Personally, I believe that the neighborhoods surrounding Carnage Middle are the ones to be replicated everywhere. There is a presence of mildly dense market rate housing and affordable housing developments (rental and ownership opportunities), with the Grey and others nearby. In order to decrease local “de jure” racial and income segregation in housing, we need more mixed income neighborhoods not new urbanistic (yes it’s not a word, I know) wealth-only enclaves.
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These days all new market-rate housing is advertised as “luxury” – the term has become meaningless.
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I’ve enjoyed the thoughtful and interesting conversation sparked by the video I posted a few days ago. Thanks everyone!
I am not a fan of places like Celebration, and I too consider it as just a different way of providing suburbia. In my mind, it’s not that different to places that the Triangle has already like Southern Village, but at a different scale and density that matches what typically happens in Florida. I suspect that the Disney development in Chatham will end up being similar.
The central control by a developer and/or a master HOA is the sort of thing that makes me uninterested in it, and the hard limit to the amount of walkability is a turn-off to me as well. It’s certainly falls into the category of walkability one drives to (or from).
As others have already stated, I think that North Hills is a better place because it’s walkable and it’s at least accessible to the adjacent neighborhoods to its north by foot. Even better is Smoky Hollow because its private street and “Hollow” has better walking access from many more residents within a reasonable walk shed, despite its interior “public” space is actually private and privately patrolled. I think that the same is true for Seaboard Station Drive in that development. It presents itself as public but it’s probably private. Can someone verify that?
In the case of Smoky Hollow and Seaboard Station, the majority of the “public” retail space faces inward where it’s privately controlled. Especially at Smoky Hollow, this leaves much of its edges at least moderately disappointing with limited sidewalk activation.
IMO, the city can counter these sorts of insular urban developments by actually working toward making downtown’s public realm exceptional now instead of waiting for developers to implement a better public and pedestrian experience. Just imagine the interest in downtown if all of our sidewalks had the same sense of place like the stretch of Martin St. outside of Raleigh Times? I’d bet that the interest of future businesses and residents alike would accelerate downtown’s growth and walkability.
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The one thing I’ll say for the New Urbanism suburbs - I do think they encourage those who live there to be a lot healthier than the standard sprawl where there’s very little non-car travel even within the developments. They also just feel nicer than your run-of-the-mill subdivision with the somewhat higher density and designed-in neighbor-to-neighbor interaction. So it’s a C+ instead of D.
The closest to it I can think of off the top of my head here is Bedford at Falls River, and I for sure would rather live there than in the standard endless sprawl developments around it.
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Bedford/Falls River was almost the example that I was going to use, but Southern Village has its small amount of retail more central to the housing.
The one positive thing that I can say for new urbanism is that it generates more tax revenue per acre than typical SFH suburbia. As it stands, greater downtown and the greater North Hills area are subsidizing much of Raleigh’s suburbia in terms of property tax revenue.
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From my understanding it’s private. One of the reasons that Commerce Place is struggling so much is that it’s the first time that the city is trying to create a similar environment on a city street.
You can see who owns a street here. Seaboard seems partially public.
https://ral.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=7f522ff4b033436b8b3fc2c7cf1f3f81
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Thanks for that. The Seaboard Station St. part that’s between the two large buildings is private, and that’s the one I was thinking about. That said, the overall area is an interesting mish-mash of public and private streets.
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im not sure how well this applies…i lived in Brentwood in the early 80s. a rather large SFH neighborhood at the time. hop across new hope ch road and there were a few hundred apartments with brentwood east and west and green castle, that had been there for years. mid eighties, a stalled but now completed apt/condo structure with likely over 100 units opened up on green road a few blocks away. maybe some of these issues were being handled ok decades back?
Edited:
My observations over the years with living in multiple neighborhoods in different cities, having a mixture of AH and market rate housing allows for more diverse (income and race) neighborhoods and schools.
Most neighborhoods nationwide are still heavily segregated if not by race, by income. This isn’t my opinion but has been a fact for decades at this point. Having multiple types of housing will allow for more diversity.
The Fair Housing act of 1968 eliminated redlining practices and funding discrimination based on race and other criteria.
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My mistake this is true, but many neighborhoods still had racial covenants in the 80’s and 90’s, many still exist today but are often ignored. I would have to look at the redlining maps to see the specific area you mentioned.
Do you mean Brentwood mentioned by @sthomper ?
As for redline maps, I’ve never been able to find them for Raleigh. If you do find them, please share! Thanks!
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Raleigh was too small at the time for true FHA redlining maps. Someone else might know of a similar type of map but that would have probably been commissioned by Raleigh or North Carolina.
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Oh, that’s interesting to know. Didn’t Durham have redline maps? It’s not like the two cities were different in size back then.
I’m open to being wrong but that is what I read. Raleigh was less than 40,000 people in the 1930s and Durham was more than 50,000 people in the 1930s. I haven’t read exactly what triggered an FHA or HOLC map but I could understand it being 50,000 people.
Edit: Wait, just found it. A 1930 population over 40,000: https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/howandwhy
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That’s very interesting. That solves the mystery of why the maps don’t exist for Raleigh.
That said, there were covenants in many “all white” neighborhoods nonetheless.
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at the time the apts near brentwood (easy and west) were racially mixed…i delivered newspapers there.
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I mean racist policy takes many forms. I feel like redlining is interesting because it’s a facially race neutral policy. If the federal government is going to insure mortgages, we should probably decide where mortgages are more likely to fail but the people involved decided that a group of people is more likely to fail on their mortgages and that racial mixing is probably going to have a negative effect on property values.
I need to do more reading on how the legal institutions of segregation worked. Like my understanding is that Wilmington Street was kind of the dividing line between black Raleigh and white Raleigh and Hargett was kind of the black main street but I don’t know if Raleigh ever had explicit racial zoning or if it was ever proposed for Raleigh in a serious way.
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From my conversations with people, you’re right, Raleigh didn’t have any official maps. We were just a small enough town that the banks “just knew” where to give loans and where not to. Call it institutional knowledge, “wink, wink” kind of stuff. 
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