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GREENSBORO — When Chris Boulware bought his home on Mystic Oak Drive three years ago, the sales agent told him the nearby woods might change somewhat in years to come.

Boulware said he shrugged it off. But if he’d known the six-lane Greensboro Urban Loop would come through that stand of trees, he might have had second thoughts about buying in the newest phase of the Carriage Woods subdivision in northern Greensboro.

“They said that in the next number of years, there was going to be a major street, not a highway,” Boulware remembers. “I didn’t know it would be an interstate.”

In fact, the new loop around eastern and northern Greensboro will be Interstate 840 through Boulware’s part of town, a controlled-access freeway carrying an estimated 72,200 cars and trucks each day hurtling along at 65 mph or more.

He lives in one of a dozen neighborhoods that local officials approved in recent years on land butting directly against the future Urban Loop or, as in the case of Carriage Woods, separated only by a wedge of woods or field.

Developments range from Briarmeade and Wynterhall east of U.S. 29 to the Bluffs at Richland Creek and Liberty Square on the city’s northwestern side.

All of the neighborhoods were approved after it became known that the loop had targeted a $300 million, concrete-and-asphalt bull’s-eye on these areas.

All but two neighborhoods started after the state Department of Transportation filed official maps at the Guilford County Courthouse, defining the road’s 300-foot-wide corridor in highly specific terms on a course unlikely to change in any major way.

In the last decade, local government has authorized relatively close residential development similar to what exists across town in southwest Greensboro, where residents were outraged by highway noise and related issues after the latest section of the Urban Loop debuted there 16 months ago.

When completed over the next 20 years, the freeway will be a net benefit to the community, improving traffic flow and giving a shot in the arm to the regional economy. But judging from what happened last year in southwest Greensboro, people living too close to all that whizzing, new traffic will not be happy campers.

“I don’t want to be on the City Council when they cut it through Lake Jeanette,” veteran Councilman Robbie Perkins said of the uproar the loop’s construction likely will cause in that area of upper-income homeowners near the lake’s namesake road. “There’s going to be people out there who will be absolutely devastated.”

New rules on the horizon

The disruption that threatens the city’s northern tier stems from sources that include weak real estate laws in North Carolina, glib sales pitches, opportunistic developers, inexperienced buyers, and limited understanding of expressway design and construction among some local officials.

The problem of future road corridors getting hemmed in by development is not unique to Greensboro, but something the state Department of Transportation confronts statewide whenever it plots such gigantic projects.

“It does give us some concern because these corridors are 5, 10, 15 years in the making,” said Gene Conti, the state’s new secretary of transportation. “You can’t really tell people that they can’t do anything with their property for such a long time.”

But the state DOT doesn’t make local development decisions, Conti said. So part of the answer is local officials working harder to defend city residents from new neighborhoods that make too little allowance for DOT’s 800 pound gorilla waiting in the wings.

Only now, with the Urban Loop about 60 percent complete, is the city of Greensboro moving to impose new rules for housing developments directly abutting the freeway.

The regulations would require developers to more carefully design neighborhoods next to the loop, said Dick Hails, city planning director.

The proposal, which should be ready for City Council scrutiny this summer, would let developers choose among noise-reducing techniques such as building protective walls or locating garages and parking lots between new houses and the interstate.

“It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution,” Hails said.

A 'caveat emptor state’

Part of the problem with residential construction around the Urban Loop has nothing to do with design standards, said state Rep. Pricey Harrison.

She believes it stems from weak laws governing what developers must tell their customers about potential threats to the property being sold.

North Carolina is a “caveat emptor state,” meaning the burden falls heavily on buyers to look carefully before they leap, said Harrison, who wants to shift the balance a little so sellers must be more candid about possible downsides.

“It’s a big problem, and it’s something we should be discussing here in the legislature,” said Harrison, a Greensboro Democrat. “But we’ve encountered incredible resistance from the real estate and developer lobby.”

As it stands now, the state Real Estate Commission can suspend or revoke the license of an agent who does not tell a buyer about any “material fact” such as plans for a future interstate highway nearby.

But the commission can’t levy fines or recover damages for an aggrieved buyer. The state Attorney General’s Office has pursued blatant cases of real estate fraud on occasion.

For home buyers who believe they’ve been bamboozled, the main option is to file a lawsuit in civil court against the seller, which many lawyers are reluctant to take on because they are hard to prove, Harrison said.

The city has nothing in its ordinances that requires sellers to fully inform home buyers of the Urban Loop’s proximity. And no such requirement is in the proposed rule changes headed for City Council consideration this summer.

But a number of residents in northern Greensboro say they bought there without a clear picture of the loop’s size and proximity to their neighborhoods. Some say sales agents misled them about the highway and downplayed its prospects for ever being built.

Several said they were told nothing.

“They just kept quiet about it,” said Howard Hutchens, who bought his home in the Harvest Hill neighborhood five years ago without knowing the loop would someday border his back yard. “There’s so many people that are greedy today. They just want to make their money and get on.”

Signed affidavits

Rex McCoullough said he learned the loop would run near the back of his lot in the new Raine Meadows neighborhood only when a reporter unfolded an aerial map for him to see.

“I’m sure it would have made a difference,” he said. “We might not have bought, or we might have negotiated a lower price.”

Developers dispute such accounts. The McCoullough family and all other buyers in Raine Meadows signed an affidavit acknowledging that the DOT already owned land for the loop behind their homes, said Jerone Pearson, who developed the subdivision off Brightwood School Road.

Buyers profess ignorance of the highway because they have selective memories or didn’t listen clearly to the description of what they were being asked to sign, Pearson said.

“They say (now), 'Oh, I didn’t understand it that way,’ ” Pearson said. “You and I both translate everything we hear into the way we want to hear it.”

Similarly, buyers in the new Quail Oaks subdivision protested at a recent meeting held by that neighborhood’s developer, Keystone Group, that no one ever mentioned the loop to them before they bought.

Yet Keystone President Scott Wallace had a list showing when buyers signed statements acknowledging that they were aware of the road.

Now, a redesigned interchange will force demolition of more than a dozen new houses in Quail Oaks, displacing those residents and forcing taxpayers to spend millions of additional dollars.

Across town, another Keystone development, Liberty Square, will lose six new town houses to the Urban Loop because the developer built on recently rezoned land now needed for the future interstate’s east-bound lanes. Buyers there signed similar statements.

It pays to do homework

What sales agents actually say to their customers is what matters, suggests Myra Hines, a resident of the Greensboro area who briefly considered buying in Liberty Square last year.

She was dubious of Liberty Square from the get-go because she knew the loop “was coming through its back yard,” Hines said.

“I point-blank asked the real estate agent about it, and she responded that it wasn’t that close, that the landscaping would block the view and also that the noise wouldn’t be excessive,” recalls Hines, who works in a local law office. “Thank goodness I had done my homework.”

To be sure, some residents bought while fully aware of what Perkins, the veteran councilman, likens to an approaching tsunami that will sweep across part of the city.

Homeowner Kevin Hart said he was told about the loop early on by the man from whom he bought his home in the Meadows at Richland Creek subdivision off Lake Jeanette Road.

“He was a good guy,” Hart said of the prior owner of his home on Montford Court. “He built the place 10 years ago, and he showed me right where it (the loop) was going to be.”

Hart recalls consulting with DOT engineers and deciding to take an educated gamble that it will be a long time before that section of the loop is built and that, when it is complete, traffic will be relatively light.

Meanwhile, developers of several other subdivisions in progress near the loop — including Briarmeade, Carriage Woods and Wynterhall — believe they are well prepared for the new interstate.

All say they are far enough away or have buffers of undeveloped acreage to insulate residents from highway noise and traffic scenes.

No noise walls

Some Greensboro residents bought new homes along unbuilt sections of the loop thinking that when the road was built, it surely would come equipped with sound-deadening walls.

Unfortunately not, said Gregory Smith, a DOT specialist in highway noise.

When the state establishes a highway corridor, as it did for the Urban Loop in 1996, it accepts limited responsibility for noise protection for all existing development along that route.

Anything built after that falls on local government or the developer to protect from highway noise, Smith said.

Not long ago, Smith examined aerial photography of the route across northern Greensboro, showing all the newly developed areas that don’t have a chance of getting sound barriers on the DOT’s dime.

“I was amazed at how much construction had occurred since the original document was filed in 1996,” he said.

City zoning officials don’t always understand such nuances when they authorize projects beside or near the loop’s future route. They seldom discuss the new road’s effect on future residents.

“I do not recall a case I voted on where I was intimately knowledgeable about the Urban Loop,” City Council member Zack Matheny said of the two years he served on the city’s Zoning Commission before his election to the council.

Perkins points out that some years back, the council did require a 50-foot buffer of natural area along any development that abuts the loop. Such a buffer should provide some noise protection and visual screening.

But he is still bracing for the tsunami effect.

“You can tell people that a tsunami is a huge wall of water,” Perkins said. “But the reality is very different from just being told. When it’s actually coming at you, it’s a whole different animal.”

Contact Taft Wireback at 373-7100 or taft.wireback@news-record.com