CHAPEL HILL -- After the planners, residents and neighbors had all spoken and people had begun to go home, two people stood talking in the Church of the Holy Family late Sunday afternoon.

"I keep hearing you say you have to do something with it," said Jane Hare. "And I don't understand it."

"We can't preserve it the way it is," said Clay Grubb, president of Grubb Properties. "We don't make investments that don't appreciate."

The first plan for redeveloping Glen Lennox was "terrible," Grubb told Hare. But times have changed since the neighborhood was built for GIs returning from the war. U.S. 15-501 and N.C. 54 are busy highways today. There is a way to modernize and still save what people love about Glen Lennox, he said.

Hare was unconvinced.

"Once all the trees are gone, they're gone," she said. "The thing about this is, it's already here. ... There should be a way to preserve it."

"There's absolutely a way to preserve a good part of it," Grubb said.

Conservation district

About 100 people turned out to learn more about making the Glen Lennox area Chapel Hill's seventh neighborhood conservation districts. Districts get special zoning rules to protect the characteristics that make them unique. Northside, the town's first conservation district, got a ban on duplexes after a rash of student housing. Other districts limit house sizes or try to save trees.

In Glen Lennox, residents hope becoming a district will protect some of the 440 cottages that rent from $660 to $1,100 a month.

Grubb Properties' original redevelopment plan called for 400 condominiums, 350 apartments, 100 townhomes and 35 single-family lots. The opposition was so strong, Grubb pulled it before the Town Council even saw it and apologized to the community.

Speaking at the church Sunday, he again said the company made a mistake.

"I think our team got carried away and really lost sight of what was here," he said.

What neighbors love

Affordability may be the bottom line. But neighbors said they love a lot of things about Glen Lennox.

The community is walkable, with gently curving roads and tree-lined streets. Hardwood floors make the units seem more like small houses than apartments.

Mothers with babies and senior citizens pass each other on the street, and people from all races and nationalities live in harmony.

"It is a blessing to live in the apartments," said Molly McConnell, who's lived in Glen Lennox for seven years.

Bob Williams moved onto Hamilton Road in 1962 and has lived within a quarter mile ever since.

"I'm not so naive not to realize there's not going to be development," he said.

But noting the East 54 condominiums rising across from Glen Lennox, Williams said: "There's been a geometric change, not an arithmetic change. That change, I think, is the biggest concern."

What's at stake

Glen Lennox has a look, a feel and a texture, said Glenn Parks of Rogerson Drive.

"There's too much at stake for a business-as-usual approach," he said, turning to Grubb.

"When we saw the first plans, it was 'This is not us,'" Parks told the developer. "You guys weren't hearing us in the beginning. I think you're hearing us now."

Afterward, Grubb said his company is committed to affordable housing.

But he said it can't afford to do nothing. The company spends $250,000 a year on landscaping, he estimated, and another $100,000 on marketing Glen Lennox. Despite the sentiments of those at the meeting, the units are not in high demand. It's only since the recession, he said, that occupancy has reached the mid 90 percent level.

Still, Grubb said he's not fighting the conservation district process. He thinks the company can preserve affordable housing on parts of its property if it gets to build more intensely on other parts.

"We've thrown away everything we've done, and we're starting over," he said.932-2003