Affordable Housing and Housing Affordability

The official stance is that if parking is a concern then certain neighborhoods can ask for permit only streets.

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Where on New Bern Ave were they talking about this development?

Where exactly his this development being proposed?

There have been a couple no parking apartments built on Hillsborough St around NC State, so this area would not be the first.

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In the end, the street does not belong to the houses/apartments on it. It’s a piece of public infrastructure.
On the one hand, current residents and businesses shouldn’t think that they have exclusive rights to any free parking along it. On the other hand, developers shouldn’t default to this free parking as a solution to housing cars associated with their projects. Within the context of a city without meaningful transit options, it’s a conundrum. IMO, limited parking projects must be paired with a reasonable lifestyle associated without car ownership. For students attending a university, putting housing like this without parking makes sense. For very specific places downtown along the RLine and within walking distance to stores for staples and to jobs, it’s beginning to make sense, but it’s not all there yet for most.
At this stage of the game, it would seem to me that having parking or not (and it’s financial implications to a buyer or renter) should involve some level of choice. Also, the city could help mitigate this transition period for the city by establishing some annual permit lots for residents until such time that a car becomes less necessary. In the end, I think it’s pie-in-the-sky to think that we are going to be creating an auto-free downtown for residents anytime soon. Sure the % of those without cars will grow over time, but I highly doubt that those numbers will be significant in the near term. That said, I think it’s reasonable to start moving beyond the ā€œmy car has to be immediately adjacent to my home at no cost to meā€ presumption.

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This is where I am talking about:

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i used to live near spring forest road…it was generally an easy drive to downtown on falls of the neuse…hop in the middle lane to dodge the backups going to each direction of 440 and if you caught the lights right i didnt have to stop to hop onto inbound capital. it was kind of ok to bike as well if i took atlantic/wake forest into town. i think quail ridge apts at millbrook road and FoN rent for about 1200 bucks for a 2 bedroom 1.5 bath. i im pretty sure there are two bus routes that pass the complex. one into town and one a connector or cross route. are affordable housing rates significantly cheaper that this rent?

This seems like a difficult place to exist without a car… I’m not super familiar with the bus routes in the area, but there aren’t a whole lot of amenities close by. It seems like getting groceries would but a whole drawn out process.

I do agree that not having a lot of parking immediately next to NCSU is a great move. I’m not really sure where else would currently be good hub locations to live and not have a car. It kind of seems like Raleigh is having a chicken and the egg situation where something has to give or we will just keep having lots of parking.

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ā€œAccess to parking has an effect on transit use three times as large as the effect of living in a neighborhood with good transit access… This impact of parking supply on car ownership remains similar even after controlling for transit, walk, and bicycle accessibility, household income, and other characteristics.ā€

This is based on research that surveyed people who were assigned by inclusionary-zoning lotteries to live in various parts of San Francisco. We may think of SF as being very transit-oriented, but it has the world’s highest density of cars.

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There is a lot more in the area than it seems at first glance, and this building will be within a 5 min walk of a BRT station so maybe the best non car transit in the city will be available. Really close, there is a hardware store, multiple restaraunts, a movie theater, a library all very close and easy with the BRT bus. You could also take the bus out to the foodlion right oustide of 440, or anything downtown really quickly. I am on lots of the BRT planning meatings and people are actually more scared that the current buisinesses will be torn down for lots of new stuff (which would probably make having a car even less needed).

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Can you point out where it says it in that link (the sentence may help so I can ā€œfind it in pageā€)? I didn’t see it and would be surprised to know this is true. I would also like to know what density we are talking about. Is this density of cars per square mile or per person?

San Francisco is a bit transit oriented but it is no way like NYC with their subways. There are some muni lines, but get outside of Market street and you run into the same transit issues that other cities have. The problem is that connecting from one outer portion of the city to another is a bit more difficult. I’m not familiar with the bus system. I’ve only had family members there and have worked along Market Street near the Powell Station.

SF is 100X more urban and less car dependent than every city in the South

That wasn’t in that article, but it’s a factoid I’ve heard touted: there are denser cities, but they generally have much lower car ownership rates. SF has about 500,000 autos registered and 47 square miles, for 10,638 cars per sq mi; NYC has 4X the car population but 6.5X the land area. That does appear to be bested by some of those goofy small inner suburbs, like Guttenberg and WeHo.

I wonder if SF might be a bit of an oddball when it comes to car density due to geography. For one, the city itself is pretty small (7X7 miles) and very hilly, and that could be a hindrance to a more complex subway system, and secondly it’s at the tip of a peninsula, which means the public transportation system doesn’t radiate outward much and might therefore lead people to want to keep their cars. You basically just have BART over to the East Bay and southward down the peninsula a little ways. At least that’s how I felt when I lived there for about 7 years.

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Just Googled it, and data seems to suggest that only about 30% of S.F. households are car-free. That means that there are a lot of cars in that tight city limits. It should also help us set expectations as to what we can expect to achieve in Raleigh, especially in the near term.

That’s because SF’s zoning restrictions mean most of the city where people actually live looks like this:


It’s dense, but very car-oriented

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Nice mid-sunset stock shot of the NJudah life…
With dedication, it can be done without the car but as noted by @John, having it be the dominant choice is a tough utopia to find…

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Well, that sums up most of California. This is my childhood neighborhood in the south bay.

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Hah, I mostly grew up in a town in the North Bay! Cute walkable downtown, hopelessly car-dependent if you wanted a white-collar job in a ā€œrealā€ office.

I grew up just a few miles north of you.

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