Chapel Hill lands new apartments with affordable units near bus line and downtown

UNC students and families could have a new option for apartment living on the bus line and within walking distance of downtown Chapel Hill and the Bolin Creek Greenway in a few years.

The Chapel Hill Town Council voted 5-1 Wednesday to approve up to 200 apartments for 701 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. The 701 MLK building will include 20 affordable apartments and will accept federal Section 8 housing vouchers — a rarity in Chapel Hill.

Council members Paris Miller-Foushee and Adam Searing were absent. Council member Amy Ryan voted against the conditional zoning permit that allows denser housing, but agreed with other members that the project was appropriate for that location.

The building from Georgia-based Landmark Properties will be up to eight stories, with six residential levels and 230 parking spaces on three levels under the building. The building and a retaining wall will rest against a 30-foot hill behind the project, beside an existing neighborhood.

Ryan said she agrees housing is appropriate for the site, but she would have liked to see a better transition between the building and the neighborhood, as well as along the street, where construction could be up to 100 feet tall, she said.

“It’s just following those urban design placemaking principles that help things to fit in and help make a good environment,” she said.

The 1.8-acre site now includes the former Johnson’s Garage and a house at the corner of MLK Jr. Boulevard and East Longview Street. The corner will get a courtyard and roughly 1,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space — enough for a small coffee shop or cafe, Landmark Properties development manager Bryan Boyles said.

Close to Chapel Hill Transit bus stop, future BRT

Future tenants will live steps from a Chapel Hill Transit bus stop and a future North-South bus-rapid transit line station. UNC’s campus is less than a mile away.

Council members negotiated with the developer in a Sept. 10 hearing for more affordable housing and to serve families and working professionals, in addition to students.

While state law doesn’t let the council dictate how the building’s interior spaces are designed, Ryan sought clarification at the September meeting about how the apartments could serve different types of renters.

“I am completely fine having students living here; I think it’s a great place for them. But I also want to make sure that folks who work downtown can be within that walkable area or seniors who don’t want to drive anymore,” she said.

Boyles addressed the question Wednesday. About 30% of the apartments will have four bedrooms and four baths, he said, which are more attractive to student renters. The rest will be studio and one, two, and three bedrooms.

A 2021 housing study showed the town needs 485 more homes a year for the next 20 years to keep up with demand, including 45 student housing units a year. That was before UNC announced its goal to add 500 more students a year for the next 10 years.

How stormwater is handled is also important, because the site drains into Bolin Creek and the floodprone area around University Place and Camelot Village. The town requires developers to plan for a 100-year storm, with a 1% chance of that happening in each year.

“We would like to do more projects in Chapel Hill, so we need to be able to do what we tell you we’re going to do,” Boyles said. “We do multiple projects in markets across the country, and as we said before, we’re long-term holders of this project, so we need to maintain a great relationship.”

Council member Paris Miller-Foushee said in September that she is excited to see something on the corner extending downtown residential and commercial density along MLK Jr. Boulevard, one of the busiest transit corridors in Chapel Hill.

“It’s a lively corner,” she said. “The retail potential of a coffee shop or something there, I think it will get the kind of traffic that it needs [from] the residents there, but also people within that space who come and support the kind of retail that goes there.”

701 MLK development details

• Location: 1.84 acres at Longview Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard
• What’s there: A vacant auto garage and house
• What’s approved: 175 to 200 for-rent apartments. Up to eight stories with six residential levels and 230 parking spaces on three levels under the building.
• Affordable housing: 10% of the apartments will be affordable to households earning up to 60% of the area median income — a family of three earning up to $62,460 a year, for example. Section 8 vouchers accepted.
• Amenities: An internal courtyard and a 3,500 square foot public plaza with a roughly 1,000 square foot retail space
• Getting around: A bus-rapid transit station is planned nearby, and the site is within walking distance of downtown Chapel Hill, the Midtown Market shops and the Bolin Creek Greenway.

This story was originally published October 9, 2025 at 8:15 AM.

Tammy Grubb

The News & Observer

919-829-8926

Tammy Grubb has written about Orange County’s politics, people and government since 2010. She is a UNC-Chapel Hill alumna and has lived and worked in the Triangle for over 30 years.