Concept Plan for Hotel in Southern Village – Developer’s Program

To: Mayor Foy and Town Council Members

From: D.R. Bryan and John Fugo for SV Center, LLC

Thank you for the opportunity to present a concept plan for the Village Center in Southern Village. Though we are still in the “idea” stage, we have been investigating an architecturally distinctive building for some time. Here is a summary of what we have done so far:

June 2007 – We held a planning charrette to consider a hotel or condominium building in the Village Center, on the site of what is now a surface parking lot. Around 60 people participated, most of them Southern Village residents and business owners.
September 2007 -- We presented the results of the charrette to participants.
September 8 and 9, 2008 -- We held two community information meetings at Christ Church. A total of around 70 Southern Village residents attended.
September 24, 2008 -- We presented a concept plan for a hotel (or condominium building) to the Community Design Commission.
October 23, 2008 – We presented our development concept to the Southern Village Homeowners’ Association Board of Directors.

In the course of these meetings, it became clear that we needed a preliminary design to help interested persons envision how a new building might fit into the existing Village Center. We are not committed to this design but hope it will help lend perspective to this overall concept.

Why consider a new Village Center building? There are two reasons: design and economics.

Design

The design goal is to complete the village center with an attractive building with structured parking and street front retail. The key design principles that we have followed in the development of the Village Center are:

Bring buildings to the sidewalk.
Make the street permeable.
Hide the parking.
Create an outdoor room.

Surface parking lots, while functional, are not attractive. A new building could achieve all of these design goals and at the same time provide adequate parking.

Parking was a topic of interest at all of the meetings we have held with neighbors, and their comments helped us arrive at these goals for the parking component of this project:

Retain all the public parking.
Through a level of structured parking, add the spaces needed to serve a hotel.
The public parking on the Weaver Street side must be open, inviting, well lighted and convenient to the Market Street stores.

Economics

We propose this project to support the existing businesses and restaurants on Market Street. SV Center is the primary developer and commercial property owner in the Village Center. It owns the buildings at 300, 400, 410, and 700 Market Street, as well as the Lumina Theater and the Village Green and Stage. These commercial buildings were completed over a six-year period, 1999-2005. As developer-owners, we have made extensive efforts to make the Village Center successful. These include establishing the Lumina Theater to create a retail anchor, forming creative partnerships to bring in important establishments such as Weaver Street Market, Christ Church and Chapel Hill Daycare, and funding a marketing, special events and concert program each year.

This hotel proposal is another effort on our part to strengthen the economic vitality of the Village Center. We believe a hotel would be an excellent third anchor in the Village Center, to complement our existing anchors (Weaver Street Market and The Lumina Theatre). The Chapel Hill-Carrboro Visitors Bureau reports that in 2008, a person who stays overnight in a Chapel Hill hotel spends an average of $286 per day for housing, food, gifts, and incidentals. We believe a hotel would bring significant business to our specialty retail stores and restaurants, and strengthen the long-term economic vitality of the Village Center.

Green Building

If our proposal is approved, we would commit to constructing a “green” building that qualifies for LEED certification for new construction and achieves a high level of energy conservation and state-of-the-art stormwater management.

Public Plaza

We would like the Council’s view on a suggestion that many charrette participants found very exciting: closing one block of Aberdeen Street, to create a plaza and public space, connecting the hotel to the Village Green and stage area.

We look forward to discussing these ideas with you on November 17.