News

City OKs 185-unit apartment building at South Gateway

By Bill Moss, Published: March 9, 2025

A field on Greenville Highway that was inundated by the floodwaters of Hurricane Helene could be the site of a four-story 185-unit apartment building if a developer completes the project that got a greenlight last week.

The Hendersonville City Council on Thursday granted a zoning application for the apartments on nine acres after the developer described plans to raise the building pad by 5-6 feet, grant the city floodplain land for its Mud Creek flood mitigation project and offer vouchers at workforce rates for 10 units.
The council’s unanimous vote came over the objections of speakers who warned during a public hearing of possible future flooding that could endanger residents.
“As our elected officials, you are responsible for prioritizing public safety first and foremost,” said Lynne Williams, who lives on Chadwick Avenue a few hundred yards from the site. As she had at several other public hearings on zoning requests since the Sept. 27 storm, Williams described the high water that isolated the home she shares with her parents and said they could only have been reached by boat during the flood. “Protecting public safety and rebuilding our community in resilient ways requires you to deny this project,” she told the council.
Ken Fitch, another frequent opponent of higher-density or commercial zoning requests, also said the flood risk was too great to set aside.
“We cannot unsee what we have seen,” he said. “We cannot unexperience what we have experienced.”
Derek J. Allen, an attorney for First Victory developer Travis Fowler, said the mid-rise building would fill a critical need in the community by providing close-in dwellings at the city’s south gateway.
“One of the things that we hear about a lot in Western Carolina, especially in post-Helene times, is the availability of housing,” he said. “And we look for those things as a community and we look for them in places where it makes some sense. We look for the missing middle and that missing middle is a project that looks a lot like this.”
The site plan “uses clustering to pull the development out of the sensitive areas of the site,” he said. The “proximity to retail, grocery stores and services and parks makes it a desirable place to live, and it has walkability and bike-ability for those points as well. We also note that this aligns with the city's future land-use plan and we do think that this is a good transition piece from the open-space conservation.”
The site plan's landscaping and open space, he noted, exceed the code’s standards.
“We're putting in 187 percent of the required tree plantings on the site that doesn't have a lot now, and 115 percent of the shrubs,” he said. “So we’re not only meeting the requirements of the ordinance but we're exceeding them by a large margin.”
Fowler has also offered to convey land at the rear of the property near Mud Creek to the city for a flood prevention project.
The easement would “benefit the city's lower Mud Creek floodplain restoration project, which focuses on reducing flooding and restoring natural floodplain functions along Mud Creek in the south side of Hendersonville,” engineer John Kinnaird of CDG Inc. told the council.
Kinnaird also described site prep designed to mitigate flood risk.
“We are planning to raise the site five to six feet to keep the building and parking above 100-year flood elevation,” Kinnaird said. “There's been some questions around stormwater. On this site, we were proposing to do underground detention and water-quality treatment in storm tanks. There's four sprinkled around the site. These do a really good job of treating the water, both for the volume and velocity of runoff, but also the water quality.”
As for pervious surfaces instead of asphalt for the parking lot and internal roadways, Kinnaird said that was not practical.
“This works well in sandy soils, works well at the coast, does not work nearly as well in the mountains, especially on this site,” he said. “We're having to raise that site up four or five feet. That is all compacted dirt — very hard dirt. So I would not recommend using pervious pavers on this site. I do think that storm tech chambers would be much more effective in this case.”
After reviewing it twice, the planning board voted 3-2 on Feb. 13 to recommend that the city council deny the request.
Council members said on Thursday night that the need for more “missing middle” housing was clear and that the commercial stretch in the south gateway was the right place for it.
“We are all acutely aware of the trauma that our area experienced with Hurricane Helene. We experienced it personally as well,” council member Lyndsey Simpson said. “That being said, this specific property is in a location that would be great for housing because of its proximity to the bus stop, the grocery stores and the ability to be able to walk to things that folks are going to need.
“I know that it can be scary for folks for us to approve something like this, or even consider something like this, but there's a lot of factors that we weigh whenever we look at projects, and I do believe that the applicant has done everything in their power to try to make this project work logically. And as a council we have to lean on the experts that we have at our disposal, which is our planning staff, our stormwater staff and public safety, and if they are comfortable with it, then that makes me a lot more comfortable with it. The fact that they're going to provide some of the units with housing vouchers is a much, much, much needed price point of housing that we just don't have right now. … When I think of where I would want to see that sort of development I would rather it be that part of town as opposed to other parts of town.”
Council member Jennifer Hensley liked the contribution to the Mud Creek flood mitigation project.
“I think this is a good project,” she said. “I think it’s going to address some of our affordable housing issues. To get that density in an area that can handle the density, for me, I’m willing to forgo the height (objection). And that is a commercial corridor that’s prime for development.”