INC NEWS - Morreee Road and American Drive neighborhood concern

[David Harris]

Column: Controversial Morreene warehouse mocks real planning
By Will Robinson, 21 Sept 2007, Herald-Sun

Dirt roads and farmland were about all that you would have found at the intersection of Durham's Morreene
Road and American Drive in the 1930s. That and a little barbecue joint. This was the Turnage Farm owned
by Woodrow Turnage, the cotton buyer for Erwin Mills. The farm and the barbecue joint were perhaps more a
hobby for Turnage, who entertained business associates there from time to time.

Durham resident Jim Warren grew up working at the barbecue joint, and after returning from WWII, Warren
came back to work for the restaurant, bought the business and moved it just down the street to the lot
at 608 Morreene Road, where he ran a popular restaurant called "Turnage's" for almost 30 years.
This was the same "Turnage's" that made headlines by becoming Durham's first integrated restaurant in the
early 1960s.

During those 30 years, the restaurant and neighborhood were incorporated into Durham's city limits and zoned
accordingly. While the neighborhood was rightly designated as residential property, all the neighbors
agreed that Warren, who also lived in the neighborhood himself, be given a "Commercial Neighborhood" (CN)
zoning to continue his business. His barbecue was certainly a welcome part of the community that had
been developed on the old Turnage Farm acreage. 

Unfortunately for the residents of the Turnage Heights/University Estates neighborhood, today, no
such enthusiasm exists today, in part because the restaurant that used to share the neighborhood's name
no longer exists. And in part because of what is going up in its place. When the old restaurant was torn down
earlier this year, neighbors who called to inquire were told by city planning officials that a retail
store was going up, which was in keeping with the property's CN district, and not to be worried.

Maybe they were naive; maybe the name "city planning" actually led them to believe someone downtown was
looking after the best interest of the neighborhood and planning accordingly. It was only when the
bulldozers came in to grade and the steel girders were off-loaded on the site that folks realized something
terrible was happening. In place of the old restaurant, plans had been approved by the city for an
appliance and appliance parts company to build a 13,000-square-foot store and warehouse -- smack dab in
the middle of their neighborhood.

Calls to the store's owner and to the city only produced disillusionment. As a result, neighbors now
find themselves fighting against the city over what appears to be an obviously bad example of city
planning and are being told that not much can be done. The parcel of land zoned CN is only about an acre and
the old restaurant fit nicely on that property. But apparently, somewhere in the 900-page (read "not
user-friendly") Unified Development Ordinance (UDO) governing development in Durham, exceptions allow for
a builder to purchase adjacent residential (RS-district) lots and allocate their acreage to meet
the buffer/yard requirements for his commercial property.

This permits the builder in this case to more than double the size of his new commercial building going
up. And thus a 5,000-square-foot restaurant becomes a 13,000-square-foot monstrosity in the blink of an eye.
What's even more befuddling is that the city seems perfectly comfortable that this new appliance and
parts store and warehouse will "complement and satisfy the needs of the surrounding neighborhood" as the UDO
states, even though no one in the neighborhood wants it.

The UDO is 900 pages because development exceptions are bound to arise in a county growing as fast as
ours. The problem is that those exceptional clauses are intended to permit favorable development in cases
where the standard requirements of the UDO would normally inhibit such positive growth. However, in
this case, Durham City Planning has simply taken the UDO, with all of its exceptions, and "cherry-picked"
it to permit decidedly bad development, which leaves us to scratch our heads and wonder whose interest is
really being served here? It is certainly not the citizens of University Estates and Turnage Heights.

The UDO was implemented to help steer growth in positive ways in Durham -- to "protect existing
neighborhoods, preventing their decline and promoting their livability," and to "encourage an aesthetically
attractive community."

Permitting this warehouse makes a mockery of the real spirit of the UDO. In this case, what the citizens of
Durham are left with is a City Planning Office with a gutless UDO in hand using the letter of the law to
justify serving every commercial development interest that darkens its door. And in so doing, they lose
sight of the forest for the trees, and the vision of a better Durham for our tomorrow. Must we stand by and
watch our neighborhood being pockmarked with unscrupulous commercial development? Stay tuned for a
warehouse coming soon to a neighborhood near you.


The writer is a former resident and current property owner in Turnage Heights.

David Harris
919-906-2023
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