North Hills expansion plan adds 1,300 apartments, restaurants and greenway upgrades

Morning drivers on Navaho Drive and the cut-through roads around North Hills are facing another round of change, as Kane Realty and McCourt Partners moved ahead with a plan that could bring nearly 1,300 apartments, new restaurants and greenway upgrades to 28 acres beside Interstate 440.

The expansion site sits at 901 Navaho Drive and includes The Pointe at Midtown, a 365-unit apartment community, and the 115,413-square-foot Grove Towers office building. Both structures are expected to come down for redevelopment as Kane Realty pushes a phased mixed-use buildout in the North Hills Innovation District, with the long-term goal of adding more homes, retail and public connections to one of Raleigh’s busiest urban centers.

The first filed project on the site is an eight-story building with 207 apartments and about 17,000 square feet of ground-floor retail. Across the broader 28-acre tract, the company’s latest vision calls for nearly 1,300 units in four separate complexes, along with restaurants and improvements meant to tie the district more closely to the nearby greenway network.

For many neighbors, the concern is not whether North Hills will grow, but how much more traffic the area can absorb. The corridors that already carry the district’s daily load, including Navaho Drive, Six Forks Road, Wake Forest Road, Lassiter Mill Road and The Circle at North Hills, are the routes most likely to feel the strain as more residents, restaurant customers and office workers come into the area. Residents have pointed to years of building activity and road disruption as evidence that infrastructure is already playing catch-up.

Kane Realty says it is studying traffic-management solutions, open-space planning and better walking and biking connections as part of the project, a sign that the next phase will be judged as much by how it moves people as by how many apartments it adds. That matters in a district where the city has already approved major height increases. Raleigh City Council backed a separate North Hills rezoning in January by a 6-2 vote, allowing some towers to rise as high as 37 stories, even though the North Hills Small Area Plan had recommended a 20-story cap.

The latest buildout is also arriving while construction is underway on Tributary, a 332-unit apartment project inside the Innovation District. Taken together, the projects show that North Hills is not growing in one leap but in a series of stacked phases, each one adding more pressure to the same roads and the same neighborhood concerns.