Now she says her neighborhood -- a mix of single-family homes, apartments and a small shopping center built for returning GIs -- is being threatened.

Dexter asked the Chapel Hill Town Council last week to designate the 60-year-old Glen Lennox a Neighborhood Conservation District. If approved, the designation would establish development rules designed to protect the historic community's character.

The town has five Neighborhood Conservation Districts. In each case, residents sought to preserve unique aspects of their neighborhood such as building height, small lots and single-family homes.

"The mission statement and the detail as to what neighborhood qualifies, it looks ... like it was written with the Glen Lennox subdivision in mind," Dexter said of the NCD ordinance.

The council referred Dexter's request to staff for its recommendation.

Creating a Neighborhood Conservation District is complicated, Mayor Kevin Foy said in an e-mail message to a resident.

For example, it took about a year to get Greenwood's rules in place, he wrote.

Grubb Properties owns Glen Lennox's 440 apartments and shopping center. It plans to replace those buildings with new residential, office, retail and restaurant spaces, as well as a possible hotel.

Spokesman Jim Schaafsma has said the company is planning the kind of project the town wants: mixed-use development that encourages people to ride buses. Grubb Properties intends to submit a concept plan -- the first step in the review process -- this spring.

But Dexter, who saw a plan at a neighborhood meeting, doesn't like it. It included a nine-story hotel and other four- and five- story buildings.

"They say they are sensitive, but I find that concept [plan] floating around the neighborhoods ... it's obscene, it's personally offensive," she said.

The Glen Lennox area was built in the 1950s to provide housing for World War II veterans.

Ernest Dollar, executive director of the Preservation Society of Chapel Hill, has said the modest homes and apartments, with patches of grass outside the front and back doors, were considered avant-garde when they were built. The stores were one of the first shopping centers in Chapel Hill.

"In the Triangle area, progress has far outpaced preservation," Dollar said. "I think in the next 10 or 20 years, we're really going to miss the places we've destroyed because we didn't really have the foresight to set them aside."

To read more about Neighborhood Conservation Districts, go to the town's Web page on town ordinances at www.municode.com/resources/gateway.asp?sid=33&pid=19952 and search for "Neighborhood Conservation District."