Live in North Hills

North Hills is two things a few hundred meters apart. One is the subdivision Ed Richards began in 1960 northwest of Six Forks Road, curving streets of ranches and split-levels. The other is the shopping center he built beside it, which became North Hills Mall in 1967 and, after Kane Realty bought it in 2001 and tore it down in 2003, the offices, apartments, hotels and shops Kane markets as Midtown. This guide is about the first, and what the second is doing to it. Its line is the one the North Hills Neighborhood Association registered with the City, from West Millbrook Road south to the Beltline, and 3,253 people lived inside it in 2020.

The overlay is about lots, not houses. At the neighbors' request, and after the Midtown Citizens Advisory Council voted 39 to 6 for it, the City put 175 acres of lots between Northbrook Drive and the Beltline under a neighborhood conservation overlay on 6 February 2018. A lot must be at least 14,000 square feet, and 90 feet wide, or 110 on a corner. There is no height, setback or floor area rule. The base R-4 zoning allows 40 feet and three stories, and the infill rules hold a side wall near the lot line to 25 feet or the neighbors' height. City staff said the overlay would discourage teardowns by making lots harder to split, and in the same report warned that a larger minimum lot may induce larger, more expensive homes.

The parcel file shows which of the two happened. Inside the overlay, 358 of 434 houses date from the 1960s, at a median of about 2,270 heated square feet and $687,143 assessed. The county dates 14 houses there to 2010 through 2017, and 49 to 2018 or later, at a median of about 4,470 square feet and $1,772,442: more since the rule than in the eight years before it. Across the whole area 297 of 1,264 houses were built in 2010 or later, and 16 of the 44 vacant parcels belong to companies whose names say they build houses. A state survey already called Chestnut Hills, in the north of the area, a tear-down area in 2006. The sources disagree on how big the original was: that survey counts 325 houses in Richards's North Hills, the county's subdivision layer 894 lots under the same name.

Midtown is the neighbor that moved in. The City's 2020 Midtown-St. Albans plan asked the development to step down to four stories along the southern frontage of Lassiter Mill Road, rising to twelve and then twenty farther away. On 20 January 2026 the City Council voted 6 to 2 to rezone nine Kane properties west of Six Forks Road for buildings of up to 37 stories and 2,521 homes. On the zoning map a 20-story site adjoins the overlay's southeastern corner, a 12-story site is about 45 meters away across Rowan Street, and a 37-story site about 100 meters. Neighbors objected to the traffic and the scale, and the conditions limit car access on Rowan Street. The rezoning sets heights, not a schedule, so nobody can yet say what Rowan Street will carry.

What a buyer pays for is the lot. The median single-family parcel in the area is assessed at $752,179 on the 2024 revaluation, land is 57% of the total, and at 90.91 cents per $100 the median bill is about $6,840 a year; a new house in the overlay at its median pays about $16,113. The City's flood layer puts no house in the overlay in the 1% annual chance flood zone and clips eight lots outside it, seven of them on Kershaw Drive. Wake revalues on 1 January 2027 (citywide figures are on the Raleigh page). This guide found no public qualified median sale price for this boundary, so it gives none.