Levine Properties Gets OK for 175 Apartments in Plaza Midwood

Add another apartment complex to Charlotte’s booming Plaza Midwood neighborhood.

Local firm Levine Properties got the greenlight from Charlotte City Council to rezone just under an acre at 2100 Commonwealth Avenue, allowing 175 multifamily units and 12,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, the Charlotte Business Journal reported.

The building will have a maximum height of 126 feet, and up to 5 percent of the apartments will be micro units reserved as short-term rentals.

The development site is a parking lot that was once home to the Charlotte Fire Department Credit Union. It’s adjacent to the Julien Apartments, another Levine development, built in 2016 with 105 units.

Plaza Midwood, about 3 miles east of downtown Charlotte, was developed as a “streetcar suburb” in the early 1900s and has experienced explosive growth in recent years, irking some local residents who’ve expressed concerns about traffic and congestion in the neighborhood.

The Commonwealth Avenue rezoning was collaborative, with the Commonwealth-Morningside Neighborhood Association and the Plaza Midwood Merchants Association giving input, said councilmember Danté Anderson.

“We’ve been working for over a year and ensuring that the community is in line with the petition, and how the community will look as this development is completed, and I can assure you that both associations are happy with where they’ve settled,” she said.

Levine agreed to allocate a portion of the property as a public “pocket park” for up to four years, which wasn’t part of the development agreement, but rather a “gracious effort to extend a benefit to the community,” Anderson said.

Less than a half mile from the Levine project, a venture of Nuveen Real Estate and Crosland Southeast is developing the Commonwealth, a 12-acre mixed-use project slated for 100,000 square feet of retail space, a 383-unit apartment building and 150,000 square feet of Class A office space, the outlet said.

—Quinn Donoghue