Guidelines Matter

In its quest to increase the commercial tax base, the Town Council in 2014 approved form-based code for the Ephesus-Fordham, now Blue Hill, district. FBC shifted approval for development projects from council to the town manager in that defined area around Rams and Village plazas and Eastgate. Council drew up some guidelines about maximum building height, block length and types of street frontage, but eliminated other expectations, such as providing some affordable housing and not building in stream buffers.

The intent was to make development faster, cheaper and more certain. But developers paid greater attention to what the FBC did not say. The council at that time did not make any building height minimums — thus, developers built single-story fast-casual restaurants popular along four-lanes all across the country, including a couple miles down the road in Durham, just on the other side of I-40.

And the 2014 council consciously chose not to include an affordable housing expectation. As a result, the area became a magnet for luxury apartments, whose developers no longer had to consider pesky requests to contribute to workforce housing.

At the March 23 council meeting, staff presented an update on how development in Blue Hill was progressing. The data offered few direct comparisons about how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go. Staff agreed to work up charts for tax value, as well as square footage of retail, office and residential, that would lay out what we had when we started, what we expected at buildout, where we are now, and where we thought we would be at this point.

The glut of market-rate apartments came through clearly in the numbers. The original plan anticipated 1,000 units, and we already have approved or built 1,015, not including the 700 additional units Park Apartments plans to build.

The 2014 council aimed for a total of 300 affordable units in the area, and expanded Blue Hill to encompass 149 subsidized units DHIC had received permission to build on the former cemetery land. The 2014 council made noises about incorporating an affordable housing density bonus on parcels across Elliott Road from Village Plaza but put nothing in writing. Now it turns out that the topography is too steep for developers to make it worth their while to consider any sort of housing discounts. The prospect of getting those additional 150 units of affordable housing looks pretty grim.

It is up to this council, in 2018, to amend FBC to correct some of these oversights.

At our March 14 meeting, council passed a resolution, a hastily drawn-up missive we received a couple hours earlier. We didn’t have time to digest it, nor did we discuss it. The resolution punted the problem back to staff to come up with suggestions. Ideally, we will take the time in the future to think through all the ramifications.
— Nancy Oates