Overview:
• The city’s planning staff says project will help Fayetteville’s housing shortage
• The Zoning Commission voted against it
• Nearby residents say it will hurt their neighborhoods
• Fayetteville City Council is to decide whether to allow it
An out-of-state residential property investment company wants to build 160 units of duplexes and quadplexes on 21.27 acres near the south end of Rosehill Road. Some home and property owners in nearby neighborhoods are trying to stop it.
The opponents’ concerns include the potential for flooding, insufficient parking, higher taxes, increased traffic and more reckless drivers, according to comments they made at a community meeting this past Monday night.
According to city council documents, an architect for Valoris Capital Partners of Jersey City, New Jersey, has asked the Fayetteville City Council to rezone the property from a single-family home category to a multifamily category that allows duplexes and quadplexes. The city council has a public hearing on the proposal scheduled for meeting this coming Monday at 6:30 p.m.
The property is a vacant tract at 2211 Rosehill Road that used to be a site for waste concrete disposal. This is about 1,000 feet from where Rosehill Road intersects Ramsey Street and across the street from the back fence of Lafayette Memorial Park & Mausoleum.
The site is near areas with single-family homes, including the Rose Hill Park neighborhood and the Broadell area neighborhoods near E.E. Smith High School and Fayetteville State University.
Protests on both ends of Rosehill Road
The Valoris project is unrelated to a 7-Eleven convenience store proposed for the College Lakes area at the north end of Rosehill Road, where Rosehill meets Stacey Weaver Drive and McArthur Road. The 7-Eleven has also drawn intense opposition from nearby residents. The city council has an upcoming public hearing on that project, too.
If the 21.27 acres on Rosehill Road were to be rezoned for Valoris, the new zoning would allow duplex and quadplex housing up to 35 feet tall, a city council document says.
A Valoris executive working with this project is out of the country and unavailable for comment, his assistant told CityView on Tuesday.
The site is owned by a Wyoming-based company called 2211 Rosehill Development LLC, which bought the land from Cross Creek Refuse LLC of Fayetteville in June for $225,000, according to the county Register of Deeds. CityView was unable to reach a Rosehill Development representative.
Fayetteville needs ‘missing middle’ housing
The City of Fayetteville planning staff this summer recommended that the city council approve the rezoning request.
Although it is near neighborhoods with single-family homes, the staff said it also is within several hundred feet of housing areas with streets that have one-story duplex housing and two-story townhome-style apartments of multiple units, similar to what Volaris wants to build.
“Cumberland County is experiencing an acute housing shortage,” the staff said in a memo to the city council. The staff cited a severe shortage of homes for sale plus temporary closures of housing on Fort Bragg for renovations, which are projected to run through 2026, that are pushing military personnel into the civilian housing market.
“Local real-estate professionals have identified duplexes and quadplexes, exactly the missing-middle types permitted in MR-5, as the product type in shortest supply,” the document says.
“Missing middle” refers to housing such as duplexes and quadplexes — housing that is less expensive than single-family homes, built with more density than single-family home neighborhoods but less density than large apartment buildings, the National League of Cities says.
MR-5 is the multifamily residential zoning classification that Valoris is requesting. The existing zoning, for single-family homes with 6,000-square-foot lots, is SF-6. MR-5 also allows some light commercial use, such as a barber shop or hair salon, or a convenience store, but the convenience store cannot have gas pumps, city Senior Planner Craig Harmon said at Monday’s community meeting.
City planners say ‘yes,’ Zoning Commission says ‘no’
The city’s Zoning Commission on July 8 voted to recommend that the city council deny the Valoris request. The Valoris proposal mostly is consistent with Fayetteville’s land policies and goals, the commission said, but the commission decided that it is inconsistent with a goal to “foster safe, stable, and attractive neighborhoods.”
Valoris appealed the Zoning Commission’s decision to the city council.
Former state Rep. Elmer Floyd and Seabrook-Broadell Neighborhood Community Watch Vice President Johnette Henderson led Monday night’s community meeting for residents to learn more about the project and talk about it. About 30 people attended.
Opponents are planning to speak at the City Council’s public hearing next week.
Some of their thoughts:
- Colin Ferrol, who owns property in the area, says drivers frequently crash into utility poles there. The streets can’t handle additional traffic, he said.
- Floyd showed a photo of a skid marks on nearby Courtney Street, where he lives. Drivers race down the street, he said. “I am tired of people coming down the street and you know,” he said. “When they get there, you can smell the road.”
- Floyd and others said Cross Creek, which runs along the rear of the site, sometimes floods and they worry that additional development will lead to more flooding. If the developer builds stormwater retention ponds to limit flooding, Floyd said, the ponds will foster breeding of mosquitos.
- Floyd questioned whether there is enough land on the property to provide sufficient parking.
The community meeting attendees included City Council Members Malik Davis and Mario Benavente (who is running for mayor). Also there were mayoral candidate Tisha Waddell and City Council candidate Antonio Jones.
In interviews afterward, both Davis and Benavente said they had not made a decision on whether to vote for or against Volaris’ rezoning request.
Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.
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