The Chapel Hill Planning Commission met virtually on August 19, 2025, at 7:00 p.m. (12:15 UTC) to consider three conditional zoning applications: 701 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, 860 Weaver Dairy Road, and 115 Chapel Point Road. The meeting included staff and applicant presentations, public comment, and commission deliberation. The commission voted to recommend approval of two projects and declined to make a recommendation on the third, forwarding detailed comments instead.
Meeting come to order. Okay, first and then second. Okay. Okay. Hello. Can you see that? Excellent. My name is Catherine Shore. I'm with the planning department, and I'm here to present the staff recommendation for conditional zoning application at 701 Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. The site is located at the corner of East Longview Street and Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard. It's in the South MLK focus area. It's surrounded by medium density residential and office uses, and it's just south of the Bowling Creek Greenway. We recommend this project because we believe it's an alignment with the complete community goals and the comprehensive plan. The requested modifications to regulations serve the public purpose. And we recommend that the council is considering the approving the project subject to the conditions of ordinance A. I'll summarize the project, and after my presentation, the applicant will come up and share more information about their request. They're requesting to rezone from neighborhood commercial to and residential three to the mixed use village conditional zoning district. Their uh proposed development is a multifamily residential and ground floor retail uh project. It would involve up to 200 units in a nine-story structure with about uh a thousand square feet of retail space. 10% of those dwelling units will be income restricted affordable housing. And the ordinance commits the developer to uh provide a public outdoor plaza and a multi-use path that would complement the across the street NSBRT station. So procedurally, the reason why this is in front of you is because the requested zoning district accommodates the proposed land uses and scale of development, and the conditional zoning would allow for some site specific standards to make this development possible. Uh the applicants also requesting some modifications to LUMO, which we think are appropriate given the location and the comprehensive plan goals. So, like I said, it aligns with the complete community framework. They're proposing a transit-oriented mixed use development in an infill location, which could reduce overall vehicle trips and support multimodal travel options. They're also committing to reducing parking spaces to align with this type of development. They're proposing the small retail space in public plaza to serve surrounding residents and transit riders. They're also committing to facade transparencies that can create a more inviting environment for pedestrians. We reviewed this project with the natural features viewer, and we don't believe it warrants additional uh review uh because this site scored fairly low in the model. In addition, a recent stream determination classified the streams on site as ephemeral, which would reduce the scores in the model further. So the procedure that we are recommending for you this evening is to receive and provide comment and to consider the consistency uh with the comprehensive plan and consider the ordinance approving the application. And I'll invite the applicant up and then after their presentation will be available for questions. Is it um projecting? Okay, so you can just click that which one this one? Yeah, just two things to full screen. Yep, but uh good evening. I'm Brian Boyles with Landmark Properties. Can you guys see the presentation? Okay. Uh so we're landmark properties. We are one of the largest residential developers in the southeast. Uh we have several different product lines. We have uh multi-family, more traditional multi-family. We have a mixed-use uh multi or excuse me, mixed use mid-rise building as close to Charlotte. Uh, we have build to rent townhome and uh single-family rental communities from Texas to Florida, and we have student housing across the country. Uh we still own and manage two projects that we developed in Raleigh. Uh we are vertically integrated, so we have our own management and construction companies, so we build and manage everything in-house, and we are long-term owners of our projects. So we uh we take community input and design very seriously on the front end because we live with the decisions that we make early. Um as mentioned, our project is located at 701 MLK Junior Boulevard at the corner of East Longview and Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard.