Two south Durham subdivisions won zoning approvals from the City Council last week, raising the question of whether it’s time Durham reassessed its vision for that end of town.

“The market reality has gone off in a direction that has continued to diverge from that long-range vision,” Councilman Don Moffitt said.

Both subdivisions – the 164-townhouse Southpoint Trails on 28 acres along N.C. 751, and Montclair, a 53-house project on 19.2 acres at Barbee Chapel and Farrington Mill roads – propose more homes per acre than the comprehensive city-county land-use plan called for almost a decade ago and was formally adopted in 2005.

Their approval continues a trend of changing – or, in the Southpoint Trails case, overriding – the plan, as one project after another has come along in the fast-growing region south of Interstate 40.

That trend has prompted several suggestions for reconsidering the premise of density decreasing with distance from the central city, or from commercial centers such as The Streets at Southpoint.

“It’s an old plan, and you look at what has happened to that area ... it needs to be revised,” said Councilman Eugene Brown.

Southpoint Trails’ zoning had hung undecided since November, when the council approved annexing the site. At the same time, the council denied a change in the city-county land-use plan to accommodate the project and left its rezoning unconsidered.

The issue of project-by-project changes to the land-use plan hung the council up then. Members also split on increasing the density on the site, between Massey Chapel and Stagecoach roads, above the 112 townhouses the plan prescribed.

During a council discussion of Southpoint Trails and Montclair, Councilman Steve Schewel suggested reviewing the land-use plan for southern Durham as a whole.

“I’m torn,” he said. “One part of me says we ought to take a look at it, the other part of me says … we’ve got a pretty good plan, we just need to honor it.”

Engineer George Stanziale, designer for Southpoint Trails and the Jordan at Southpoint subdivision farther south, said revising the plan is a good idea.

“It’s probably worth doing, since so much has been done since the (land-use) map was done,” Stanziale said. Hundreds of acres have been developed and the presence of Interstate 40 makes southern Durham an attractive region for homes and businesses.

Brown said land-use policy should consider economic development. “Otherwise this is all somewhat nebulous and abstract,” he said.

South Durham homeowner Donna Rudolph, though, said she would approve of revising “only if ... certain values don’t get lost in the reshuffle.

“It’s the role of policymakers ... to imagine a community environment in which urban, suburban and rural beauty, manmade and natural, is not subverted by our culture’s default mode, materialism,” she said.

Planning Director Steve Medlin said the entire county-wide plan needs revisiting to clarify “how we capture the policies within the document.

“It’s time to realize that what we have is a very good plan from the time it was developed, but ... how (do) we evaluate projects? ... We obviously have not elevated our plan to that level of sophistication. I think it’s time we considered doing so.”

That is not, though, a simple undertaking, said Medlin.

“At best, we’re looking at about a year and a half to two-year process to do that,” he said. “It’s not a quick and easy thing to do.”