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The university’s growth into the streets around it: land taking, campus planning, student housing pressure, and the neighborhoods that changed.
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"The first study of campus buildings in almost forty years, this book offers a short account of campus developments behind building projects, the ideas and architects involved, and the people within the university who w…
The Dynamic Decade tells the story of the sweeping makeover of the 200-year old campus of the University of North Carolina. Six million square feet of new buildings were constructed and a million square feet of historic…
Cover title: Alternatives, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1969.
Speech given by University President Kemp P. Battle in 1883 on University Day, the anniversary of the laying of the corner stone for the Old East Building. Battle presents the history of each building, how it was named …
Dated events connected with this event: sixteen of 17, the highlights and the earliest of the rest, in date order. See all 17 in the chronology →
The core of what became the Carolina North tract, north of Estes Drive and west of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, came to the university as a bequest from Professor Horace Williams. The university later bought adjoining land, and parts of the site were used as an airport, landfill, town operations center and animal shelter.
When Northside and Pine Knolls were targeted for urban renewal, residents confronted HUD and avoided the wholesale clearance seen in Durham's Hayti, winning home improvements and new construction instead.
Between 1980 and 2010 Northside's Black population fell by roughly 40 percent as investors bought homes and converted or replaced them as student rentals; over the same period the share of university workers living 10 or more miles away rose above 60 percent.
The Chapel Hill Town Council approved the university's Development Plan covering 582 acres of the main campus in the Office/Institutional-4 district, proposing 41 new buildings, 8 parking decks and new roads, about 5.9 million square feet in all, to carry out the 2001 Campus Master Plan.
Chapel Hill formed the Horace Williams Citizens Committee in 2003 to advise on development proposals for the university's Horace Williams tract, and the Town Council adopted the committee's March 2004 final report as town policy.
After residents asked for protection from student-rental conversions, the council enacted the town's first neighborhood conservation district, a zoning overlay limiting house size and height in Northside. An advisory committee drafted it through 2003 before a January 21, 2004 public hearing.
The update to the 2001 Campus Master Plan found about half of the 2001 plan's sites under construction or in design, with over six million square feet of new buildings under way, and put remaining main-campus capacity at about 4.5 million square feet; it planned residence halls to replace Odum Village on South Campus.
The council voted 9-0 to adopt Ordinance O-7 creating the Pine Knolls district, which bans new duplexes, caps floor area at 2,500 square feet and reduces front-yard parking. The Greenwood and Kings Mill/Morgan Creek districts were adopted the same night.
The Board of Trustees approved a plan for Carolina North on the Horace Williams tract, later submitted to the town with the 2009 rezoning application; the trustees adopted Carolina North design guidelines on November 19, 2008.
After ten joint work sessions with trustees and hearings on May 11, June 15 and June 22, the Town Council approved a 20-year development agreement for Carolina North and rezoned the in-town portion of the tract to University-1, authorizing about 3 million square feet on 133 acres.
The council voted 7-0 for a six-month development moratorium in Northside and Pine Knolls, backdated to May 23, 2011, while a community plan was drafted. Jackson Center staff helped organize residents in support.
The council approved three resolutions under the plan, amending both conservation districts with building rules effective February 1, 2012 and a four-vehicle-per-lot parking limit effective September 1, 2012.
UNC-Chapel Hill committed a $3 million, 10-year, no-interest loan to Self-Help to buy Northside homes as they came on the market and hold them in a land bank for affordable resale or rental. The Jackson Center and the Town of Chapel Hill were partners.
People: Mark Kleinschmidt · Carol L. Folt
UNC closed Horace Williams Airport on May 15, 2018, under a November 2017 trustees resolution, citing money lost running the field and at least $1 million in needed runway repairs. The airfield dated to 1928 and had trained Navy pre-flight cadets during World War II; the Carolina North campus once planned for the site had stalled.
Subject: Horace Williams Airport
By mid-2022 the initiative had bought more than 41 Northside properties with the UNC loan, and 51 families with 50 children had moved into the neighborhood through its housing work.
The Regulatory Reform Act of 2025 became law without the governor's signature, making UNC System projects in Orange County subject only to state rules and leaving the town a consultation role on utilities, stormwater, traffic and similar matters.
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