- Planning commissioners deadlocked 3-3 on the 210-unit Bella Norte apartments. The City Council decides next.
- City staff say the project fits the general plan: downtown housing helps support nearby businesses.
- Nearby, Skyline Towns is under construction, the Wolff apartments won approval and the Roers 88 North plan was denied.
- Last year, the developer projected rents near $2,300 a month and a 24-month build.
- The plan offers 408 parking spaces, 45 fewer than city code requires. Staff can approve cuts up to 10 percent.
- A new eight-foot-wide trail will run behind the existing Idaho Road sidewalk and connect to Skyline Towns.
- Twenty-three business letters and the Chamber of Commerce back the project. Two public speakers raised Idaho Road traffic and water concerns.
APACHE JUNCTION — The decision on 210 new downtown apartments now rests with the City Council. On Tuesday, Aug. 25, the Planning and Zoning Commission deadlocked 3-3 on the Bella Norte Apache Junction proposal, a three-story rental community planned for the northeast corner of Idaho Road and Junction Street. As a result, the project heads to the council, which has the final say.
If the council approves, construction would take about 24 months. That timeline comes from developer Bela Flor Communities, which answered questions at a neighborhood meeting last year. The builder said it would not go one building at a time and stretch out completion. It also said rents would average about $2,300 per month for apartments of 600 to 1,400 square feet.
Inside the Bella Norte Apache Junction proposal
Bela Flor plans ten three-story buildings on 9.31 acres. Together they hold 60 one-bedroom, one-bath units; 126 two-bedroom, two-bath units; and 24 three-bedroom, two-bath units. That works out to roughly 22 units per acre. In addition, the gated community would include a pool, clubhouse, pickleball courts, a dog park, a playground with ramadas, bocce ball, cornhole and a community lawn.
According to Reese Anderson of Pew & Lake, the attorney representing the owners, open space covers 38 percent of the site. The buildings follow a Southwest-inspired pueblo style that staff said went through multiple design rounds with city officials. Meanwhile, the recommended conditions in the staff report would bar age restrictions and require management to join the city’s Crime Free Multi-Housing Program and file proof every year. The program is a police-backed certification aimed at keeping crime and drug activity out of rental properties.
Rooftops for the downtown core
The site sits in the general plan’s Downtown Mixed Use area, where the city wants housing, shops and offices clustered into a walkable core. Its City Center zoning allows apartments at up to 40 units per acre, but only with a conditional use permit. Principal Planner Nick Leftwich told commissioners the project also aligns with the city’s newer Concentrated Downtown Master Plan, and planning documents place the site in a “strategic residential infill” area. “The city center zoning district is specifically designed to allow for some of this higher density multifamily in order to better support adjacent commercial uses, and we believe that there is a need for that downtown still,” he said.
Construction is already underway nearby: Skyline Towns, another Bela Flor community approved about a year ago, is going up just east of the site. Staff said the vacant land to the north is expected to develop as well, and Leftwich noted the city itself bought downtown property to help grow the core. Fry’s Marketplace sits just south of the site, while the old hotel site sits across Idaho Road to the west.
Straight sidewalk stays, with a new trail behind it
City rules normally call for a “meandering” sidewalk along major streets such as Idaho Road, meaning one that curves away from the curb. The standard is mainly about looks, putting landscaping between walkers and traffic. Instead, Bela Flor asked to keep the existing straight sidewalk and add an eight-foot walking trail behind it. Deputy Development Services Director Sidney Urias said people on foot lose nothing, because the total width stays the same either way. Additionally, Leftwich said the walking space, with the trail included, works out to about the same as the standard layout or more. The trail is part of the city’s planned downtown trail system. It will connect to Skyline Towns and later extend north with the next development.
Anderson said buried utility lines and street trees leave no good room to curve the walk. He also urged commissioners not to assume “the developer just wants to skip some money.” In turn, Chairman Dave Hantzsche asked whether Bela Flor would repair any damaged sections of the existing sidewalk it keeps. Anderson said the owner was not at the meeting, but he believed the answer would be yes because the owner wants the property to look good.
Parking count lands one space inside the 10 percent rule
City code calls for 453 parking spaces for a project this size, but Bella Norte provides 408. That is 45 fewer, or 9.9 percent. City rules let staff, rather than the commission, approve a parking cut of up to 10 percent when a study shows the spaces are not needed. In fact, one more missing space would have pushed the project over that limit, as Hantzsche pointed out. However, the parking study the developer filed with the city predicts residents and guests will need far fewer spaces, and nearby cities set lower requirements for the same project.
Every apartment gets one covered space, as the city requires, and the lot includes nine accessible spaces plus 12 electric-vehicle charging stalls, the most EV charging Hantzsche said he has seen in a project before the commission.
Commissioner Jesse Gage questioned the study’s use of Phoenix, Goodyear and El Mirage as comparison cities. He noted Phoenix is not an apples-to-apples match because it has far more public transportation, and he asked how those cities square with the parking review Apache Junction itself completed in recent years. In response, Leftwich said he ran that review after the council asked for one in December 2022, comparing 10 or 11 cities from Phoenix to Florence. He said Phoenix sat at one end of the spectrum and did not shape the city’s own parking ratio. As a result, the city added a guest-parking rule in 2023 that requires three guest spaces for every 10 apartments. Its overall requirements ended up stricter than most nearby cities, he said. Even so, reductions are judged case by case, and he noted the site is designed so overflow cars cannot end up parked along Idaho Road. Looking ahead, Urias said staff will likely revisit parking rules about every two years. Ridesharing keeps growing, Waymo is expanding to this side of the Valley, and younger residents would “rather use an Uber or a Lyft or a Waymo,” he said. “Times are changing.”
Business backing meets water and traffic doubts
Twenty-three letters of support for the Bella Norte apartments have come in from local businesses and the Apache Junction Area Chamber of Commerce: 11 with the staff report and 12 more delivered the day before the hearing. The Chamber’s board formally voted to back the project, and the business letters cite new customers, housing options for employees and an energized downtown corridor. Earlier outreach included a June 24, 2025 neighborhood meeting, where six attendees asked about parking, rents, construction timelines and the crime-free housing policy.
However, two residents raised concerns during Tuesday’s public hearing. Donna Carr, an Apache Junction resident, said congestion has worsened since Fry’s opened and questioned why traffic counts against one developer but not another. She argued the corridor, which she described as the main route from the freeway to Canyon Lake, the rodeo, the state park, the ghost town and the museum, should hold restaurants and gift shops instead: “We need something better along Idaho Road, and it’s not apartments.” She also pointed to a recent cut in Colorado River supplies and raised the question of the region’s long-term water. Catherine Meek recalled the council recently turning down another project over Idaho Road traffic and its three-story height, a description matching the Roers 88 North apartments denied in February. She said the city needs “more rooftops to get our businesses supported,” but recalled that the council seemed unwilling to approve similar projects “until we get Idaho under our control,” and said she was unsure how the pieces would fit together.
Anderson noted a traffic study is already on file. He said apartments bring far less traffic than commercial development would. An April follow-up analysis combined the traffic from Bella Norte, Skyline and a future project planned nearby. It also used December counts, taken while winter residents are in town, which ran 53 to 62 percent higher than summer. Even then, it found every studied intersection met the city’s traffic standards. And it concluded apartments create far less traffic than the stores, offices or medical buildings the land could hold.
Where the six votes fell
Four commissioners explained their thinking before the roll call. Gage called it “a needed project” that supports the general plan’s goal of adding rooftops to develop the downtown commercial area. However, he repeated a reservation he had raised earlier during the parking discussion. He said he prefers that projects simply meet the city’s written standards. Instead, he said, those standards keep “getting pushed into the administrative section.” Requests to deviate from city standards have come up in other recent projects as well. Hantzsche said the green space, playground, dog park and pool would “better serve the people living here” than roughly 40 more parking spots, so he leaned toward leniency. Commissioner Ari Kalan called it “a beautiful project” full of outdoor activity rather than “a bunched in concrete jungle of apartments,” yet he asked, “Is it right for our city?” Meanwhile, Dr. Roy Starr raised two worries. First, apartments keep rising along Idaho Road with no plan for where future bus stops would fit. Second, he said he always has concerns about gated communities this dense: if residents ever had to evacuate quickly, he worries the gates would get in the way. Hantzsche noted the site plan shows several pedestrian gates. He also said he trusts the fire department and believes projects do not come before the commission without its approval. Still, Starr said commissioners never hear directly from fire officials, and he welcomed the chairman’s offer to invite them to a future meeting.
When the vote came, Hantzsche, Gage and Commissioner Nicholas Kelley said yes; Kalan, Starr and Commissioner Sandra Mykland said no.
Council holds the deciding vote on Bella Norte
The conditional use permit cannot take effect without City Council approval, and no council date was announced Tuesday. If approval comes, Bela Flor has said it will begin building as soon as it has the necessary approvals. For now, the Bella Norte development remains a proposal awaiting the council’s final decision.
City case numbers: P-25-46-CUP (conditional use permit) and P-25-47-DR (design review).
