INC NEWS - New growth guide in works: Durham revamps development rules/UDO (today's N&O)

[John Schelp]

New growth guide in works: Durham revamps development
rules (News & Observer, 27 Aug 2005)

Unless someone wants to put a big development next
door, most people in Durham have only a vague notion
of how city and county officials try to control what
is built where.

Durham's development ordinance is stuck in a suburban
mind-set -- 30 years behind the times, city officials
and neighborhood advocates say. But a major overhaul
is in progress.

For much of the past year, planners have been drawing
up a Unified Development Ordinance, a proposal that
would make it so developers can build more houses,
offices and shops around transit stations and better
preserve the county's remaining pastoral patches.

"What we have now is a world-class 1970s development
ordinance," said Frank Duke, Durham's planning
director. "It sort of assumes the only thing a
development ordinance has to do is make it look like
suburbs."

The proposed Unified Development Ordinance, or UDO as
the document is referred to in planning circles, would
divide Durham into urban, suburban, rural and
compact-development zones.

It recognizes that many of Durham's inner-city
neighborhoods were built in the early 1900s when few
residents relied on the automobile to get around. The
homes were built on smaller lots around old railroad
and streetcar hubs.

After World War II, planners say, more families had
cars and were able to move farther away from their
work and central shopping areas. That's when Durham's
suburban neighborhoods took shape.

Now, as environmentally conscious planners hope to cut
down on commuter traffic and preserve farms and large
forest swaths, developers are encouraged to abandon
blueprints for suburban sprawl and build clusters of
homes and offices around proposed regional train
stops.

New rules proposed for Durham's different zones
attempt to recognize the unique characteristics that
residents hope to protect and preserve for decades.

"There's every reason to believe and to hope that in
the urban areas we will be able to arrest decline and
bring back neighborhoods," said Tom Miller, a
neighborhood representative who spent many Sundays
studying the suggestions. "We will remove the
impediment to revitalization."

The Durham City Council and county commissioners are
scheduled to discuss the sweeping proposal Monday. The
governing boards could vote on the document, but
neighborhood representatives say a little more
tweaking is necessary.

"Nothing that we're suggesting will even alter by a
degree the current direction of the document," Miller
said.

In several neighborhoods, residents are worried that
as the document is now written, a developer could come
in and build an apartment complex of four units or
more in the middle of a row of bungalows.

Those who are worried about multiplexes, as they call
the apartment buildings, say they are not opposed to
duplexes or townhouses, which might be more likely to
be owner-occupied.

"If you all of a sudden put an apartment building in
the middle of a neighborhood that has been making a
comeback, like Old West Durham has for the past 20
years, that can have a jarring effect," said John
Schelp, a neighborhood activist.

Neighborhood advocates laud new rules designed to
leave forests and protect creeks, waterways and other
environmentally sensitive areas.

They like recommendations that would require
developers to design new offices, shops and homes with
an eye toward what already exists in the established
neighborhoods and commercial districts.

Many like a part of the ordinance that could give
vulnerable neighborhoods another layer of protection
by seeking a conservation district designation that
would add restrictions specific to that area's needs
and unique character. The ordinance proposal does not
specify how a neighborhood would go about doing this.

Duke, the planner who helped shepherd the overhaul,
has presented proposed guidelines that would make it
necessary for 51 percent of the property owners in a
neighborhood to support the idea of an overlay
district before such a designation could be sought.

But in East Durham and other parts of the city where
such a district might help neighborhoods preserve
their character, many of the property owners are
absentee landlords.

"The neighborhoods that need the protection the most
have the least chance of getting the backing of that
high a number of property owners," Schelp said.