The Greensboro City Council has five rezoning requests on the agenda for the Tuesday, July 21 virtual meeting.
A rezoning request takes an hour if there is opposition and both sides use all their allotted time. However, if there is no opposition, this City Council often doesn’t even bother with the staff report and rezones the property in minutes.
One request that has opposition is to rezone 2400 N. Elm St. from Residential Single-Family-3 (R-3) to Conditional District Residential Multi-Family-8 (CD-RM-8).
The lot is on the corner of North Elm Street and Cone Boulevard and is adjacent to the Sherwood Swim and Racquet Club. It is surrounded by R-3 single-family residential zoning.
The Planning Department staff recommended in favor of the rezoning request and the Zoning Commission voted to deny the request by a 7-0 vote at the June, 15 meeting.
The consensus of the Zoning Commission according to the minutes was that the proposed CD-RM-8 zoning district was “too dense for the area and the proposal was not in keeping with the character of the neighborhood.
The one condition is that the property would only have access on Rockford Road, which dead ends into the Sherwood Swim and Racquet Club property.
The developer, Jack Wright of Black Rhino Capital, said the plan was to build five townhome units on the 0.68 acre lot. One of the reasons given for the rezoning request was that the single-family home currently on the property was in much need of repair and the intent was to build a duplex and a triplex on the property.
The zoning commissioners asked a number of questions about parking and the question of where visitors would park appeared to be one that was not answered.
Neighbors spoke against multifamily zoning in an area that is zoned for single-family residential and the increased traffic and noted that Page High School students walk down Rockford and across the Sherwood property to school, and adding more traffic at an already busy intersection would create a safety hazard.
