Sitting at my desk listening to a few folks chat about this development. Just sitting here and smiling. #Uninformed. HAHAHA
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This may be and apples to oranges comparison, but in doing some reading was led to this tidbit.
Park Center covers some 100 acres. The Research Triangle Foundation disclosed plans to build the center in October 2015 shortly after Durham County committed $20 million to help underwrite the cost of the project.
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This is your chance to educate them. “Say friends, I couldn’t help but overhear you talking about the new stadium… have you ever heard of dtraleigh.com”
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I concur, I am ok with the money but on a more limited scale. Perhaps a zone is created for the development and all the tourist/motel tax money generated there goes to the stadium for x years. You could cap the amount at $x a year so if there was overflow an abundance in taxes it would go into the general pot.
This would certainly give them incentive to get the hotel rooms built!!!
Completely factually wrong
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What house? what a moron. He clearly has no idea what he’s talking about and has spent 0 time researching anything about the site. Classic naysayer. Thinks he knows the cost of everything but the value of nothing… In this case he knows neither.
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Ironically one of them (the engineer beside me) lives in Oakwood. I shared this forum with him, but he obviously hasn’t looked at it yet. 
The other was my boss, so I didn’t want to “out” myself to him and say I obsessively read this forum rather than focus on work. 
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Yes it enrages me this land is basically vacant and located in a rundown industrial part of town. I love how he tries to rule people up with inflammatory statements like “pave over peoples homes”
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I read through the Reddit thread some more. I stand by what I said, filled with uneducated communists. I mean look at those comments. According to one poster this is a White Supremacist land grab!
My Sides!!! lol
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Between all the proposals in the Peace/Capital area, the Union Station area, and now “Downtown South” the pressure on the council to revise the UDO is heating up. It’s becoming more and more clear that, even when granting them the best of intentions, the current plan does not conform with the reality of development or the future of the city. It’s just standing in the way, largely because it was poorly constructed in the first place. Some of them know that if they grant Kane’s request, they have little standing to refuse other requests outside the extremely small area they granted for scary skyscrapers without conceding that the whole thing is arbitrary. Personally, I’m in favor of appropriate checks and conditions being in place for development, but their obsession, and I do mean obsession, with height is terribly misplaced. They can either adapt reasonably to the city’s urban transition, and therefore play a part in guiding wise development, or they’ll eventually be steamrolled out of office and have no part to play.
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You missed another option of what could happen. The current council could continue to stay in power and hold Raleigh back while competitive cities in the region including Durham pass us by.
Don’t underestimate the power of their political armies. If people don’t pay attention and vote, the status quo could remain.
A key here is to get those in the city but not downtown to care about this project and associated issues. A case has to be made for them to care, and that case should be built around keeping their taxes low because that’s what’s in it for them that matters.
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Serious question are most of the challengers running for council actually all that pro development? I genuinely don’t know?
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That’s very true. It was the optimist in me. 
I think one thing in our favor is the growing demographic of people living downtown, who want to live in an urban environment, and who are willing to be politically engaged. We just need more coordinated information/action campaigns like some of the ones that have started up here (but on a bigger scale).
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Here’s a narrative that needs to be pushed.
Project > city and county tax revenue > more funding for affordable housing
The city is currently boxed in and growing ever more slowly year after year after year while the rest of the county booms. This sort of game changing project is how the city grows (revenues) going forward. We will never sustain ourselves financially or be able to fund our future with a trickle of new growth and development to tax. It just won’t work. We want an awesome Dix Park? How do we pay for it? We want affordable housing? How do we pay for it? We want better schools? How do we pay for it? We want more city amenities? How do we pay for it?
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It would be really cool if “a rising tide lifted all ships” here, and this development brought some benefits to lower income folks who live nearby without displacing them to the hinterlands due to increased land values. I hate seeing the little guy get screwed over. I’m all about seeing the city grow and prosper, just not off of the backs of those who don’t receive anything in return.
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This is where the city has to step in and make decisions that are outside of the free marketplace. Malik and Kane have opened that door for the city to step through with all of the other land holdings available to address that issue.
Sadly, the market can’t/won’t take care of that by itself. That’s not their role. The market is about making money and it’s the foundational system within which we play economics in this country. We cannot expect the market to take care of non-market issues, or work to devalue property, neither which are in the best interest of a city that needs to continually grow revenues to provide for our collective futures.
The city needs to stop passing the buck by making it the market’s problem. They should be smarter than that and realize that increasing revenues provides the funding that we need to address affordable housing. Stopping development and growth doesn’t make things cheaper, it’s just makes things more exclusive and expensive. If the demand grows but the supply doesn’t, guess what happens? Also, guess what happens when we don’t build more taxable base in the city and the costs of doing the city’s business continue to rise?
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Wow. I’m up here in Roanoke for the Weird Al concert tonight and just dialed in here after a couple days off. This thread is really blowing up! Wow!
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Perhaps I’m too bold. Here is my email to commissioners and city councilors.
Good afternoon ______________,
I hope all in your world is swell! I’m writing to endorse the joint Kane-Malik Downtown South proposal as a resident in the vicinity (Pleasant Ridge Estates homeowner), as an advocate of Downtown Raleigh, as a supporter of increased density in our growing city for various reasons, and as a supporter of cultural experiences for our tourism economy. Please, for me and my peers sake, strongly consider awarding the requested funds, or find a win-win compromise to allocate a portion of the hotel occupancy/prepared foods funds to support their ambitious revitalizing vision for Downtown South (DTS).
Undoubtedly, a loud contingency of constituents will complain about traffic, affordable housing, “public monies lining the pockets of wealthy developers”, underutilization of the proposed stadium, and a host of other dissents I am sure. In response to those anticipated dissents, please consider the following:
- This proposal is a new urban node expanding the physical boundary of Downtown Raleigh and allowing for smarter, more sustainable urban growth in the core of Wake Co. When projects like this don’t come to fruition, this would-be office, retail, hospitality and residential square footage will (at least partly) be accomplished by the status quo: Suburban sprawl. Municipalities grabbing virgin forests and building car dependent, infrastructure taxing low density communities. Urban growth supports transit, preserves natural habitats by slowing sprawl and reducing traffic miles, results in more tax base per acre than suburban development, and contributes to less infrastructure per tax base dollar, ultimately better financing our future city’s infrastructure repair expenses.
- This development is along a planned BRT transit corridor. If BRT is implemented correctly, bussing people in and out of DTS to other transit nodes and areas of density (Raleigh Union Station for connection to future commuter rail and other dense, mixed use areas for example) will be a viable option for those whom don’t own cars, don’t want to drive, don’t want to deal with traffic/parking, and those whom choose to use transit instead of single occupancy vehicles. This was very important to Amazon’s HQ2 search efforts, as it should be important to all of us who have a stake anywhere near downtown Raleigh. It’s terribly frustrating when lack of transit is used as a reason for not approving density, and vice versa when low density is used as a reason for not approving transit. We need to be bold as a region and prepare for the future; not use the current landscape as an excuse for inertia. Growth is here. Fortunately for DTS, the site’s alignment with a highway, greenway, and BRT corridor is perfectly positioned to handle the growth with a multimodal transit framework.
- It is not the burden of private developers, home builders, or landowners to provide affordable housing for the benefit of the public. Affordable and attainable housing scarcity are problems which governments must form private-public partnerships to fix. I believe gentrification is distressing, and housing inflation is a problem that hurts our communities and weakens our diversity. It is also a problem that is way beyond any one regions’ control, with many federal level decisions and global trends hurting the affordability of housing. Density helps housing affordability because it encourages transit and reduced commute distances, which is an equation in cost of living, it spreads the cost of land acquisition/development across more square footage of housing, and increases the tax base for the city. Cost burdened people can continue to move further and further into the suburbs, but at some point the car maintenance, gas, and parking to transport that worker into the job centers every day becomes too large an expense to reason. The DTS proposal is a huge opportunity to form a private-public partnership on housing affordability and tie some form of affordable housing funding into the deal, perhaps as a joint effort between Raleigh and Wake property taxes of the assessed value of the improvements.
- Regarding the soccer stadium, I do sympathize with the concern that ongoing funding could potentially disincentivize profitable programming at the stadium. I am confident that this concern can be worked out in the reservation of those funds for specific purposes outside of maintaining/floating the stadium itself. So long as the stadium is run as a for-profit business, it will have to be financially independent and find creative ways to generate revenue when there are no soccer games ongoing, such as summer concerts, holiday fireworks, large public rallies, etc. Certainly a large corporate sponsor would pay for naming rights of the stadium.
I so much appreciate you reading this message, and I eagerly look forward to learning more about this proposal as negotiations develop.
Thank you for your public service.
Best regards,
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White supremacist land grab 
that’s bull.
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