News

Developer touts walkability of Greenville Highway apartment building

A proposed four-story apartment building could go up on a 9-acre site south of Publix and across from Chadwick Square (Dollar Tree) shopping center if the Hendersonville City Council approves a rezoning request. [CITY COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT DEPARTMENT]

By Bill Moss, Published: July 23, 2024

Neighboring homeowners who got their first look at plans for a 185-unit apartment building on Greenville Highway south of Publix panned the project, predicting that traffic and flooding will grow worse.

“You know that you’re building in a floodplain,” Sandra Williams, who lives on Chadwick Avenue, told developer Travis Fowler. “I grew up here and it doesn’t flood all the time as it did in January, (when) in a short period of time, it filled that whole area with water. You could not go down Greenville Highway to go to town, you could not come out that way to go to Flat Rock. Eventually you’re going to have a flood in there because there’s streams all around that area.”

Fowler and his company, First Victory, revised an earlier plan for apartments on the site. The new plan proposes one four-story building covering about an acre and a half of the nine-acre site. The development would also have a pool, benches, sidewalks and landscaping. Although part the rear of the land is in floodplain, reducing the plan to a single building allowed engineers to avoid it. The elevation will be raised and the building site supported by retaining walls.

“We are not going to build our building in a floodplain. The water will not enter our building in a 100-year flood,” Fowler said.

“This property is very close to town and it is very important to me as a developer personally and also from a responsibility standpoint to use the existing infrastructure that the town that we’re developing in has already provided to make that property adjacent to the services and the businesses that are already in place and to help our tenants have access to the local amenities such as the Ecusta Trail, which is a quarter mile from this property, and to have access to not only a job but also a place to buy food or restaurants.”

He pointed that the city is working on improvements behind the property that will reduce flooding on Greenville Highway. The close proximity to retail and services is another positive factor, he said.

“You can walk next door to Publix or across the street to Harris Teeter,” he said. “It’s gonna, in my opinion, decrease the traffic in the area as opposed to putting that same number of units in single-family houses or townhouses way out Greenville Highway or Kanuga Road.”

Jim Barnett, owner of a real estate office at 640 Greenville Highway, also warned about traffic and runoff.

“My main concern is traffic control,” he said. “You can go down there right now and the traffic will be blocked from White Street all the way to your property. I don’t believe you’ve got an answer for that. The other is stormwater runoff, and I bet you don’t have a solution for that either. Because we cannot stand any more stormwater runoff in that street.”

Engineers have plans to address both concerns, Fowler responded.

“There are ordinances in effect that we have to meet in relation to stormwater management,” he  said. “There’s a fairly significant amount of underground storage that’s part of the stormwater and civil engineering plans.”

NCDOT has “very stringent guidelines on how we’re to identify the current traffic flow, the anticipated traffic flow and the impact of our site,” he said. “We cannot change the fact that if we build housing, we create cars. There’s just no way to do that unless we had a subway in the area. We are going to cause more cars to be there. Our primary concern is that that travel distance is shortened as much as possible, that the possibility of walking on existing sidewalks to close area amenities is better than say maybe five or six miles out Upward Road or five or six miles up Greenville Highway.”