422 Hershner, Los Gatos was my family home. My parents bought it new for $21,500 in 1965. I think the highest estimate I’ve seen for it was around $2.7M, but the prices have eased a bit into the lower 2 millions.
When my parents sold the house in 1974 and moved to Raleigh with IBM, they got $38,500 for the house and found the houses in Raleigh to be too expensive to get what they really wanted. How times have changed!
I don’t think that I’d call the neighborhood functionally Oakwood. It’s big time in suburbia. Back when I was a kid we walked to school because schools were everywhere, but that has changed over time with households being much smaller. It was more like The Wonder Years TV show when I was a kid. Now kids don’t necessarily walk to school as many of them have closed. All of the houses in our immediate development (the Los Gatos side) were built by the same builder and were the same basic house with either 3 or 4 bedrooms + very minor differences in some design choices like having no wall between the kitchen and family room, and where to put the fireplace. It’s not that dissimilar from places like Raleigh’s 5401North, but without all of the new urbanism amenities. What was very different to Raleigh is that all of the houses were single story, and while the yards were tiny, there was a sense of backyard privacy because nobody’s windows looked into your yard and every house had a 6ft redwood fence in the back.
The house you randomly picked is directly across the street and was originally built as a 3 bedroom but you can tell from the aerial image that they expanded off the back of the house to make it 4 bedrooms.
By American standards, that’s really not that bad. Walk Score of 48 since it’s 1/2 mile down sidewalks to a strip mall with a supermarket. There’s also a high school just across Leigh.
Apex has a larger population than Los Gatos, a rather New Urbanist zoning code, and a town-wide walk score of… 26.
If I’m being honest, that style of suburbia is not terrible and would be a huge improvement over most American suburbs built post 1960. The grid structure enables a lot of connectivity that makes walking/biking viable and isn’t possible in cul-de-sac style developments.
There’s at least a coffee shop there that’s accessible to the neighborhood. A nearby school and grocery would go a long way in making daily needs met without need for a car.
I’ll defer to you, since you have the lived experience. I’m just saying that it looks a lot better than most suburbs built post 1960 (very low bar). ITB Raleigh can and should be better than that, but for the suburban areas, this looks decent.
The grid structure is the thing gives it potential. The best you get nowadays in suburban development is a Southern Village style master planned community with some centralized retail, but still has many drawbacks compared to a grid layout.
Here in Raleigh, that is evident in developments like 5401North.
While I’m not a fan of my childhood neighborhood in Los Gatos, I am also not a fan of the “new urbanism” model either, though I could probably objectively argue the ways that the new urbanism model is a better walking experience. Sure there’s a small strip center that’s a half mile away, and a walkable high school to the Los Gatos location, but there wasn’t much else while we lived there. In the new urbanism models, the things you can walk to are intentionally curated experiences, and there are certainly more variety than my family had in Los Gatos when I was a kid.
FWIW, here’s a screenshot of what’s happening at 5401North.
I don’t know that this not being a grid matters, but I am open to hearing arguments why it does or doesn’t. Not sure how old this aerial is, but you can see them working on the “town center” near the top of the screenshot
Personally, I’d rather see redevelopment of our burbs follow the model that continues to emerge around The Village District, with more infill, density, and experience piled onto its existing footprint, and making it more compelling to visit by foot by more people as experiences expand.
I can see re-imagining around places like Quail Corners (all four corners of the intersection of Millbrook & Falls of Neuse), but the trick is going to be how to make redevelopment connected to their existing adjacent neighborhoods and not just somewhere that’s presumed to be accessed by car alone. Unfortunately, most strip development over the last 50-60 years was purposely developed to shield the neighborhoods from their adjacent retail centers instead of embracing them as community resources. The connection to The Village District is something that sets it apart from most strip centers. It doesn’t turn its back on the neighborhoods that surround it, and it’s much more connected to them and scaled for foot traffic.
5401 North is walkable enough within its limits but overall it is a big missed opportunity. It was supposed to have a full town center but it ended up with a very small strip of businesses surrounded by extra apartments and a random SECU office building. The businesses they have are nice and serve the neighborhood well (coffee shop, Heyday Brewing) but without more, especially a grocery store, it falls short.
in looking at that area now…its flat, has a safeway grocer, a jersey mikes, hershner appears to have semi separated bike lanes, and the heintz open space seems pretty easy via bike. that seems pretty good.
Long time lurker here, I actually live in 5401N (bought about 2 years ago). The undeveloped land in the NE was all recently (re)subdivided. The corner of Midtown Market and Astor Elgin there is an ASR for a 4-story mixed used building with a few hundred apartments with some ground level retail and structed parking. Hopefully the rest of the parcels will develop out that way. A grocery store would be a huge win. There is technically a Food Lion up at Perry Creek and 401 but that is not a quick walk, nor one with sidewalks the whole route. It’s no urbanists paradise but it does at least offer some walkability for those on a tighter budget. If the Northern BRT route runs up 401 there is some potential for transit connections, at least in my dreams.
Sprawl is essentially a mathematical equation. The densest “townhome” style development I’ve encountered, where each owner has a garage and parking spot, is Stanley Martin’s 2-over-2, achieving approximately 23 units per acre. By comparison, most townhome developments average closer to 12 units per acre. In projects like 5401 North, car dependency remains a fundamental component and the project reinforces sprawl in several ways:
Even mixing density of saying a surface parked apartment building with single family on 1/8 of an acre, you are only putting on 15-20 units per acre in a best case scenario.
For retailers, if customers rely on cars, parking lots become inevitable, with spaces ranging from 1 per 500 to 1,000 square feet of retail area, there will continue to be large amounts of parking lots.
There is no job center nearby, so most residents reporting to a job location will have to utilize cars to efficiently reach employment opportunities
From prior discussion on here, this development is within an HOA, so there will be future hurdles should the residents decide to adopt higher density housing.
It’s nearly impossible to maintain a sustainable balance between single-family homes, multifamily housing, and commercial spaces, unless you adopt the approach seen in Houston or Raleigh, with nine-story parking podiums beneath 20+ story towers. The parking podium under a tower is an inefficient method for reaching higher density averages because the result is extremely tall buildings scattered irregularly, disrupting the urban landscape. A more cohesive and sustainable solution would involve constructing 4-10 story buildings, as seen in places like DC. This creates a more harmonious city layout, fostering better integration between residential, commercial, and transit-oriented spaces.
The only problem I have about Quail Corners is that it’s on a very wide road with 8 lanes across Falls of Neuse and 6 lanes across Millbrook. The Village doesn’t have intersections like this which I find to be more desirable.
I also lived in a California suburb (Dublin, CA). I would actually like to see Raleigh step up to this level of density. As it is right now, I believe huge parts of Raleigh are less dense than Dublin (outside of downtown). Dublin does have bike lanes in what appears to be quite a few of their streets that are not residential streets. In looking at street view, it appears quite a few of them had even been there during 2011. The bus system itself rivals Raleigh’s (or I would argue is at least on par). The 30R from Livermore to Dublin has frequency of 20 minutes. Dublin also has 2 different metro stops which you can take to San Francisco, Oakland, or other parts of the Bay Area. I’ve used the bus and metro when I lived there. When I lived in Pleasanton and worked in Dublin, I was able to catch the 4AM bus on days that required me to go in that early. I used BART quite often.
I mention Dublin this because I think that suburbs can be built pretty well and can support decent transit options as well as being able to maintain single family housing options. My annoyance with Dublin would be that they need to adjust their housing options as most of the city is zoned for single family housing. They are running out of space to build houses and yes it is still technically a car-first type density. Now in California, car ownership is expensive so I feel this already gives an incentive to walk, bike, or at least cut your car trips shorter. My annoyance with Raleigh is that we have large parts of land which are set to only be R-4. The single family housing options I see in Dublin look to be R-6. Considering the size of Raleigh, at minimum it should be R-10. I’m also annoyed by our amount of bike lanes, especially downtown, compared to Dublin. A lot of the busier roads in Dublin seem to have bike lanes (Amador Valley Blvd which has businesses, Village Parkway, Dublin Blvd east of Civic Plaza, Hacienda Drive, Central Parkway, etc). I will also note that Dublin’s bike lanes are far from perfect.
I like the 5401N area overall. Even with it being that close to Food Lion without the sidewalks, I believe it’s only a small section. This beats other areas I’m sure (including Raleigh Iron Works). If I worked up near that way, I’d look into the area. I like that it’s next to the greenway.
lived in reno nv for 10 years…and perhaps some development style washover…our ring road , mcarran blvd had a bike lance circumnavigating the city and adjacent sparks nv. i think some PTZ cities adopted ‘new urbanist?’ modes faster than down here.
While I understand that city council does get voted in, I believe most opposition comes from a vocal few. Down in Holly Springs, they are upset that they are bringing what I assume to be more single family homes to the neighborhood.
Can you imagine if their homes were votes against 25 years ago?
For the most part, I don’t think people care. It’s just the vocal few.
Also adding in that part of the listed concerns were “child safety”, but at the same time, they want to widen the road.
to be fair to the residents, they don’t want ANY houses, SFH, townhomes, apartments, whatever. Judging from the traffic and currently rural area of this school, it would be a terrible area to make more dense than SFH. That’s what is already nearby, but as a parent I do appreciate parents’ safety concerns for elementary age kids walking to and from the school with cars zooming by.
Here’s the streetview as of 2023, and a neighborhood map
