Y’all Queda State Government is 86ing the DMV site.
DMV site should be bought by the city for a massive affordable housing project (15+ stories) and senior living center and redo Hargett Street from the future bus station to the DMV site to have dedicated biking lanes and more tree shaded sidewalks.
A benefit is it’s right next to the future Bus Rapid Transit too.
Oh my goodness, what excellent news! 
You’re absolutely right, the potential for this site is just tremendous given its prime location. I totally agree with you that this would be a perfect location for multi-story affordable housing.
Here’s a link to the N&O’s original story about the relocation. (And I confirmed that this provision was included in the final version of the budget that was ultimately signed into law.)
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article212171619.html
it would be better to sell to a private builder.
For who? The buyer or the city? Hope we never turn out like Charlotte.
I believe for both. That is prime area for re-development. A nice mixed use project would be great there. That area is going to be really walk-able soon.
Does anyone know if there’s been any additional movement on this? With Dix getting ready to get started, and the way things have been progressing in our city, I hope this has picked up some momentum. I can’t find anything on the internet about it though other than what has been shared already here and a MLB Stadium proposal. I plan to make my own mock up of this land hopefully sometime soon!
Oh, man, I remember this brainstorming session. It was really good.
Unfortunately, there’s not been any tangible progress on this, sadly. The biggest sticking point is probably not the actual prison, which could be decommissioned without a lot of fuss, but the prison hospital next to it. It was built in 2007, and the state is going want to get decades of service out of it to justify the sunk costs. It’s apparently a very good hospital.
I think that getting rid of the prison and putting this land to other use would be transformative for Raleigh, but there’s going to be a ton of resistance from the state government, which I think has tamped down the enthusiasm for more brainstorming like this.
There’s another prison, in southeast Raleigh, that I would also really like to see decommissioned. I’m kind of optimistic that one might actually be feasible in the not too distant future.
That really sucks! Man, this land would go such a long way making this a more complete, symmetrical city. I was at Pullen Park last weekend and found myself thinking how it was a great city park but it’s almost on an island. Even with Dix built out, not having this land actually being used will kind of be a black eye on the makeup of our city. We can keep dreaming though. Maybe one day we’ll have a state legislature that wants to take action on this.
Could the prison hospital not be converted into a… regular hospital? Wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing to have a full-time, full-service public hospital right next to the heart of downtown
Excellent idea! 
Or even combined with…?
I think that’s a lot easier said than done. Prisoners’ rights relating to medical treatment (like consent to treatment, DNR orders etc.) can get weird in ways “normal” clinical professionals aren’t used to. Before you even get to that point, you’d have issues with guarding incarcerated patients, transporting them while staying away from the eyes of non-prisoner patients/visitors etc., which can be an awkward obstacle that really gets in the way of civilian healthcare workers. Because of all of those things, doing prisoner medical treatments onsite becomes better for everyone involved and cheaper for taxpayers; in general, it actually seems like a smart idea.
Apparently there’s a whole research and policy field specifically about this. This paper mentions North Carolina having a prisoner-specific hospital being a super rare thing in the US, among other fun(?) facts:
For serious conditions, the NCDPS does partner with existing “normal” hospitals for some treatments. I’ve seen several patients in that situation when I volunteered at UNC’s hospital as a high schooler, even after the Central Prison facility opened.
IMO they should have built the hospital at the Butner facility as it is a much larger prison complex and could be a business draw for the region as well.
Totally agreed. Incidentally, the history of the park and the prison is quite interesting.
The Morehead School for the blind opened in 1845. The park is on the grounds of what used to be known as the Dix Hill Asylum, which was opened in 1856. Construction of the original prison in this location began in the 1860s. In those days, this was a location way out on the edge of town, and it’s not at all a coincidence that the school for the blind and the treatment center for the mentally ill and the prison were all put in close proximity to each other, on the other side of the then newly-built railroad. So now we’ve got a fantastic new train station, and we’re going to have this amazing park where the asylum used to be, but it’s going to take time for some of these other historical choices to be unwound, I suppose.
Possibly, but the issue is that you would still need to find the funding to build a new prison hospital, which is the real sticking point here. Those things are expensive, unfortunately.
Sigh. I know, right? If only. If only!
Fenway Park is a few blocks away from a pretty large urban park in Boston so I like this idea of having a baseball stadium here.
Yeah, this came up when this group tossed out that idea three years ago, but this would be a terrible, terrible place for a baseball stadium. You have only one point of ingress/egress, running east/west on Western Blvd. That would be an absolutely horrific nightmare from a traffic standpoint.
Except for Wrigley Field (and you really truly couldn’t build anything like Wrigley today, and Wrigley itself was vastly different when it was first built), every MLB stadium and/or its parking lot is within half a mile of at least one major freeway exit, often more than one major freeway. (Fenway predates the freeway that now runs past the outfield walls; for the other 28 stadiums, the freeway was there first.) If Raleigh ever does get an MLB stadium, it’ll be right next to a highway, just like all the other MLB stadiums, because so many of the spectators arrive in cars.
We can still dream about the possibilities, right??
I’ve completed my initial draft idea for the transformation of the area.
Very impressive. Thank you.
Thanks! First time taking an actual stab at a site plan of any sort
