City Council Hamburglars
Opponents of an ambitious renovation planned for Quail Corners shopping center in southeast Charlotte showed up ready for a food fight at Tuesday night’s city council zoning meeting.
Crosland development wants to give its 30-year-old shopping center a multi-million-dollar facelift, but the plan hinges on an expansion to include a drive-thru fast-food restaurant that company officials say would act as a new-customer lure and revenue generator needed to pay for the renovation project.
Sounds simple enough, but Quail Corners’ current zoning doesn’t allow for fast-food restaurants with drive-through windows and the prospect of adding one into the mix is leaving a rotten taste in the mouths of some neighbors of the popular shopping center.
They argue that when Crosland built Quail Corners in 1979, to win community support the developer promised the shopping center wouldn’t include a fast-food restaurant. Adding one now would be inconsistent with the city’s own South District area plan, said Jay Shapiro, a member of Quail Hollow Homeowners Association, one of about four neighborhood groups protesting Crosland’s plan at Tuesday night’s zoning meeting.
A drive-thru restaurant, opponents contend, would increase traffic in the area and create safety issues for Quail Corners, located across the street from Quail Hollow Middle School and near the already-busy intersection of Park Road, Gleneagles Road and Sharon Road West.
A Charlotte Department of Transportation (CDOT) study of Crosland’s rezoning petition, though, indicates that even with a fast-food drive-thru restaurant, the proposed renovation and expansion would yield negligible traffic impact, about 600 additional trips per day.
“The increment of increase of traffic is not significant, in our minds, in the context of the overall development,” CDOT project manager Mike Davis told councilmembers Tuesday night.
That didn’t prevent neighbors who oppose the plan from trying to tackle the safety issue by using another tact: any fast-food joint, they argued, would in and of itself pose a significant hazard, and not just from clogged arteries and high cholesterol.
The greatest concern is the proposed fast-food restaurant’s proximity to Quail Hollow Middle School, said Maria Smithson, vice president of Cameron Woods Homeowners Association.
“It would sit tantalizingly close, directly across six lanes of high-speed, busy traffic on Park Road, to where hundreds of young students go to school, attend after-school activities and athletic events,” Smithson said.
It was only a few years ago, she reminded councilmembers, that a South Meck High School student was hit and killed by a car not far from the spot of the proposed fast-food restaurant. And last year a Quail Hollow student was hit and seriously injured while trying to cross Park Road in the exact spot where, Smithson said, “we expect students to attempt to cross if you allow a fast-food restaurant to go into Quail Corners.”
“While we would hope that our middle-schoolers would not dodge traffic to get to a McDonald’s or a Taco Bell, we know reality is they’re not going to use commonsense,” Smithson said. “We know that the temptation would prove too great.”
Crosland officials acknowledge that traffic in the area at peak hours can be heavy, but note that their plan, at the request of the city, includes adding a pedestrian safety island in the middle of Park Road to help mitigate crossing problems.
That solution did little to ease the angst of worried neighbors.
“This twisted logic simply adds to the problem and says to our students, ‘Go ahead and cross,’” Smithson said. “In legal terms, this is known as an attractive nuisance.”
John Carmichael, representing Crosland, said the Quail Corners renovation and expansion plan is entirely consistent with a neighborhood shopping center that serves a community, and he drew upon his own history as proof. He lives in a Cotswold neighborhood, Carmichael said, that is located about two-tenths of a mile from four fast-food restaurants, and that hasn’t impacted neighbors’ quality of life or property values.
Peter Pappas, president of Crosland’s retail division, told councilmembers that at least two other Crosland shopping centers – Rae Village and Hunters Crossing – have a large anchor grocery tenant and a fast-food restaurant similar to what is being proposed for Quail Corners, which currently has a Harris Teeter as an anchor tenant. Both Rae Village and Hunters Crossing, Pappas said, have successfully integrated with surrounding residential neighborhoods.
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