Cottage-style housing developments with courtyards and community parking lots may soon be sprouting up all over Wilmington.
The Wilmington City Council voted 6-1 during its Tuesday, Sept. 1 meeting to pass an ordinance amending the city’s land development code to add regulations for courtyard-style housing developments in residential zoning districts R-3, R-5, R-7, R-10, R-15 and R-20.
Mayor Bill Saffo supported the ordinance.
“We’ve been talking about this cottage-style housing for quite some time and we feel that this is the wave of the future in some of the in-field development in Wilmington,” he said.
Saffo added that new housing developments would be a good way to vitalize vacant lots.
“We’re putting enough safeguards in there that whoever does these kinds of developments has to acquire enough property to be able to do them. We’ve seen this concept in Bald Head Island and we’ve seen some of it across the country, and we think they would make for good development of Wilmington,” he said.
Saffo also addressed some of the council members’ concerns about adding small-lot developments in districts of town that have one-half acre lots. Developers who wish to build on R-15 and R-20 lots will need to present their plans to the city council and acquire a special use permit before they can begin their projects.
R-15 and R-20 districts include Landfall and lots near Bradley Creek and Hewletts Creek.
“The other districts, like R-5 and R-7, we felt would be very conducive to this type of cottage-style development because the nature of those areas is predominately smaller lots and smaller homes,” Saffo said.
Many of the city’s R-5 lots are located near Greenfield Lake and Wooster Street.
Council member Kevin O’Grady voted against the ordinance.
“I thought there should be a process of public input before they go through with this,” he said. “The design concept is fine.”
Saffo said the ordinance was developed based on community feedback.
“We have a comprehensive land use plan,” he said. “We’ve been out talking to the community for almost two years. We’ve had a series of meetings; we’ve talked to more than 1,000 people. It seems that this is what people are asking for — more cottage-style development, more walking availability within a neighborhood through cross-city trails and through sidewalks where people are interacting more like they used to in the old days in the historic districts of our downtown.”
Christine Hughes, one of the city’s senior planners, said it is difficult to gather public input regarding housing developments that have not yet been planned.
“It’s hard to say that a particular neighborhood or a particular part of town is more invested in what happens because there is no development being considered,” she said.
Hughes said she and her colleagues began planning the proposal after receiving a request from the council in January.
Glen Harbeck, the city’s director of development services, said he has received feedback from developers who wish to build in Wilmington.
“Ever since we have been looking into this, we have been getting phone calls from people seeing if they can utilize this provision for something they have in mind,” he said.
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