After nearly three hours of rigorous discussion on Monday, the Durham city council approved a 140-unit apartment complex on Pickett Road by a 4-3 vote.
Pickett Apartments, a 6.12 acre project, was originally brought before the city council on February 3. At that meeting, residents raised concerns about the environmental impact of the project on bird habitats and flooding into nearby Durham Academy and Sandy Creek Trail, as well as transit accessibility, traffic overflow and student safety.
Councilmember Javiera Caballero recommended that the case be continued until a later date to give neighbors and representatives from Durham Academy the opportunity to collaborate with the developer to address some of the concerns. Two council members were also missing from the discussion; DeDreana Freeman and Chelsea Cook both had excused absences from the February meeting.
The case came back to City Hall on Monday where the developer offered additional commitments to try and meet the requests of residents including adding elevators to the apartment design, making a $300,000 contribution to the Durham Parks Foundation, and installing bird-friendly window treatments. Still, many residents upheld their original opposition to the project, carrying over concerns from the previous meeting.
William H. Schlesinger, former dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University and past president of the Ecological Society of America, said the case was “far from a ‘not-in-my-back-yard’ (NIMBY) issue. He echoed a position held by many folks in the room; the biodiversity that the Sandy Creek park attracts is under threat by surrounding developments like Pickett Apartments due to flooding, run-off and pollution. Schlesinger said he and his wife have tracked over 100 species of birds in the park over the last decade, as well as numerous other creatures who call Sandy Creek home.
“This rich biodiversity gives a richness of experience for visitors from all parts of Durham and stems from the wonderful natural habitat in Sandy Creek Park,” Schlesinger said.
Jesse Birkhead, a member of the Feminist Bird Club of Durham and the New Hope Bird Alliance who works in land conservation, urged city council to direct more infill development throughout Durham’s urban areas, including her own neighborhood, instead of near environmentally-sensitive areas.
“Many of us don’t live near the park and we would welcome development of affordable housing in our own neighborhoods and communities,” Birkhead said. “We know that affordable housing is critical to Durham.”
Walking the Sandy Creek trail, which is designated as a handicap accessible park, has become increasingly more hazardous, said Jody Barlett, a longtime resident of the neighborhood who spoke at the February public hearing. The sides of the creekbed are eroding, causing trees to uproot and fall into and around the trail. Water from the creek also has started leaking into the trail. Bartlett and others are worried that what’s left of the trail, and the park, won’t survive the run-off caused by construction on Pickett Apartments and the nearby Vintage Durham apartments. Both those projects will also contribute to increased traffic and congestion on the road, but according to the city’s traffic study, the road is underutilized and could handle an uptick in volume outside of the peak hours during school drop-off and pick-up.
Despite pushback from residents, and the planning commission, which voted to deny the project 8-2, city council members spoke highly of the project.
Council member Nate Baker opened his comments by stating the Pickett Apartment project checks a lot of boxes: it increases density rather sprawl, it’s in proximity to a park, and the developer offered strong proffers. He said that blending dense urban development with the natural world should be the ideal design for every Durham resident. Sarah Young, planning director with the City of Durham, said that sites like Pickett Apartments were identified during the development of the Comprehensive Plan specifically because of their proximity to open space.
“My hope is that we would move our city towards one where we increase the percentage of our residents who are within a five-minute walk to parks,” Baker said. “I believe that would be a good metric of success.”
As with many rezoning cases, the city council is weighing a limited set of options for how to proceed. The Pickett Apartments site is already zoned for residential, meaning the developer can build up to 12 single-family homes on the site “by-right” without the need for approval from the city council. But to upzone the property, and include a higher density of units on the same plot of land, the developer needs sign off from council. This is where residents and the city council can step in to make additional requests called proffers (things like building parks on the site, making donations to the local school system, or setting aside units designated for affordable housing) as a way for the developer to sweeten the deal for the community.
During the meeting, Caballero laid out these circumstances that she and her council colleagues are weighing each time a case like Pickett Apartments comes before them. If they chose not to approve the rezoning, the 12 hypothetical homes built on the site would likely be large and in the range of $700,000 to a million dollars, and would not have to include any of the proffers made by the developer.
“We always collectively have to think about the vision we’ve set aside, and right now, this council and the two councils before with the comp plan that we’ve adopted, we passed an urban growth boundary,” Caballero said.
Caballero and mayor pro tem Mark-Anthony Middleton said the council has prioritized “keeping fidelity” with the urban growth boundary, a line beyond which the city council has said it would prohibit future development to prioritize density and infill closer to the city center. At the February meeting where Pickett Apartments was first presented, the city council voted down a zoning case near Mt. Moriah Road because it violated the limits of the UBG. But to continue upholding that boundary means more of Durham’s urban land will get upzoned, Caballero said, in order to protect farm land and watersheds throughout the county.
Durham needs to increase its density to avoid urban sprawl, but more and more of the green space available to residents is being threatened in the process, and rarely is a site ever turned back into woodlands or green space after it’s been developed. City and county leadership has to strike a difficult balance between growth and preservation. For councilmember Carl Rist, the community shouldn’t have to choose between affordable, dense projects and nature.
“There’s an opportunity for abundance here that we’ve all just gotta embrace,” councilmember Carl Rist said, referencing the forthcoming book, Abundance, in which authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson make the case that some governments, particularly liberal-leaning ones, have failed to keep up with building infrastructure and providing basic services that their constituents need to thrive.
Pickett Apartments is an example of striking a balance, Rist said, between meeting our goals as a community of providing affordable housing and supplying residents with accessibility to green space.
“I think we can have that abundance and meet the multiple goals that we’re addressing here as a city for affordable housing and parks… We have to aspire to that or otherwise we’re going to get crushed in this old politics of housing versus environment,” Rist said.
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