Placemaking: the Heart of the Complete Community Strategy

Can the Town stay focused to make it a reality?

On May 10, 2023, the Chapel Hill Town Council adopted the Complete Community Strategy, a strategy based on the theory of placemaking: “Placemaking is an approach to urban design that prioritizes people over infrastructure. It aims to create public spaces that are more than just utilitarian, but rather places that inspire and promote social interaction and cultural exchange. Placemaking recognizes that public spaces play an essential role in the social and cultural life of communities, and that they are critical to creating a sense of place and identity.”

This desire to follow the principles of placemaking began with the planning that led to the 2014 construction of the ten-story, 140-unit condo tower at 140 West Franklin Street; it continued with the redevelopment of University Square into Carolina Square. Neither of those projects accomplished the desired placemaking principles, although both bring additional housing options to the community. 

The community and the Council wanted a public gathering space with large shade trees at 140 West Franklin Street, similar to Carrboro’s popular Weaver Street Market lawn. Instead we got hostile architectural construction with a million-dollar piece of art nicknamed “the cheese grater” that discourages public gatherings. The community and Council wanted the same thing at Carolina Square but what we got was a walled-off public space and a slew of new chain stores. As for the Blue Hill debacle, the results speak for themselves.

The question Chapel Hill residents need to be asking themselves in 2024 is whether the town can reset its planning process to stay true to the placemaking principles of the Complete Community Strategy. The strategy is based on investing in infrastructure to create “places” that meet the daily needs of residents, connect to one another via greenways, and generally take the disparate neighborhoods/developments built over the past 50+ years and unify them into a connected community.

Three pilot projects were adopted to test the theory. During her presentation, the consultant who proposed the strategy emphasized the importance of learning from these pilot projects to determine for Chapel Hill what works and what doesn’t and to “rebuild the community’s trust” in the town’s planning process.

• Everywhere to Everywhere Greenways (E2E): The goal of this project is to connect schools, shopping, parks, healthcare opportunities, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill via greenways and other multimodal transit options. The town was awarded a $1M planning grant to get this project started.

• Midtown (short-term) mixed-use development: This is a redevelopment project of UNC’s Cecil B. Sheps building on MLK Blvd. UNC will partner with the town to plan a shovel-ready project on the 4-acre site before UNC sells the site to a commercial developer.

• Parkline (long-term) mixed-use development: This is the site of the  old Blue Cross Blue Shield building on Fordham Blvd., across from Eastowne. The site is currently owned by the State Employees Credit Union, but a group of developers have partnered to purchase 21 of the 36 acres. Design work is underway according to the News & Observer.

The difference between the Complete Community Strategy and previous aspirational planning processes, such as Chapel Hill 2020 and the Future Land Use Map, is this pilot project approach. Those projects add a concrete aspect to the planning process that has been absent in the previous plans. Will they help the town stay focused on the plan? That’s where I and others become skeptical.

Despite the plan to proceed with these pilot projects to test out the Complete Community Strategy/Framework, the town is also building and/or planning other ‘disconnected’ projects, without the infrastructure or the trust of a large part of the community. Some of those projects, such as Aura Chapel Hill (Estes and MLK Blvd), were underway before the Strategy was adopted and should not be held to the Complete Community vision. Some projects, like the Glen Lennox redevelopment, seem to have followed the vision before the strategy was adopted.

But other decisions, made after the Complete Community Strategy was adopted, fly in the face of the vision. For example, the elimination of single-family zoning has opened up many of the older suburban residential neighborhoods, like Ridgefield, that contain most of the town’s remaining naturally occurring affordable housing (NOAH) to redevelopment. The more expensive neighborhoods governed by HOAs are exempt from this new regulation despite having larger lots and wider roadways to accommodate street parking.

In 2017, the town adopted a Future Land Use Map with an array of commitments to equitable development, including this one: ‘The Town should preserve and enhance established neighborhoods by directing dense growth to multimodal and key transportation corridors facilitating connections to those corridors in order to promote a multimodal network thereby potentially reducing vehicular trips and increasing mobility options.” Adding density to existing, middle class neighborhoods doesn’t really align with that commitment.

How stormwater controls will be implemented in the older neighborhoods—many of which lie in or near floodplains—as they are densified has not been addressed by the town but is a serious concern for already financially strapped homeowners. Opening existing neighborhoods to redevelopment exemplifies the Town’s willingness to risk the affordability and the security of many long-established neighborhoods, perpetuating the Town’s behavior over the past 10-15 years of bending over backwards to create space for new residents at the expense of existing residents. Placemaking and equitable development are only for newcomers in the eyes of Chapel Hill staff and Town Council. Existing residents who disagree are labeled as NIMBYs (or racists or various other epithets) and pushed to the side, regardless of their history of financial and social contributions to the Town.

Another example is the town’s December 7 vote to expand the urban services (water and sewer) boundary south from Southern Village to the Chatham County line. Although this vote must be approved by Carrboro, Hillsborough, Orange County and OWASA before the expansion occurs, the vote itself is an indication that the Complete Community Strategy has yet to influence  the mindset of elected officials. There is no plan for what would happen on the 360 acres if municipal water and sewer service is allowed except for the town’s desire to build affordable and missing middle housing. In fact, development in this area was left out of the Future Land Use Map in 2020. BRT to Southern Village is 10 years out (at least), and there is no plan to extend it further south, meaning no money to make this an extended transit corridor. What changed between 2020 and 2023?

When a highly-paid consultant tells Council that the community doesn’t trust them and develops a plan to help them regain that trust, but they continue to act in the same untrustworthy manner, how can we have any faith that the appealing, placemaking-focused Complete Community Strategy will be implemented as planned? 

Will the greenways really get built or will that million-dollar plan simply gather dust on a shelf in Town Hall like so many before it? If they get built, will they serve the entire town or just the new developments? Will the pilot projects be evaluated before every other square inch of remaining space in town has been redeveloped using the same disconnected, square-box architecture that makes money for out-of-state developers but imposes expensive eyesores on those of us who love this community? Will we lose any remnants we have left of sense of place?

I hope the mistakes of the past will not be repeated when it comes to the Complete Community Strategy. It’s a vision I want to succeed. It’s a vision I would like to see Carrboro adopt. But it isn’t just a vision for construction. If the placemaking aspects of the strategy are not foundational to every aspect of development review, from Town staff to Community Design to Planning Board to Town Council, it will fail like the FLUM, Chapel Hill 2020, and so many others over recent years.

While newer residents scoff at the old-timer village memories of Chapel Hill, an updated version of those days are what we could get back if the Complete Community Strategy succeeds. But only if the strategy is faithfully implemented and the pressure to “build, baby, build” takes a backseat to progressive design principles, principles that put placemaking ahead of those who are getting rich at the expense of this community.