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After a public hearing that stretched past midnight, the Durham City Council voted 4-3 early Wednesday to annex and rezone 11 acres on two-lane Sherron Road for up to 50 single-family homes.
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The council approved the Oak Grove Landing annexation and utility extension agreement with M/I Homes of Raleigh. Mayor Leo Williams and council members Javiera Caballero, Matt Kopac and Carl Rist voted yes. Council members Nate Baker, Shanetta Burris and Chelsea Cook voted no.
The vote followed nearly two hours of public comment and council debate on familiar tensions in Durham: whether the city should continue adding housing in areas where residents say roads, sidewalks, emergency services and other infrastructure have not kept pace.
In June, the Durham Planning Commission recommended against the project in a 7-2 vote.
M/I Homes representatives said the company scaled back its initial plan for 76 townhomes after neighborhood meetings. The current plan calls for smaller-lot single-family homes intended to transition between larger lots to the north and west, and townhomes to the south and east of the property.
The developer offered $96,000 to Durham’s Dedicated Housing Fund, $15,000 to Durham Public Schools and $15,000 to Durham’s emergency services. The plan also includes right and left turn lanes on Sherron Road, a 55% maximum impervious surface limit, a 100-foot buffer and a 10-foot landscaped buffer along parts of the property.
The project includes no designated affordable housing, and the homes will be sold at market-rate. In Durham, the average single-family home is between $410,000 and $429,000.
Juan Montez, an attorney for the developer and a member of the Durham Planning Commission (he recused himself from the June vote), said the company listened to residents’ concerns and made adjustments.
“As developers, we can only try to help, and we can try to contribute some money to these efforts,” he said. “But the responsibility of this lack of buses and lack of EMS doesn’t fall on the developer. It falls on the government, and we can only do so much to try to help with that.”
Over a dozen residents spoke during the public hearing, saying they did not oppose growth but that Oak Grove Landing would add to an already strained area.
The project consists of 416, 426, and 430 Sherron Road in southeast Durham. The property is off N.C. 98 and near the Lick Creek watershed.
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“Let’s make sure we’re not just building more houses. We are building communities together,” said Adam Shiffman, a resident of the Sherron Acres neighborhood. “Development after development is coming to this part of town, while the same deficiencies in road, sidewalk, connectivity and local services remain.”
Melissa Fissel said a trip to drop her daughter off at Southern High School that should take six minutes can take 23 minutes during peak traffic.
“Within this radius, also we need to consider: there’s no street lights, there’s no sidewalks, and there’s no bus or transit transportation,” she said. “When we’re unable to get my daughter to school, you know there was a few times the school said, ‘let her take the public bus,’ but we can’t. There’s no buses around.”
Some residents raised concerns about ambulance response times, which can take about 35 minutes for a non-life-threatening emergency in Durham County, according to EMS Director Mike Lockhart. Other residents said more construction will harm nearby streams and waterways that provide habitats for salamanders, owls and bats.
Rist said the city gets about 400 new residents a month and argued that adding housing can help limit rent increases. He said the developer’s $96,000 housing fund contribution could help subsidize two affordable units and represented about 4% affordability when applied across the 50-home project.
“No project is perfect,” Rist said. “I think you’ve passed the threshold to make this work with this site. I’ll be supporting this.”
Caballero said cases like Oak Grove become challenging when a family is seeking to sell their land to create generational wealth. Sammy Henry, one of the property owners in the project shared his personal background and explained that selling the land would allow him to achieve his “American dream” of buying a small farm.
“So I get the resentment at some of us for saying yes to a lot of these cases, and I often land with there’s never a really good answer,” Caballero said. “You’re always going to upset somebody. You’re never going to get it right. So you’re left with the trying to do the best as you can with what you have, the data you have in front of you.”
Burris said she was a “hard no.”
“We have a very real problem here in terms of growth in infrastructure,” she said. “In the report, there are no scheduled city of Durham or NCDOT road improvements, knowing the impact to Sherron Road. So it’s the expectation that we diminish the quality of life for residents as we continue to build out.”
With the vote, M/I Homes can move forward with the annexation and rezoning process. Construction on the homes was not specified.
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This story was originally published September 9, 2026 at 11:48 AM.