QUESTION: Why hasn’t anyone demolished a vacant, fire-damaged home that has been a blotch on the 3300 block of Maple Avenue for the past several years?
ANSWER: The charred bungalow at 3333 Maple Avenue has stood in its half-incinerated state long enough to show up on Google Earth and imprint itself onto the county’s tax records.
But the owner of this ramshackle dwelling does, in fact, have plans to replace this perennial eyesore with something more fetching – although it remains to be seen just when this proposed transformation will actually start.
Since the fall of 2022, the site of this uninhabited home has been owned by a Raleigh-based limited liability corporation called “Maple Ave 1.” By the time this company closed on the property, the residence had already been reduced to its current fire-ravaged condition. In recognition of this state of affairs, Alamance County’s tax office has zeroed out the property’s “improved” value and assigned it a taxable worth of $83,638 that’s based the land value alone.
The 4-acre parcel that’s home to this ashen dwelling was nevertheless attractive enough to compel the current owner to spend $327,000 on the property. Since then, the owner has sent city officials plans for a 29-unit townhome development that it has tentatively dubbed “The Townes at Maple Grove.”
Among the property owner’s submissions for this venture is a site plan that depicts the proposed dwellings on either side of a new access road that would branch off of Whites Kennel Road. This street would cut through the vacant home’s 4-acre site as well as two other parcels that, between them, comprise an additional 2 acres of land.
This site plan received a nod from a staff-level technical review committee in March of 2025. Since then, the city has also approved an annexation petition for the development’s site, an infrastructure permit for the access road and a utility pump station, and zoning certification for the property. Yet, according to Russell Williams, the city’s inspections director, the property owner hasn’t acted on these approvals at this point.
“We haven’t issued any permits,” Williams conceded in an interview Tuesday, “and we can’t force the developer to move at the rate that we want. But they do have the greenlight to begin.”
Williams added that the demolition of the fire-damaged home will ultimately depend on the inscrutable timetable that has been governing the project’s developer. Until then, he conceded that the neighborhood’s residents will continue to live with the unsightly pile, which they’ve already had to endure for longer than he himself can remember.
“I’ve been with the city for five years,” the city’s inspections director acknowledged, “and it’s been like this ever since I’ve been here.”
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