Hillsborough Road Coca-Cola Bottling Site

Noticed this morning that a zoning change request was filed at the end of the year to allow “mixed use including multifamily and commercial”. This is a pretty big site at 11.7 acres. Would be a great infill project IMO.

TBJ has new details about this potential project by The Ardent Companies out of Atlanta.

-370 apartments
-24 townhomes
-68k square feet of commercial
-Grocery store occupying 23k square feet similar in style to Durham Co-Op
-Remaining commercial mix of food/beverage, soft goods and services

Sounds like the developer plans to take possession of the property by year end and the actual construction is probably still some time off. Would be a great use of that site.

Now that's the kind of development we need replicated around the city. High density and medium density housing together. Retail and a designated local grocery store space. On paper this is the most exciting development I can think of in Durham, this is what Northgate Mall could have been (but bigger).

edit: on second thought, I'm very curious how parking minimums are going to play out with this. Can developers get a pass on parking minimums?

edit 2: Oh, I see the site map on in the article. Certainly not light on parking, but still seems like a great project for what they need to work around

It will have a significant amount of parking, including surface lots. The usual suspects are already on Twitter bitching about how this is actually not a good thing at all because it doesn’t conform to some purely theoretical idea of urbanism. Wish people would live in the real world and understand that a project like this is the only way to catalyze higher density along a stretch like this part of Hillsborough with zero residential or walk ability. If this project gets built and Trinsic is successful with their Aura project a block over you have the beginnings of a much more dense corridor. As it is, this proposal is significantly more ambitious than I would have expected for the location and offers much more benefit than what is proposed at Northgate on a much smaller site in a less desirable location. Rant over.

The rezoning request for this project was approved so looks like it will be moving forward sometime early 2025. Evidently the bottling operation will still be there a bit longer prior to planned relocation to a new facility.