This seems like the best place for this. The Growth and Natural Resource Committee was just shown a request to changes the floor heights for our taller buildings. The request was to allow taller buildings to have slightly taller individual stories (more aligned with what we allow for 2-3 story buildings today). https://youtu.be/9yLGzCLCwUw?t=1628
And here is the link for when comments from city councilors start. As expected one city councilor starts out by asking, “so the puplic requesting this, are they the development community?” https://youtu.be/9yLGzCLCwUw?t=2141
The whole code is built out of fear relative to adjacency to SFH neighborhoods…
Our fear of rampant change from town to city is impacting our ability to function as a growing municipality.
It’s pretty straightforward except for our simplistic hangups. Unreal…
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I cannot believe these are our city leaders. I’m sure they are nice people but they just feed off each other. No leadership.
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At least they’re talking about removing the dumb height restrictions right?
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One measure of it. But Russ “Oh No Oh No” is concerned about people gaming the system.
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If someone can’t visualize the height of a building, or needs multiple mechanisms by which they can choose to be skeptical, then perhaps they shouldn’t be on the committee.
Listening to them talk about this stuff is like listening to a group of random people thinking that they can perform a surgery.
Also, when Stef talks about neighborhoods, she’s clearly only interested in talking about single family homes, as if they were the only type of neighborhood that matters or even exists. I get the feeling that, for her, there are no other types.
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Finally watched the video, moving this to its own thread.
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Yup. This topic is on the agenda for the GNR Committee on Wednesday.
http://go.boarddocs.com/nc/raleigh/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=BFQQZW6A5501
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Sounds like this is mostly in regards to 5 and 7 floor height classifications. Potentially changing to 4 floors/68’, 5 floors/80’, and 7 floors/no cap?? The original request was to change the 7 floor zoning to have a corresponding 102’ height?
7 floors w/ 32 mezzanine levels @ 500 ft. will be fine without a rezoning request? 
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The problems with the heights is not with 3, 5 and 7 story buildings, etc. The problem especially exists at the 20 and 40 story heights where it’s nearly impossible to imagine 20 floors of commercial office building at 250’ or 40 floors at 500’. A more reasonable number would be 20 floors at 300 ft and 40 floors at 600 ft., and these proposed numbers are only to the roof of the building, not its ornamentation/crown/spire or parapet walls.
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The GNR meeting from yesterday can be watched here. The first item is the building heights topic. I’m watching it now…
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They should change the acronym for this committee from GNR to NRG…the No Real Growth committee.
Hopefully they can see that these floor height restrictions need to change, but I’m not holding my breath.
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Anyone know what that building that Cox called an “Abomination” up in his district is?
David Cox has no issue with this type of development in downtown or ITB but he describes this as a “monolithic wall” as well as “the wall at the Mexican border” and completely inappropriate near residential suburbs.
It sounds like there’s no issue with raising the building heights for downtown and SOME mixed-use areas, it’s just the suburbs where something like the above is not wanted.
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This is hilarious to me. I used to live up in this area and remember him leading the charge against a proposed Publix that would have occupied that location along with some of the other property there. The fact that he despises what actually ended up there instead amuses me to no end.
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