Tuesday night the Wake Forest Planning Board recommended the town board approve a request to build 290 apartments on Rogers Branch Road, a deadend street behind the Harris-Teeter on Rogers Road. The plan met opposition from neighbors.
The Meridian at Rogers Branch apartments would be built on about 12 acres on the south side of Rogers Branch Road. There would be two large apartment buildings, both four stories tall, with elevators and six two-story apartment building around the perimeter of the property. A small family cemetery will be surrounded by a black metal fence. There will be a pool and clubhouse.
Part of the plan is to extend Rogers Branch Road through a commercial project, Wheatfield on Forestville Road, to align with the traffic signal at Foundation Drive. (See the town board work session article for the rest of the plans for Foundation Drive.) This would provide two ways to leave the apartment complex.
Mark Barker with Northview Partners, the developer, said his firm has completed more than 7,000 apartment units in the Raleigh area and has its own inhouse construction component. When looking for apartment sites, he said, they want to locate next to retail, a grocery store and restaurants. He said only 1.5 percent of their tenants have school-age children; seniors make up 22 percent of their tenants. Rents will range from $1,200 per month to $1,800 or $1,900 depending on the size of the apartment.
“We believe it will be an asset,” Barker said. They find their complexes “tend to be the leading taxpayer in towns and we expect the same in Wake Forest.”
Louise Springer, who lives in Heritage, said she supports the goal of high density residential use near amenities, but “Our children cannot walk safely to school today.” She talked about the number of accidents in the stretch of Forestville Road from the traffic signal at Rogers Road where people are trying to turn right and left.
An unidentified woman, also from Heritage, said there are already two apartment complexes on Rogers Road and two more pending, this one and one on South Franklin Street behind Sheetz. The resulting increase in cars on the road “will impact all Wake Forest citizens.”
A realtor who does not live near the site said, “I love growth. I have a concern for the traffic.”
And Ken Christie said, “It’s a dangerous situation.”
Jonathan Jacobs, the town’s traffic engineer, said that the bottleneck on Rogers at the railroad crossing where there are only two lanes, will be eased in 2020 when the North Carolina Department of Transportation plans to build a vehicle overpass across the CSX rail line.
Jennifer Currin, the development services manager, said the almost-complete update of the comprehensive transportation plan has identified “hot spots,” difficult intersections and heavy traffic flow, and is working on solutions for them.
After the hearings, the vote on the project was four to two. Joe Kimray voted no but it was impossible to discern the second no vote. There were only six board members present – Karlene Tjurrentine, Chuck Mosley, Grif Bond, Chairman Ed Gary, Kimray and Karin Kuropas – out of the nine members.
The voting was unanimous in favor of the two other rezoning requests.
The first was the Brewer Circle subdivision, a private-public partnership where the town will pay about $300,000 to realign and pave the street with curb and gutter on part and swales along the rest because of the difficulty of relocating a sewer line. DRCW will plat the nine new lots and build affordable houses on them.
A woman spoke against the project because it will invade her privacy because some trees will be removed. She said there will be “so many new houses on small lots.” She said a neighbor’s lot has four to five dogs and six abandoned vehicles, and Currin said she could complain if there are violations.
The second was a request by Alliance Group of NC to rezone about 30 acres near the 500 block of the N.C. 98 Bypass. Most of the property is on the north side of the bypass adjacent to the new planned unit development that includes Wegmans grocery store. The request was made without a master plan so the planning board might never see it again.
Jacob Anderson spoke for the Alliance Group but failed to say what is intended for the property except to say that only about 12 acres is “probably usable” because of stream buffers and steep slopes.
Ray Kline, a resident of Holding Ridge Court, said that the current plans seem to indicate the town is “filling in all the forested area with townhomes. People coming in are going to see development, development.” He showed pictures of the wildlife near his house. “Is it going to be banks and businesses or this? The forest is the front door of Wake Forest.”
3 Responses
“Jennifer Currin, the development services manager, said the almost-complete update of the comprehensive transportation plan has identified “hot spots,” difficult intersections and heavy traffic flow, and is working on solutions for them.”
So we ALMOST have a transportation plan to identify “hot spots” and we are “working on solutions for them”, yet we continue to APPROVE DEVELOPMENT that will only further ADD to the problem. How is this acceptable? What if we the tax payers just ALMOST pay our taxes? Would that be acceptable to the Town?
THIS. IS. UNACCEPTABLE. The Town of Wake Forest is failing this community.
Agreed 100%. Build first, ask questions later. I expected more from our town leadership.
I would like to see a clearly defined ambition about how much wild life our town will keep. I see growth ambition, but we need a limit – where does our town draw that line? I want to keep the forest in Wake Forest. My elementary school child jokes that our town’s name is now Wake Parking Lot. This is unacceptable.