Apartments for North Main?

A developer who had planned a five-story apartment complex on North Main Street – what might have been a sign of the downtown development boom starting to creep north of Elmwood Avenue – scrapped the project last September after running into various roadblocks and saying the city was “very difficult to work with.”

The developer, Florida-based Brian Ray, was seeking exceptions from the city for reduced parking requirements and a reduced buffer between single-family residential districts. The apartments were being planned for the corner of North Main and Confederate Avenue, about three blocks north of Elmwood, just south of River Drive.

Neighbors from the abutting Cottontown/Bellvue Historic District and other nearby neighborhoods spoke out against the proposed apartments, saying they were concerned about a lack of parking at the development and that it did not quite fit the character of their community, though they said they otherwise looked forward to the redevelopment of North Main.

So is the city’s multifamily downtown housing trend just not ready to cross the Elmwood divide?

Besides a planned residential component at the new Bull Street development north of the traditional downtown area, there are the NOMA Flats apartments off River Drive, near Earlewood. The development was renovated a few years back, but no similar projects have joined them in the area.

Don’t count them out, though, said Krista Hampton, Columbia’s director of planning and development. The area’s ripe with available parcels, and she sees it as a promising corridor for a mix of commercial and multifamily residential development.

She doesn’t know of any developers looking to build multifamily housing there at the moment, but “I feel very optimistic about it,” Hampton said.

This story was originally published April 18, 2015 at 10:29 PM with the headline "Apartments for North Main?."