Charlotte City Council held its monthly zoning meeting on Monday. Zoning meetings are split into two parts: zoning decisions, in which they vote on whether to approve or deny petitions; and hearings, during which developers are able to present their plans, residents are able to speak in support or opposition, and council members are able to discuss before the decision is scheduled for a later date.
Below, we’ve included some notable examples of both decisions and hearings from Monday night’s meeting.
On the Agenda:
- Zoning Decisions
- Zoning Hearings
Zoning Decisions
Council approved a petition to allow for the development of 60 duplex and townhome units on Shopton Road West near Berewick Commons in Steele Creek. District rep Tiawana Brown said the petitioner and community are now in agreement after many neighbors originally spoke out against the plan.
A seemingly small zoning petition drew opposition from community members in Hidden Valley and council reps. Dante Anderson said she had pleaded with the petitioner, who wanted permission to split a 0.35-acre parcel on White Plains Road into two lots in order to build separate buildings on each, to engage with neighbors but he refused.
With council having approved two similar petitions already earlier in the night, Marjorie Molina said precedents were already set in those neighborhoods and that type of rezoning hadn’t yet been implemented in Hidden Valley, an historic neighborhood.
Ed Driggs said he didn’t remember the last time council had denied a petition. Renee Johnson said she believed it was a proposed development near the Lexington neighborhood in 2022.
The petition was then unanimously denied, resulting in applause from members of the Hidden Valley Community Association in attendance.
Council approved a petition to allow for the construction of the Cedar Mill Townhomes development comprising 39 units on Sonoma Valley Drive in northwest Charlotte. The 8.5-acre lot is currently vacant/undeveloped.
Zoning Hearings
Staff was not recommending approval of a proposed large-scale development on Providence Road across from Charlotte Latin School in south Charlotte. It would include up to 220 townhomes fronting Providence Road and 55 single-family homes located behind them, south of Kuykendall Road.
In its explanation for not recommending approval, which would not have come up for vote during a hearing anyway, city staff said they would like to see efforts made “to thoughtfully layout, design, and amenitize open space areas to match the character of the surrounding neighborhood” as well as to work in more du-, tri- and quadplexes to help with housing diversity, among other suggestions.
A rep with the Kuykendall Coalition, representing 220 households in the surrounding south Charlotte neighborhoods, expressed frustration with how Monday’s hearing unfolded. He said that two years of conversation were culminating with an Easter Monday hearing that neighbors were only just informed about during Spring Break.
“We’ve got Charlotte Latin across the street, we’ve got multifamily to the north, we’ve got some big campus things going on,” said Collin Brown, who is representing the developer, in response to concerns expressed by neighbors about the proposed community’s character and density.
The Kuykendall Coalition pointed out that density was limited to one home per two acres when the new owner bought the property and proposed to build 600 apartments there around three to four years ago. Members of the Kuykendall Coalition believe that proposal was not serious but was made to be so extreme that the new one seems reasonable by comparison.
Ed Driggs acknowledged that the original apartment complex proposal got neighbors worked up and said he and staff wasted too much time with that before getting into this new proposal, which he believes has potential.
Despite staff’s non-recommendation, Driggs believes there is enough work being put toward compromise to warrant Monday’s hearing. He believes the developer can come to terms with neighbors despite the steadfast opposition from the Kuykendall Coalition expressed on Monday night.
Residents of the Moores Park neighborhood in west Charlotte spoke out passionately against a light-industrial warehouse proposed for 7.3 acres behind their neighborhood — located north of I-85 and south of Tuckaseegee Road, west of Little Rock Road — saying the 70,000-square-foot facility threatens the way of life in their tight-knit community.
A 156-acre rezoning petition on Moore’s Chapel Road on I-85 would clear the way for two data centers totaling 3 million square feet.
A 2020 rezoning allowed for 1,530,000 square feet of warehousing and industrial uses at the site but this rezoning would nearly double that square footage while committing solely to constructing facilities for “telecommunications and data storage.”
LaWana Mayfield voiced her concern with the environmental impact of not only clearing land for the development but maintaining a data center. She asked that staff look further into how the project squares with the city’s Strategic Energy Action Plan.
Data centers are emerging as major environmental challenges due to high energy demands related to cooling systems, as explained in this January report that reads, “Current estimates suggest data centers account for 3% of global electricity consumption, with predictions indicating a rise to a potential 10% by 2030.”
Charlotte City Council will meet again for an action review, public forum and business meeting on Monday, April 28, where they’ll vote on new affordable housing proposals as presented at the April 14 meeting.
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