Last month, new mayors across the Triangle took their oaths of office and laid out their visions for the near future.
In Chapel Hill, Jess Anderson took the top job with a promise to fight a trio of crises threatening the town.
“Municipalities across the country are facing very real challenges, including a climate crisis, a housing crisis, and an affordability crisis,” Anderson told the town hall audience in her first speech as mayor in December. “Despite all the special things about Chapel Hill, we’re not immune.”
Anderson won her election with the support of former mayor Pam Hemminger, who had served as the college town’s mayor since 2015. During her tenure, Hemminger focused on righting the town’s imbalanced tax base (skewed by the presence of a large public university) by championing business, including the Wegmans near the Durham border and two new wet labs downtown.
She also pushed for more affordable housing—the town reported that in 2023, Chapel Hill doubled its previous record for the most number of affordable units approved in a single year.
Council newcomers Melissa McCullough, Theodore Nollert, and Elizabeth Sharp took their oaths alongside incumbent member Amy Ryan, who won a second term. Those four members will serve until 2027, while the seats of council members Camille Berry, Paris Miller-Foushee, Adam Searing, and Karen Stegman will be up for election in 2025.
While the campaign season saw its share of disagreements between candidates, the council is united by an optimism about the future of the town and a desire to serve as a model for other municipalities facing the nationwide shortage of affordable housing.
That optimism was reflected in Anderson’s rhetoric, as she framed the crisis as an “exciting new opportunity” to implement the town’s Complete Community framework, developed in 2022 and adopted into town plans through this year, as a cornerstone of her vision. It’s a guide that, through changes like amendments to the land use management ordinance (LUMO), aims to balance the town’s needs for housing, transit, retail space, and other categories in order to provide structure to the council’s future decisions. In June, the council approved changes to the LUMO to allow for the construction of a greater variety of housing types.
This year, the council will have to figure out how to transform its plans from ink on paper to brick and mortar.
“It’s about getting those greenways started, it’s about getting that denser middle-income housing out of the ground, it’s about making sure that we’re continuing to build partnerships with our key local partners,” Anderson told INDY in November, following the election.
The town’s new affordable housing plan and investment strategy, approved earlier this year by the council, affirmed that “considerable progress has been made to address affordable housing in Chapel Hill.” But there is still a lot of work to be done, as the same plan warned against complacency, arguing that “the Town should focus on sustaining and scaling up its housing programs over the next five years.”
Through its votes and comments, the last council indicated a willingness to approve most housing projects, with some notable exceptions—council members were practically incredulous at a proposal to replace the aging Kings Arms apartments on Ephesus Church Road with a 212-unit luxury housing development.
“Coming without even a real proposal for consideration is really a problem for me,” Stegman told the developer about the proposal, which would have decreased the overall number of affordable units on the site.
Later in the year, the council drew another line as it denied a proposal to squeeze a 12-story luxury condo tower onto a one-third-acre lot on East Rosemary Street near the historic district. Several council members expressed that they liked the proposed building itself—they just had issues with the location. They also indicated that they would be open to approving a smaller building on that site.
And with that pro-growth attitude, the council has indicated a reimagining of the identity of the college town.
“Chapel Hill is not a small town. We are a growing small city with a housing shortage,” Stegman said at a meeting.
The affordable housing crisis, as it disproportionately affects people of color, is inseparable from the small southern town’s legacy of enslaving, disenfranchising, and discriminating against its Black residents. The site of some solutions to this wicked problem may be the Greene Tract, a roughly 160-acre stretch of land jointly owned by Orange County, Chapel Hill, and Carrboro.
In the last decade, task forces and resolutions have considered possible uses and developments of the Greene Tract. About 60 acres are owned solely by the county as a “headwaters preserve.” In 2021, the county and town governments approved a plan to mark 22 acres for a nature preserve, 66 acres for development, and 16 acres for a public school and public recreation.
Officials have studied the Greene Tract as a step in remediating the harm inflicted by the landfill dug in the 1970s in the largely Black Rogers-Eubanks neighborhood. At the time, Orange County and Chapel Hill officials promised residents that they would receive basic utilities, streetlights, and sidewalks in return for locating the landfill in their community. Officials also promised to eventually turn the landfill into a park.
In 2024, it’s still a landfill, with toxins leaking into the ground, water, and air.
The Greene Tract and the landfill are also tied to the story of the St. Paul Village, a 350-unit development by a nonprofit associated with St. Paul AME, Chapel Hill’s oldest Black church. Construction will start this year on the village, which will eventually offer 90 affordable units and 100 for seniors, as well as a community center and space for retail. The nonprofit members have pitched the development as a gateway to the Greene Tract because of its location.
While the land has been stuck in the limbo of government—an already convoluted process compounded by the joint ownership between two towns and a county—the St. Paul Village development may bring the attention needed to move forward with projects on the Greene Tract, all with the goal of addressing the affordable housing crisis and making Chapel Hill, as Anderson said at the December meeting, “even better, now and for future generations.”
“Meeting this moment will require us to collectively embrace change,” Anderson said. “Not simply for change’s sake. But because change is inevitable if we truly want to continue to live our values while the world changes around us.”
Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at chase@indyweek.com. Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.
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