Multi Housing News August 2012 : Page 32
Located next to the Bland Street Station in Charlotte’s Lynx Blue Line light rail transit corridor, the 360-unit Circle at Southend includes 8,000 square feet of retail space and 714 parking spaces situated on about 5 acres. Developed by Crescent Resources and managed by Greystar, the apartment community is LEED Silver-rated, and the fi rst smoke-free community in the metro area. garages and 36 townhomes in three different fl avors of archi-tecture: modern, traditional and fl ats. “The architecture does its best to respond to the context across the street at any point,” says Ritchey. Conformity Corp. was responsible for delivering all the real estate with the exception of the Lowe’s store. Southborough was designed by BB+M Architecture with land planning by LandDesign. Riding in a vehicle on the street fronted by the traditional town-homes, one would never guess that there was a Lowe’s big box store situated on the site behind the townhomes. One of the dis-tinct features of the Southborough site plan is that the housing is wrapped around Lowe’s –without having a view onto the store. Understandably, members of the historic Dilworth neighborhood had been particularly concerned about the presence of a big box store. The eventual solution that was found: the traditional townhomes sit on the streets facing the historic neighborhoods, while behind them, forming another housing layer, the fl ats wrap around the store and face out towards the townhomes. Drive-ways leading into interior courtyards, fountains, or green spaces lend a sense of human “discovery” and site “porousness.” Southborough’s location in the transit corridor meant that Con-formity Corp. had to comply with density requirements and ar-chitectural guidelines that applied within a half mile ring of the transit stop, says Ritchey. “Those were the two big tests [of the transit station location]: density and architectural guidelines,” says Ritchey. The TOD overlay district zoning required, for ex-ample, urban setbacks and fewer parking spaces. In addition, conditional rezoning provided further zoning refi nements that were specifi c to the project. What CATS did well, says Ritchey, was “its decision to inte-grate the planning mentality with the transit mentality in as com-plete a manner as possible” with respect to the layout of the tran-sit, as well as to think through the bus routes, and reroute or add additional routes to integrate buses with the light rail station. Noell Consulting Group has found that rents of apartment 32 August 2012 | Multi-Housing News
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