TRAVERSE CITY — An affordable housing development in Traverse City’s northwest corner could grow after city planning commissioners recommended rezoning the property.
The shorthanded commission voted 6-0 Wednesday to send the rezoning request to city commissioners, who will make the final call at a future meeting. Planning board members Jess Heller, Shea O’Brien and Jerry Swanson were absent.
Traverse City Housing Commission wants to add 30 apartments next to the 21 townhouses currently at Orchardview, said Andrew Mollison, an architect with Alliance Architects who’s working with TCHC on the project. He told the planning board the idea is to add one- and two-bedroom apartments to a property in the city’s northwest corner that currently has three- and four-bedroom homes.
First, TCHC would need the city to rezone the property to R-3 multifamily from its current residential conservation zoning, Mollison said. Orchardview already doesn’t conform with that zoning as is, since it doesn’t allow for apartment buildings.
City Planner Shawn Winter said that zoning is the result of a 1999 rewrite of city zoning ordinances, although he couldn’t say why Orchardview was rezoned that way. Changing the zoning would not only better reflect the current use, but help TCHC secure tax credits and meet its mission to provide more affordable housing.
“As you are all aware, the need for more housing, and more specifically, more affordable housing, is acute in this region, and the market needs are changing,” he said. “So they’re not only wanting to build additional units on the property, but to add one- and two-bedroom units to the mix.”
Several neighbors from the adjacent Morgan Farms development spoke against the rezoning request during the public hearing, even as they said they support adding more affordable housing. They cited concerns about arsenic contamination in the soil, as well as whether the rezoning would allow for too much density.
Jenny Young told commissioners that some unoccupied areas of the property had arsenic levels higher than a limit that the state Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy determined to be safe for direct contact. That’s despite the fact that the limit, part of a site-specific plan for Orchardview, is three times higher than the state’s generic cutoff.
George Schankler said that while Winter noted EGLE determined in 2021 that no further action was needed at Orchardview, his conversation with an agency regulator suggested that any future work on the property would have to meet certain standards.
Testing in 2012 revealed arsenic at varying levels on the former orchard, and in 2019 EGLE asked the housing commission for more information on how it was keeping residents safe. TCHC already warned residents not to dig when they signed their lease. After another round of soil tests and fencing off an undeveloped part of the lot where the highest arsenic levels are found, EGLE determined no further action was needed.
Karl Fulmer, TCHC’s executive director, said any development there will need EGLE approval, since it’ll be built with public money.
“So we will have to mitigate any sort of arsenic in the soil that EGLE deems unsafe,” he said.
Commissioner Brian McGillivary said he saw the arsenic contamination as a “non-issue” that will be remediated if needed.
“If we didn’t allow construction on contaminated properties in this city, 75 percent of the city wouldn’t be built,” he said.
Other neighbors thought rezoning the property to R-3 was a big jump up. Janet Fleshman told commissioners to consider not what TCHC proposed, but what a potential full buildout of the property could look like. And Scott Springer said Morgan Farms residents already had a bad experience with apartments being built nearby at a higher density than neighbors originally thought.
Fulmer said slopes make redeveloping much of Orchardview’s property into affordable housing isn’t feasible. The commission requested R-3 multifamily because it was the zoning type that best fit what it’s trying to do on the property.
“We’re not trying to cram anything down anybody’s throat,” he said. “What we are trying to do is thoughtfully add to the development that is Orchardview.”
Commissioner Mitch Treadwell, also a TCHC member, said the question about rezoning had nothing to do with a tentative site plan the commission presented. That means some concerns raised about the safety of a second driveway on Carter Road shouldn’t factor into the decision.
Planning board members raised a few other questions, from whether the rezoning fit with the city’s current master plan and the rewritten one it’s about to adopt, to whether R-3 was the best zoning type.
Commissioner Anna Dituri said she supported the rezoning as a way to undo a questionable change made in 1999, and provide for zoning rules that are both more uniform but also unique to the different regions of the city.
“This makes sense, it’s a better use of the property and to me it fits both the current and future master plan definitions,” she said.