Southern Village high in sales, low in school buses

A traditional neighborhood development (TND) in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, provides evidence that a walkable community can be popular and have a measurable impact on school traffic. Mary Scroggs Elementary School in Southern Village has 450 students. A conventional suburban elementary school of its size would be expected to use seven to eight school buses, according to Chapel Hill Carrboro school transportation director Mary Lin Truelove. Because of the school’s location in a TND, only four buses are needed. A substantial number of students walk or bicycle to school — most from within Southern Village. “It is an ideal location for walking to school,” Truelove says. “Southern Village is a pedestrian-friendly community, and certainly all of the families live within 1.5 miles (the district’s walking radius). All of the kids in Southern Village walk to school.” The same will be true of children living in the development and attending Culbreth Middle School in the next school year (a new street connects Southern Village to the adjacent school). The elementary school is part of a town center, which now also has a church, commercial offices, community building, town square, multiplex cinema, 250 apartments, bus transit (with park and ride), and recreational facilities. Retail establishments and a hotel are planned. Southern Village is beginning to feel like a diverse town — in terms of buildings and uses — and it is one of the more popular developments in its market. The project sold more than 200 homes in 1999 — just missing the top spot in the Chapel Hill-Raleigh-Durham region and well ahead of the community in third place. The project is about two-thirds finished, and likely will have 1,150 to 1,200 homes when complete. The streets in the residential areas look nice. Houses generally are set back 10 to 20 feet from the sidewalk (townhomes are closer), and most streets are 27 feet curb to curb. Most lots are 110 feet deep, and developer D.R. Bryan has focused on making sure the small back and side yards offer privacy. Homes that lacked privacy generally languished on the market for months, and were not sold until the privacy problem was solved through the use of a fence or landscaping, Bryan says. Southern Village has some design and implementation flaws — e.g. some of the commercial architecture in the town center is mismatched with the rest of the project, notably office buildings on the square and a large grouping of apartments a block from the square. Also, the distance of the town center from the highway detracts from the site’s retail potential. Taken as a whole, however, Southern Village has created a highly successful model for smart growth in its region.