Southeast Wake County by the border of JoCo? Yeah they’ve been talking about that since 2019. Basically Brier Creek II: Suburbia with a Vengeance. At least from what I understand the city wants to apply city building codes to the area so that developers don’t ruin the area with development designed with lax county standards.
Hopefully I hope the city just doesn’t let developments plan everything. The city should build a boulevard with large pedestrian, biking, and low speed car/tram lanes in the direction of downtown.
Do you remember if the place they’re talking about is near US-70 or the NCRR rail tracks? If so, depending on what the BRT extension study’s results say later this year and if the city decides to add TOD overlays there, it could force the area to not just turn into another suburban hell.
Chapel Hill is 21 square miles. I find it hard to believe that Raleigh could annex a chunk of land that large under the current annexation laws. The developers would have to own all of this property and ask the city to annex it.
Personally, I am not interested in Raleigh putting itself on the hook for more suburban infrastructure liability that won’t pay for itself in the long term. The property tax density that Raleigh’s been creating downtown, midtown, in the Village District, etc. are helping Raleigh address the miles and miles and miles of aging suburban infrastructure that it already has. I am not interested in the city taking on more of it.
I agree that Raleigh needs to stop subsidizing suburbs, but one way to think about this is that the ETJ/urban services addition could also work as a deterrent from doing just that. If you think about what Francisco suggested:
…then isn’t it also fair to see this move as a first step to discourage suburbanization?
If one presumes that the land gets developed at an average of 3000 per square mile, that would lift Raleigh’s eventual population by over 50,000. However, with new suburban development, that density metric may be higher as new SFH’s are built on much smaller lots now.
I saw this on twitter and couldn’t agree more, Boston and Philadelphia are the only cities that I can think of that don’t fit into the American category.
This might help give the area they’re talking about some context. You guys were right, it’s the Southeast Special Study area near the JoCo border. In the WRAL article I posted they link to the study done by the city of Raleigh. I guess this is where they’re claiming it’s an area ‘similar in size’ to Chapel Hill.
