Aug. 11, 2026
By Jonathan Rich
BrevardBeagle.com
During Tuesday’s Brevard Housing Trust Fund Selection Committee meeting in City Council chambers, a long-gestating affordable-housing project showed new signs of life when City Manager Wilson Hooper informed the group there was new interest in redeveloping a 4.7-acre wooded lot behind Brevard-Davidson River Presbyterian Church into a multi-family affordable housing complex with more than 60 rental units.
In February 2024, Brevard City Council invested $50,000 to determine if undeveloped 4.7 acres of land located behind the church property on East Main Street between North Johnson and Franklin streets and down a hill toward the corner of East French Broad Street could be developed as a site for low-to-moderate income housing.
In June of that same year, the city signed a three-year lease agreement for $1 with the church to pursue the creation of an affordable housing development with 50 affordable housing rental units on the site within the next 5 years.
In September 2024, officials learned that engineers from Solid Ground NC had tested soil samples from across the property and found the soft soil would have to be completely removed and replaced to build the intended large multi-family complex on that property.
In December 2024, representatives from the UNC School of Government’s Development Finance Initiative told council members an updated geotechnical analysis of soil indicated the mix of sandy clay, sandy silt and silty sand that would need to be undercut and regraded for construction would cost at least $19 million to develop 3.5 acres of the wooded property for the intended rental units.
That price tag effectively stalled the project for more than a year and a half, but Tuesday afternoon Brevard City Manager Hooper said there was new interest in the joint-project between the city and the downtown Presbyterian church.
“We quietly let that agreement slide, however we didn’t legally break the lease,” Hooper told the committee. “We’re still the tenant and they are still the landlord of that property and we did that with the idea if another opportunity came up and the lease was still active we would be able to take advantage of it. Well, behold, another opportunity has come up. A group called Greenway Development backed by Dominion Investments Bank has approached the city and the church to say they think they can develop an outlying complex on that property.”
Hooper further elaborated that he had informed the developers of the previous geo-tech soil study results and the response was that it would not be an issue moving forward.
“They said ‘Yes, we know, but we think we can get in there.’ We questioned them a little bit further and they said they have an in-house construction team so they save money that way and their site plan would take care of a total of 62 units, which is 12 more than we projected to put on the property and that would make it all more financially feasible.”
“We were kind of shocked to hear this, but we felt we should explore this possibility and we’ve talked with the church a couple times and they still feel called to provide this type of housing on their property,” Hooper continued, “and so they would like to resurrect the deal we made that’s recorded in the lease and do what the lease requires of us to do … some diligence on this firm. If they survive the diligence, we would consider signing a development agreement with them per the terms of the contract.”
Hooper added that to move forward, the original contract between the city and the church would need to be amended as the lease agreement is set to expire soon and there was no way to complete the proper amount of research before it runs out.
He also said the city would need to remove a stipulation in the original contract that stipulated the project must employ a competitive solicitation process. He suggested that the city instead hire an outside advisory firm to do an impartial third-party review of the developer’s proposal.
“We’d keep everything else the same under the lease with the church,” Hooper said. “We’d start over, a little bit delayed, on the plan that had originally thought we were going to go through two years ago. That’s the emerging possibility of it all.”
Housing Trust Fund Committee member Vince Foster asked if the soil at the site was still a concern due to it potentially causing the foundations of the multi-family buildings initially planned for the site to sink into the ground.
Hooper responded that the previous studies actually detailed how to remediate the soil on the property for safe development and that the Missouri-based development group was ready to implement the suggested solution at a lower price tag.
“The report was very clear on what you need to do to make the soil solid enough to develop on and so these folks just claim they can do that in-house and very much more affordably than what the geophysical firm claimed that it would cost,” Hooper said.
Brevard Senior Planner Emily Brewer advised that the contract requires the developer use low-income tax credits and that the development also be created for the purpose of affordable housing (defined as intended for households earning no more than 80% of the area median income), so any changes to the cost of remediating the soil could not be later passed onto the city or the tenants who would later pay rent to live there.
“Even if it does cost more, that burden would not fall to the city or any potential renters,” Brewer explained, later adding that if the plan moves forward the church-owned property would still need to become a conditional zoning district for residential mixed-use which would need to go before City Council for public hearings as part of the traditional public approval process.
“The conditional rezoning process is its own thing and entering into a development agreement also is another very public process,” she said. “It’s suggesting the third-party review that includes looking at their assumptions, gut checking and looking at what has worked in that neighborhood based on all the research they’ve done and what they know of the site, so it’s more of a technical review of their detailed performa, and things like that before the city enters into any kind of an agreement.”
Members of the Housing Trust Fund Selection Committee present unanimously voted for Hooper to inform Brevard City Council of the developer’s interest and the suggested changes to the initial contract between the city and the church for consideration at its Monday, Aug. 17 meeting that starts at 5:30 p.m. in City Council chambers.