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Letdown at the lake: Residents hope tide turns in Wylie rezoning dispute
Marian Black lifts her hand to shade her eyes. As she gazes out over Lake Wylie, a heron glides across the water lapping at the dock behind the John James Audubon Lodge in The Sanctuary lakefront community.
“That right there is what we’re fighting to save,” Black says as the bird flies out of view. “This place is a refuge, for us and nature. When I pull off Shopton Road and hit that gravel road and see the trees and the lake, all my stress just washes away.”
For Black and 250 other homeowners in The Sanctuary and surrounding area, the fight is against Charlotte-based developer Crescent Resources, which is seeking a higher-density zoning to build houses nearby.
The company wants 180 acres of land east of The Sanctuary to be rezoned so it would be able to build 1.75 homes per acre, more than the 0.4 homes per acre that zoning allows. The city’s planning department has OK’d the higher density rezoning, but the City Council has yet to vote on it.
Lake Wylie behind the John James Audubon Lodge at The Sanctuary, where residents concerned about runoff into the lake are upset over plans by Crescent Resources to build more homes in the area. Photo by Scott Baughman
Residents in the area are livid and questioning the way the planning department calculated density when it approved the rezoning.
Crescent’s development of The Sanctuary started in 2003. Back then, in the booming days before the real estate crisis, the company set about to develop an approximately 1,300-acre neighborhood on an 1,800-acre tract.
According to the company’s marketing materials from the time, only 20 percent of the land in The Sanctuary would ever be developed, with lot sizes for single-family homes ranging from 2 to 13 acres. Indeed, only 20 percent of The Sanctuary has been developed, but residents are worried about Crescent building at a higher density on nearby land.
Although the land is technically not part of Charlotte, it is in an extra-territorial jurisdiction area of Mecklenburg County, so the city had to approve the development of the area for homes. The city set the density for the 1,800 acres at 0.4 homes per acre.
By 2007, the development had sold reasonably well, with only 17 home sites out of about 200 still left to sell. Crescent turned over most of the land in The Sanctuary to a homeowners association, but the company still owned 319 acres around the lake. Crescent had plans to build another housing development, Chapel Cove at Glengate, on that land.
As the housing market sank, interest in Chapel Cove homes waned. Crescent had other financial problems and, in 2009, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, emerging from it in 2010.
In July, Crescent filed a rezoning petition to increase the density on the 319 acres. Since then, Crescent’s request has been modified: The company is asking for 180 acres of land east of The Sanctuary to be rezoned to allow 1.75 homes per acre.
The city’s planning department considers the 180 acres to be part of the 1,800-acre tract the city zoned in 2003. So, the overall density averaged across all acres will be 0.52 homes per acre, below the recommendation, included in a plan that was developed for the Steele Creek area with input from residents, of one home per acre.
Residents in The Sanctuary and nearby are so upset by that way of calculating density, they formed a group, Save Lake Wylie’s Coves, to fight Crescent’s plans to build more houses.
“We’ve always known Crescent was going to try and sell lots over there, but that’s just way too many houses to put out here,” said Dave Chavoustie, a member of Save Lake Wylie’s Coves and one of the homeowners in The Santuary. “We want to protect the cove there from all that runoff and keep all that silt from draining into the lake.”
Nancy Nyberg, another homeowner in The Sanctuary, said she feels the city’s planners are ignoring the feedback from residents who worked on the Steele Creek area plan earlier this year.
“During that process we got the city to recommend a density of one house per acre for this whole area,” Nyberg. “Now, it feels like all of that effort was for nothing.”
But Tammie Keplinger, rezoning planning manager for the city, said – adding that she has explained this several times to representatives from Save Lake Wylie’s Coves – the land will have a density that is less than one house per acre, even after the rezoning.
“We have not done anything differently in this case than we have for other developers of large projects like this,” Keplinger said.
“I personally can’t recall another time when citizens complained about that kind of density determination. If you go to Highland Creek or Palisades or Berewick or other large developments we have in the city, you will see that we look at the overall development to determine the overall density.
“You might have different components within the development that may have a density that is higher or lower than what the overall density of the entire development is. That is just the way we calculate density.”
The practice of averaging density across land that is no longer owned by a developer infuriates Chavoustie.
Some of the homeowners who are members of Save Lake Wylie’s Coves lived in the area before Crescent developed The Sanctuary. Much to their frustration, their land is also used in the city’s density calculation.
“They just lumped our land in there without even asking us,” said homeowner Patricia Guin, who lives near The Sanctuary. “We’ve never been part of The Sanctuary. Now it is like the city will come up with any excuse they need to get around their own area plan and go ahead and let Crescent do what they want to do, regardless of what we as citizens have to say.”
Steven Firestone, a member of the city’s planning committee, which is made up of volunteers who make recommendations to the City Council on rezoning requests and other land-use matters, agrees with the disgruntled residents on the density calculation.
“I think once a developer no longer owns a parcel – so they don’t have the ability to influence development on the parcel – they should not be allowed to borrow the density of that land for future projects,” he said. “Obviously, the planning staff has their own interpretation of the regulations.”
Based on the way city planning staff is calculating density, if homeowners at The Sanctuary wanted to level their homes and propose a rezoning for a higher-density project, they could average their project’s density with the vacant land Crescent owns adjacent to The Sanctuary, he said.
“I do not believe that is the correct way to approach it,” he said. “Not only is something going in that the homeowners in the area don’t want, but their own land is being used to do it.”
Crescent declined interviews, issuing a statement instead:
“We’ve taken into consideration thoughts and ideas we gleaned from nine meetings with interested community members over the last several months. The resulting plan reduced the total number of households by 25 percent, includes only single-family homes and includes more than twice the required amount of open space.”
Black said she plans to keep battling the rezoning request, on which the council is expected to vote at a June 18 meeting.
But other residents say the decision already seems to have been made in Crescent’s favor.
“When Crescent asked for this rezoning, they went from having plans that called for 15,000-square-foot lots to 5,000-square-foot lots,” Guin said. “Other people from neighborhoods like Berewick told us we should be happy Crescent made the concession to keep it at 5,000. They said we were crazy to try and fight the city and the developer. I guess they were right.”
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