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GREENSBORO — State highway engineers have redesigned the future Greensboro Urban Loop to save most of a town house development on the city’s west side, where some residents said they bought without knowing the road was planned so close to their homes.

The new design still endangers one building in the Liberty Square complex off Old Battleground Road, but the state Department of Transportation might be able to save it as well, said Mike Mills, division engineer for the Greensboro area.

The redesign adds an extensive retaining wall beside Liberty Square to solve the drainage problem initially requiring DOT to demolish several two-unit buildings in the complex, Mills said.

“We asked them to go back and look,” he said of DOT’s road designers. “They looked at what it was going to cost to buy those buildings, then they said, 'OK, what if we put a retaining wall in?’”

Meanwhile, engineers in Raleigh also are reconsidering an Urban Loop interchange that threatens up to 18 houses in the Quail Oaks neighborhood in northeast Greensboro, Mills said Wednesday at the monthly meeting of the local Metropolitan Planning Organization, which supervises transportation planning.

But that is a more complicated problem because the future interchange at U.S. 29 and Assembly Road is large and intricate, and its design has safety implications, Mills said.

As it is now, building the interchange means demolishing many recently built houses, relocating the owners and redesigning Quail Oaks’ street system.

The Urban Loop is an interstate highway planned to encircle the city. Roughly 25 miles of its 43-mile route has been built.

Three remaining sections go from U.S. 70 east of town to U.S. 29, from there to Lawndale Drive, and from Lawndale to Bryan Boulevard near the airport. The U.S. 70-to-U.S. 29 section was planned for construction in 2012, but the schedule now is unclear because DOT is reassessing all such loop projects statewide.

Mills said he didn’t want to raise false hopes among Quail Oaks residents. But DOT began seeking ways to soften the impact on that neighborhood of single-family, starter homes after a meeting a month ago among residents, developers and DOT staff, including highway designers.

“When they left that meeting, they realized that they had impacted a lot of folks,” Mills said of DOT’s road designers. “They’ve gone back and they’ve been looking (at alternatives) since that meeting.”

Wednesday’s MPO meeting opened with an appeal on behalf of the Quail Oaks residents from Terry Lee, the Greensboro businessman who is developing the neighborhood just west of U.S. 29.

He said the residents were caught in a dilemma because of uncertainty about their neighborhood’s future.

“They can’t sell. They can’t relocate if they’re transferred,” Lee said. “What we’re asking, we need some finality here. We need some direction.”

The MPO, a panel of elected and appointed officials, urged him to formally ask DOT to speed up any necessary purchases in Quail Oaks under the agency’s “hardship” rules.

Mills said he has been checking regularly with DOT engineers in Raleigh about their review of the Quail Oaks interchange but doesn’t know when they will finish.

Scott Wallace of Keystone Group, the company that developed Liberty Square and is building homes in Quail Oaks, said he is encouraged by DOT’s actions.

“Certainty is very important at this point,” Wallace said. “We just want to work proactively with the community and the state to come up with the best solution.”

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