach to growth, or become an exclusive community for the ultra-rich lacking diverse people and places.

The town did nothing, Rod Stevens, an urban planning consultant with Business Street, wrote in a scathing opinion piece posted last week on chapelboro.com, the local radio station’s website.

“There is no comprehensive plan for where and how to grow, the infill approach of missing middle [types of housing between apartments and single-family homes] won’t come close to meeting the town’s needs, and the council has adopted the housing equivalent of Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down theory to approve more large, drive-to luxury apartment projects that are divorced from their surroundings,” he said.

Stevens, whose 2021 report told Chapel Hill to add at least 485 housing units a year for the next 20 years, didn’t explain what he meant by the town’s failures. However, in an email Tuesday to The News & Observer, he referenced Parkline East Village , a district created by the town in 2022 to test its new Complete Community strategy

The goal of Complete Community is to build dense, sometimes mixed-use neighborhoods, all connected via a 25-mile greenway network that encourages people to move around without a car.

Stevens also took responsibility for proposing Jennifer Keesmaat, former chief planner in Toronto, Canada, and founder of The Keesmaat Group, to help lead the town strategy. He claimed in the email that Keesmaat did not complete her work for the town.

Chapel Hill Mayor Jessica Anderson told The N&O on Tuesday that Stevens’ assessment is just wrong.

Did the town consultant do her job?

Keesmaat, who spoke Wednesday with The N&O, said Stevens’ op-ed is “not based in any fact or any reality.”

“I take great offense at what he said, because it’s inaccurate, and I’m not sure why he’s saying those things,” Keesmaat said.

Her $470,387 contract with the town — some of which was paid to subconsultants and other experts, Anderson said Thursday — required her team to talk with community leaders, residents, and university and civic partners about how and where the town should grow. The goal was to start moving the town toward consensus, she said.

The council later asked her to recommend ways to shift its planning and development system from “a reactive regulatory process that produces outcomes misaligned with the Town’s vision and values to a proactive, strategic, forward-thinking process,” according to the council’s approved resolution.

Her team checked off the requirements as it completed them, holding over 100 stakeholder interviews, multiple focus groups to talk about development and about greenway trails and equity, and more council workshops than originally planned, Keesmaat said.

Chapel Hill’s three pilot projects

In December 2022, the council picked three pilot projects , instead of one, from a list of options:

▪ Build an Everywhere to Everywhere greenway network for recreation and transit

▪ Work with UNC to redevelop two university-owned office buildings near Root Cellar on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard

▪ Work with private developers looking to develop Parkline Village East, a suburban residential area of single-family homes and apartments near The Parkline office campus (formerly a Blue Cross Blue Shield building) between U.S. 15-501 and Old Durham Road.

In 2023, Keesmaat delivered options to the council for changing its planning and development system. Her contract expired in June 2023, after the council adopted its Complete Community strategy, based on her work and Stevens’ housing report.

That strategy was not expected to bear fruit for five to 10 years, Keesmaat said.

“In a place like Chapel Hill, where every new development has to be considered so incredibly carefully, it’s not going to happen overnight, and it’s going to take a lot of tenacity over many years to deliver on Complete Communities,” she said.

Is Parkline East Village on track?

Stevens took particular issue Tuesday with the town’s pilot projects, saying the council could have chosen a single capital project, such as “a greenway or a plaza in a neighborhood, to be completed in six months, and that would be immediately useful and enjoyable by all.”

Instead, the UNC project on MLK Boulevard appears stalled, Stevens said. The Parkline build-out seems to be moving on a project-by-project basis, he said, rather than from a Complete Community approach that looks at how projects in a neighborhood work together to manage concerns, such as traffic, and meet all of its residents’ needs.

The council approved two residential Parkline projects — Chapel Hill Crossing and Meridian Lakeview — with up to 700 apartments and for-sale townhomes last year. Another 440 apartments and townhouses , and just 1,000 square feet of retail space, have been separately proposed.

The town paid Stevens $5,000 last year to review an urban design plan for the Parkline district, but his suggestions to make “significant changes in the type, location and amount of retail” and connections between future stores and homes “appear to have gone unheeded,” he said.

Stevens didn’t mention the greenway pilot project, which Keesmaat said is the linchpin to a successful Complete Community strategy.

Her team helped town staff land a $1 million federal grant last year for a greenway network study, Keesmaat said, because it will easily link residents to where they need to go despite Chapel Hill’s fragmented urban areas and steep topography.

“The objective wasn’t to cram every use into every development,” Keesmaat said. It was saying, “what if all these different nodes throughout Chapel Hill were connected in such a way that you could easily get from everywhere to everywhere within a five- or a 10-minute electric bike ride, and that would be a way of ensuring people don’t have to get in their car and drive everywhere.”

Mayor defends Complete Community progress

Anderson said it was disappointing that Stevens didn’t reach out to learn more about the town’s progress. The Complete Community goals are now integral to staff and council work and are being written into local land-use rules, she said.

“The recommendations (Stevens) brought forward in 2021 have helped to motivate the entire council to take on hard truths and to create a new vision for us and for Chapel Hill,” Anderson said. “Within weeks of his recommendations, we were acting on them and we’ve really not taken our foot off the pedal since.”

In the last 16 months, the council has approved over 3,000 housing units — roughly half apartments, records show. Another 2,500 apartments are coming or leasing in the town’s Blue Hill District, where projects follow a design code and don’t need council input.

Housing is Chapel Hill’s biggest challenge, even though U.S. Census data shows it had the region’s slowest population growth of 8% from 2010 to 2022 — an average of 0.7% a year. In 2022, the population was estimated at over 62,000 people, including UNC students.

The town’s housing stock has grown by 1% overall since 2010, the town reported, allowing new apartments to charge top rates — too expensive for most people earning less than $75,000 a year, according to a 2023 report. Older housing is increasingly out of reach for households earning less than $150,000 a year.

Smaller homes cost less to build and multifamily options spread the cost of expensive land among multiple tenants, experts have said. Fewer cars and parking decks and lots being built save everyone money, they said.

That approach requires “superb comprehensive planning and strong community support,” Stevens said in his 2021 report. He encouraged the town to talk with the public about its shared vision and develop a more holistic housing plan.

Commercial remains hard to land

Commercial projects are more complex, depending on bank financing, market demand, visibility, and a population density that brings enough customers to a business. Chapel Hill’s lack of density and sites that can be seen from more heavily traveled roads has affected its retail recruitment in the past.

The Parkline district might not attract commercial projects in the near future, Anderson said, but the work developers are doing to create street and greenway networks will serve future shops and homes. Existing projects are being designed with commercial in mind, she said.

“That certainly doesn’t mean that we’re not going to be very focused and intentional about getting commercial (projects) on major corners and places where it can succeed,” she said. “Things go at the pace they go, and people bring projects when they’re ready and it makes sense market-wise. We can’t force people to come forward.”

What did others say about it?

▪ David Adams, a key critic of the town’s growth and a 2021 council candidate, noted on Facebook the changes suggested by Keesmaat to reduce the development role of town advisory boards and commissions. He also criticized local media, who he said “cast aspersions onto anyone who opposed free reign (sic) for developers.”

“So the damage has been done and one has to wonder why Stevens published his mea culpa nearly a year after the election,” Adams wrote. “Certainly Adam Searing and his slate deserve recognition (for) their position that town development policy and the Complete Communities framework in particular, had serious flaws.”

▪ Triangle Blog Blog, an online news blog that backs Complete Community , said it’s too early to say the policy failed , calling Stevens’ op-ed “weird and unprofessional.” It also called out the grassroots group Chapel Hill Alliance for a Livable Town, which has opposed most Complete Community changes.

“The noisiest opponents of Complete Communities do not want to manage growth, they want to block it,” the Blog Blog said. “It’s hard to reach consensus when you have an organization like CHALT that operates in bad faith and believes community engagement in Chapel Hill is illegitimate unless the community thinks exactly like CHALT does.”

NC Reality Check is an N&O series holding those in power accountable and shining a light on public issues that affect the Triangle or North Carolina. Have a suggestion for a future story? Email realitycheck@newsobserver.com