As I watch the city struggle with financing of infrastructure projects from the widening of Six Forks Rd, to possibly tolling US1 North to Wake Forest, to making BRT a reality, etc., all among an inflationary environment where time is truly money, I keep coming back to how downtown can be a key player in these issues and more.
I think that it’s pretty common knowledge that downtown is the most revenue generating part of the city vis-a-vis its land area, but it also has the potential to add another benefit to the city as it grows. Unlike these challenging infrastructure projects that rely on funding from the Federal and State Goverments, plus local revenues generated from bonds, downtown can be the financial gift that keeps on giving if the city had the will to allow it to fully become the dense walkable place that it can be.
Not only can downtown generate way more revenue per acre through property taxes, it can grow disproportionately to the amount of infrastructure that it takes to support it. Meanwhile, it can do both of these things while adding fewer miles driven per year per downtown resident by taking more people out of their cars for more things that typically require a car in Raleigh. As we add people to downtown, the more retailers and services will respond to it. The more the retailers and services respond to it, the more people will access those stores and services by foot or bike. The good news is that these are things that the city can enable now without worrying about whether or not the money will be there to create infrastructure to move people from one car dependent part of the city to another. We just need the political will to block out the NIMBY noise on downtown’s edges that works to suppress a dense, walkable core.
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