News

Planning Board recommends denial of senior apartments on Sixth Avenue

The Hendersonville Planning Board cited the building’s size, split parking lots and incompatibility with historic single-family homes when it recommended that the City Council deny a rezoning to allow the senior housing building on Sixth Avenue West.

By Bill Moss, Published: April 13, 2022

The Hendersonville Planning Board said no to a rezoning application to allow a three-story senior housing development across from the Pardee Hospital campus and then endorsed a rezoning for a different senior housing proposal on Chimney Rock Road during its regular meeting on Monday.

The advisory board voted 7-1 to recommend that the City Council deny a rezoning to permit a 52-unit apartment building on Sixth Avenue West at Oak Street after residents and board members expressed concerns about scale, compatibility with the West Side Historic District and traffic.
The applicant, Ohio-based Woda Cooper Companies Inc., is seeking a rezoning from MCI medical cultural institutional to UR-CZD urban residential conditional zoning district to allow the building offering affordable apartments for seniors 55 and up.
Board members agreed with neighboring homeowners that the 48,000-square-foot building has a problematic parking lot design and insufficient green space.
Board chair Jim Robertson cast the only no vote on the motion to recommend denial, saying that the need for affordable housing is so great that the city ought to find a way to approve the application with conditions that address neighboring residents’ concerns.
“I’m not sure we can come up with enough conditions to protect the neighborhood,” board member Neil Brown said.
Barbara Cromar said although affordable housing is needed, the proposed Hawkins Pointe senior housing development is too large for the space it would be built on.
“The architectural design and the height I personally feel are not compatible with the neighborhood, even with the industrial medical neighborhood,” she said. “It’s too much in a small space.”
Homeowner Ginny Faust, who has lived in a 1920s house on Florida Avenue since 1995, said the split parking lots, including one on the west side that would have only one entrance, would cause residents and visitors seeking a space to use Justice Street, Florida Avenue and Oak Street to drive between the lots.
The Planning Board recommended denial of a permit despite numerous concessions by the developer to resolve objections.
Woda Cooper executive Clay Cooper said the company owns 400 affordable housing developments in 16 states. In its 31-year history the company has sold only one property. The developer trimmed the number of units from 60 to 52 and dropped the building height from four stories to three, agreed to install an engineered stormwater runoff management system, agreed to save a large oak and large maple tree and was open to other changes.
The 44,550-square-foot apartment building would create less traffic and noise than uses that the current MIC zoning allows, including a 49,000-square-foot four-story office building, Cooper said.
“It’s a much less intense use than what’s permitted already,” he said.
The application goes next to the Hendersonville City Council, which could take it up at its May 5 meeting.
After taking up the Sixth Avenue case, the board voted to recommend approval of a four-story 78-unit senior housing development at 2620 Chimney Rock Road.
The applicant is Stephen Drake of WDT Development LLC. The 88,500-square foot White Pine Villas project would contain 36 one-bedroom and 42 two-bedroom apartments.
The Chimney Rock Road and Sixth Avenue projects are both seeking approval for tax credit financing from the N.C. Housing Finance Agency. The Hendersonville City Council last week granted a rezoning to allow a third project seeking tax credit financing to build affordable housing, the Apple Ridge development of apartments and homes on Sugarloaf Road.