Residents at Raleigh’s Homestead Village Mobile Home Park are ecstatic over news that WJ Properties is dropping its request for a rezoning of the park’s 38 acres.

Cary Joshi of WJ Properties told IndyWeek that the firm would instead look elsewhere. The zoning request, to be heard Tuesday, remains active in a formal sense.

Claudia Shows, a resident at Homestead Village for more than 30 years, rejoiced.

“As long as it is still a mobile home park,” she said, “we don’t care. We have still got to be cautious, I suppose. But, I am so excited, I just want to burst! This is the best news.”

The park’s owners still want to sell. This news, though, means that they will not be selling to WJ. WJ had sought a rezoning to build a shopping center, several housing developments, and some open land on the tract. It would have introduced many new homes to the area. Estimates by The City of Raleigh predicted that more than 500 children would be assigned to the area’s elementary schools as a result.

Shows organized some of the residents. She was able to generate support from her college classmates, as well as to generate some good media. That said, the rezoning decision may be a product of larger forces in the financial markets. Joshi tells Bob Geary that the decision to drop reflects a lack of available financing for shopping center developments.

H1700, the bill that provides a tax deduction (of 5 percent of sales price) to park owners that sell to non-profits, passed in the budget bill before the end of the short session in the 2008 NCGA.

A new rezoning hearing data has been established to determine the fate of the 160 households living in Homestead Village Mobile Home Park in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The Committee of the Whole, under the Raleigh Planning Commission, will meet at 9 am on Tuesday, July 1st, in the Municipal Building in Room 305.  The group will consider the merits of Rezoning application Z-006-08.

The zoning change would allow a proposal by a developer to build more than 1300 homes and an assortment of retail and commercial buildings on the 38 acre site, off of Capital Boulevard, near the 540 interchange.  Katherine and Robert Binns, owners of the park, filed the request for a zoning change on October 19th of last year.  The petitioners suggest that the region would benefit from a rezoning because a classification would provide the area with flexibility in the 4 types of land use (Shopping Center, O&I-2, Residential -4, and conservation management) that are otherwise “lacking in areas” .  They disagree with the notion that the development would cause significant impacts to traffic.

An initial analysis by the planning department suggests that the rezoning would create demand for an additional 599 seats in the area’s public schools.

A previous hearing was delayed pending a traffic impact study.