A former brickworks site in East Durham is getting a makeover.
On Tuesday, the Durham City Council voted unanimously to rezone almost 100 acres of land nested between Hoover Road, Angier Avenue and US Highway 70. Upstart development firm SpaceCraft plans to offer 1,880 apartment and townhouse units, 90 of which would be offered at 60 percent of the area median income. With 49,500 square feet of mixed-use space proposed, the plan also considers including residential and commercial in the same structure, which is an unusual feature for developments outside of more dense urban centers.
Nil Ghosh, lawyer at Morningstar Law Group who represented the Brickworks project at Tuesday’s meeting, said that “no site is without challenges, and this site is no exception.” The land was previously used by Borden Brick and Tile, a brickmaking company that moved from Goldsboro to Durham in 1929. The industrial history of the site, and the unusual topography, created challenges for SpaceCraft. Ghosh says the project has gone through a number of changes since planning began nearly two years ago, in part because SpaceCraft was invested in bringing forth a proposal that was “right for Durham.”
SpaceCraft, which has offices in New York, San Francisco and Charlotte, focuses primarily on building highly dense, urbanized developments that prioritize mobility and access to transit, sustainability and communal living, according to their website.
Only 23 acres on the 95-acre East Durham site will be used for residential and commercial structures. SpaceCraft plans to include 5,000 feet of walking trails throughout the project next to an existing stream, and preserve a substantial amount of the tree canopy. Ghosh says that these features and others, like proximity to a transit line that connects the site to commercial hubs nearby, sets the project apart from others that typically come before the city council.
“If this project is brought to full fruition, that’s about 90 affordable units located next to a transit line in a mixed-use community with a walking trail adjacent to a public park and only a stones throw away from the industrial park that the council approved at the Parmer Edge location,” Ghosh said. “This is kind of a poster child redevelopment story.”
Still, projects of this scale are a hard sell, and councilmember Nate Baker is arguably the city council’s toughest critic on development.
“I’m always skeptical when a developer comes and says we’re going to do something but it’s not put in writing,” Baker told the INDY. “I think we get tricked a lot.”
Baker says that there are three important things that he looks for when considering a development project like this Brickworks: density on the site, diversity of the housing options, and design of the structures. Baker says that he spoke with folks on the project before the meeting to negotiate specific asks about the design, the arrangement and location of buildings on the site, and the buildings and their orientation.
“That was really the piece that I was trying to push them on,” Baker says. “The devil is in the details.”
At the meeting, Baker also highlighted that the city’s unified development ordinance, which is currently being rewritten, will codify many of the design specifications that are frequently absent from current projects. SpaceCraft made an additional proffer to ensure every building would meet at least the bronze level for the National Green Building Standards. The additional design proffers are not required by the comprehensive plan or the current UDO. Baker says he took these as a sign of good faith that SpaceCraft is willing to work more collaboratively with city staff to get a project that gets close to satisfying everyone’s requests.
“They knew they were gonna get their approval,” Baker says. “But they didn’t just want an approval. They wanted a unanimous vote.”
Projects at this scale have mostly been seen in Southeast Durham, which has received the brunt of residential housing development in recent years. Community members make regular appearances at city council meetings to contest what is often described as “suburban sprawl,” large single-family housing developments on the outskirts of the city limits that require car ownership and are disconnected from other services and amenities.
“We’re almost out of land in Southeast Durham,” Baker says. “We have almost permanently destroyed Southeast Durham. It was, for some, farmland, and we had the chance to make it truly mixed use, walkable, all that stuff, and instead, it’s going to be suburban sprawl.”
Baker laments the outcomes in that region of Durham, but projects like Brickworks give him hope that more developers can approach projects with the same flexibility and eye towards pedestrian-oriented design.
“We need good developers,” Baker said. “Putting together a complex deal is a really tough skill set. The difference between a good developer and a bad, it’s just huge. So I would definitely invite them to do more work in Durham.”
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