Who say I’m not left wing, myself? But I can call a spade a spade when I think a group’s concerns are noble but their tactics are extremely misguided. Anyway this is off topic.
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Mike shared some of the renderings, but the visitdowntownsouth website has been updated to include a 30-page pdf about the proposal that is very detailed and substantive and I’d encourage everybody to check it out. I am genuinely very impressed with how through this is.
I think the opposition to DTS is a strange-bedfellows coalition of knee-jerk anti-urbanists like Stef and Cox who have opportunistically latched on to the gentrification issue, and a lot of local residents who are really, genuinely concerned that this is going to increase their cost of living.
To help put their concerns in perspective, if the city council was considering a proposal that would raise people’s taxes by a couple hundred of dollars a month, I think a lot of people on this forum would react very negatively to that. The concern here is that if DTS gets built out, their rent will go up by quite a bit per month, and money is money whether you pay it in taxes or rent, so from their perspectives, it’s a totally reasonable thing for them to be worried about and want to voice their opinion about.
Ultimately, most of these folks are voters, and politicians ultimately have to do what the voters want or else they won’t be politicians anymore. (Sometimes they become angry cranks who email out newsletters and go on rants at city council meetings. It’s sad.) I think that, big picture, most Raleigh voters would probably like to see this approved, but you’re always going to have some people who think the thing you think is awesome is actually really terrible. That’s life. We’ll see what happens, but the more you can do to address the underlying concerns One Wake has, the easier it’ll be to get this thing approved.
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I had no idea they owned so much land. I truly thought this was just the area around Penmarc.
Color me ignorant. It’s so hard to follow this and the Park City South stuff without conflating the two.
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Thanks a lot for pointing out that they have an updated plan. It includes more detail for areas “A” and “B” than I’ve seen so far. That said, for as great as the area “C” plan is, I don’t think any of the “A” and “B” parts are very well thought out at all. I wouldn’t be inclined to approve those areas as shown.
Area “A” is tricky and hemmed in by wetlands and therefore rather constrained, but it is basically a dead end off of Maywood Avenue. I personally think they need to get a connection to Hubert Street in there as well.
Likewise, the Area “B” isn’t quite shown as a cul-de-sac but it doesn’t offer much of an interconnected street grid. It is dense multifamily neighborhood that has been designed in a way that everybody will have to drive everywhere. Also inexcusably missing is a connection to Lake Wheeler Road (via Smith Reno Road.)
The problem is, once they have this zoning, there is absolutely nothing that council or anybody can do, to prevent them from fully building out areas “A” and “B” as cheaply as they can (with as many impacts and as few amenities and benefits as possible) and completely skip Area “C”, with they typical dodge of “The numbers didn’t work.”
It’s not that I think they don’t want to build Area “C” exactly as shown, but at they end of the day they are developers and their top goal is to make a profit, and if we don’t force them to build something that is in the City’s best interest, there is no guarantee that they will do so. If their numbers show that only “A” and “B” will turn a profit, then that’s what they’ll build.
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Well I live right down the street from this project and am looking forward to increased property value and so should every homeowner in the area, regardless of skin color. Build baby build!
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I don’t want to take this thread down a political road, but in my view the goal of ONE Wake and other similar anti-gentrification groups (and increasingly, all forms of advocacy/policy writing groups) is to strike down anyone that comes from a place of privilege/majority if they are pursuing something that will bring them profit/more “privilege”.
I hope this does not offend - it is my opinion that if Kane were a Black Queer Woman proposing the exact same development it would be applauded all the way to the ribbon cutting with expedited rezoning, with criticism of any dissent remotely similar to what ONE Wake is bringing forth.
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@Phil This is a great example of how different people can have diametrically opposed opinions that are both totally reasonable based on their very different circumstances. If I owned land in and around DTS, I’d be pretty jazzed about this project, too. But a lot of people who live in this area aren’t homeowners; they’re renters, and they’re very concerned that their rent is going increase, and that is an extremely reasonable thing for them to be worried about. And, crucially, they’re also voters, so the council needs to at least be cognizant of the full range of viewpoints on this issue if they’re interested in getting re-elected in a few months.
@evan.j.bost I really don’t believe that’s the case at all, and I’d be curious what sort of evidence you could marshal to support such a hypothesis. Are there examples in other places of projects being proposed by developers who are black and/or LGBTQ and/or women that you would expect would face this sort of opposition but have instead been universally applauded? (Also, for better or for worse, I don’t think that a developer being LGBTQ would necessarily be seen as a plus by this particular group. And I’m really skeptical that having more women, in addition to Billie Redmond, who is already a key player in this, in the development group would particularly change anyone’s opinion either.)
The people who are worried that Southeast Raleigh is going to be increasingly gentrified and that this is going to make it impossible for them to continue to be able to afford to live there have very, very good reason to be worried about that. The question is, how can we address that underlying concern about a rising cost of living to create a situation where we can approve projects that increase the stock of new housing and other amenities while also ensuring that we’re not depleting the stock of relatively affordable housing and create a more prosperous and equitable city for people at a variety of income levels?
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I think there’s an important distinction some people here aren’t making: there are three groups that are criticizing Downtown South. These groups are NOT one and the same, so I think it’s simplistic and careless to have one opinion when there are 3 very different games being played at the same time.
True NIMBYs = critics who just personally don't want new developments
These are the people I think most people think of when we talk about NIMBYs. But remember: this shit’s more complicated than that.
Maybe there is a reason to think people in the “Leftist-ish” group are being manipulated by activists in this group, like @Kevin suggested:
…but I don’t think that’s a reason to group the two together. If anything, that plays right into the hands of “True NIMBY” activists.
This is tempting for the “Leftist-ish” people to do (and also for us to think about) because, as @NoRaAintAllBad put it:
That is exactly why I think every DTS critic should NOT be considered strictly anti-DTS. Just because it’s easy to imagine, that doesn’t mean it reflects what people are actually saying and feeling. If you actually listen to what OneWake representatives are saying, some of them just sound opposed to DTS no matter what, but others sound much more complex and nuanced.
Leftist-ish = people who want the city to aggressively protect people in poverty
I’d modify what @evan.j.bost wrote, and summarize these people’s goals as this:
I call this group “Leftist-ish” because I don’t think everyone in this group has tactics that align with their ideologies. Some commentators in OneWake’s inaugural meeting, for example, just want affordable housing somehow. They don’t seem to care how it happens (maybe market-based ways like tax incentives are just fine) as long as their rents don’t increase.
That’s probably true, and I agree that’s why DTS should eventually happen. But there’s this cool article/podcast from investigative journalists at The Correspondent that looks at how, by saying just that, you can perpetuate the exact problems you want to solve.
Maybe? I can see it going either way, and it’s an interesting thought experiment. I’m not sure if it’s a helpful conversation to have here and now, though.
I agree. But at the same time, people are not robots; we’re emotional creatures that see and understand the world based on our experiences and ideas. It’s naive to think that people are truly objective -especially when you have thoughts that get personal.
Environmentalists = people with technical, engineering/design-related concerns
I haven’t heard a single person (here or elsewhere) say “noooo we shouldn’t create a district that can withstand floods” or “I don’t care if we pollute the water or wreck up where helpless animals live”. I just threw in this 3rd category for completeness.
This does make it easy for people in the other 2 categories to use this line of thought as a weapon, though. Again, that’s why I think it’s important to list this as a separate line of criticism.
Because of how this issue is such a dumpster fire, @daviddonovan, I personally agree that
is the question we should be asking. But it sounds like so many people (both on this website, at OneWake, other activists etc.) don’t agree on where we are as a city today -so it doesn’t sound like a productive conversation is even possible 
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I’m generally in favor of this development. What I understand less is how the mayor and current city council that seem to rush on that one.
Apparently, a city council session was added Dec 15 specifically for this case, before the planning commission end of work (mid January I think).
Those kind of moves only reinforce the thinking that Kane gets a special treatment form current mayor and CC and in my opinion is a political error.
Maybe I’m missing something and some regulation will make it harder to approve that rezoning after Jan 1st?
It’s not a regulation. The buyers of the property (Malik, Kane, etc.) have until Dec. 31 to close the deal, they say. They’re not willing to close the deal unless the rezoning is finalized. That’s all probably true, and they can’t unilaterally change the deadline, but they could almost assuredly pay the owners some money in exchange for some extra time to close the deal. But they’d prefer not to have to pay a little extra money, so they’re really jamming the council to get this thing done by Dec. 31.
That may present a problem for them. You need five votes for a rezoning, and at least one member (Jonathan Melton) has publicly tweeted that the Dec. 31 deadline is the buyer’s problem to solve, not the city’s problem to solve. If Malik/Kane say it absolutely has to be done now-now-now, they may lose some votes that they might have gotten if they’d been more patient, and it’s possible they could lose enough votes that they don’t have five anymore.
It’s also possible that Malik and Kane are 100 percent bluffing here, and things will be totally fine if it gets done in January or February. There’s absolutely zero reason to assume that they’re being totally transparent and showing us all of their cards here.
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To their credit, Kane is pretty serious about answering concerns about environmental and affordable housing problems. If you want to see for yourself, I downloaded the PDF @daviddonovan linked to, and formatted the file/took out a few pages so it’s much more lightweight:
DTS project overview.pdf (3.0 MB)
This booklet answers lots of questions like:
What are they actually building?
As we all know, DTS will be a mixed-use, walkable development. But half of the land turns out to be a flood zone; those places will be upgraded into park-like spaces open to the public, or restored as a beautified Walnut Creek.
Here’s the proposed layout for Phase 1 of area C; buildings in light gray are existing buildings:
…and area C once it’s fully built:
…and a proposed layout of buildings for area A (to be built after area C):
To summarize the relevant tables spread across several pages, the three plots of land will be developed as follows:
| Land Use Type | Property Area | Est. Density (sq.ft.) |
|---|---|---|
| Office | A | 400,000 |
| B | 500,000 | |
| C (phase 1) | 433,000 | |
| C (full build) | 2,100,000 | |
| Retail | A | 25,000 |
| B | 50,000 | |
| C (phase 1) | 64,000 | |
| C (full build) | 165,000 | |
| Housing | A | 500 units |
| B | 900 units | |
| C (phase 1) | 609 units | |
| C (full build) | 2000 units | |
| Hotel | C (phase 1) | 502 keys |
| C (full build) | 750 keys |
Why is City Council in a rush to approve this rezoning case?
The City also has to come to a vote about the rezoning by Jan. 11, 2021 -but this can be extended if City Council votes to do so.
How is affordable housing provided by DTS?
How are my taxes impacted?
See past discussions in this thread on what TIGs are. But it’s summarized here:
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Again, I am totally on board with Block C, but Kane has totally just phoned in the plans for Block A and Block B. They need a lot of work before a rezoning of this size should pass. In exchange for this much upzoning, they have to give up some of their flexibility to change plans and just build whatever they want if conditions change.
They did this when they filed the master plans for NHE and they must dothe same here.
Where would that put me?
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DTS is a great opportunity for Raleigh. I hope it gets built with or without the shakedowns.
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I would put you in the 3rd category by technicality. Your criticisms are still related to how DTS is designed, even if it’s not a conservationist thing.
As an engineer, that’s the kind of discussion I want to have, too. … if only people actually read and care about the details instead of making opinions without reading and listening 
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I just read it, looks great, APPROVED
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I read it not liking the watered-down stadium design… makes sense that this place will be district beyond just a stadium!!! Cause for the 50,000th thousandth time MLS is not coming to Raleigh, however we can make Major League Baseball come to Raleigh!!! I don’t know why A and B have so much I think it unnecessary to expand over there floodplain it’s too much!!!
Well looking at it in the PDF it said rezoning must be done by December for the projects to move forward with all it benefits to our community!!! Meaning if it not approved for rezoning by December 31st, essentially there saying this projects is scrapped!!!
Yeah, they’re basically saying, “Nice little project you’ve got here. It’d be a real shame if something bad happened to it because a certain city council didn’t get the rezoning request approved on time.”
But whereas real gangsters really would break a few thumbs if the protection money didn’t arrive on time, there’s actually good reason to suspect that the developers are just running a naked bluff here, and if the rezoning gets approved in early 2021 everything will be totally fine and the developers will just have to absorb a little extra expense to get this thing rolling as planned.
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It should be noted that I believe ONE Wake and the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) were even against the affordable housing bond, essentially calling it gentrification in disguise, arguing it helped some people but not the people who need it most, and therefore not worthy of support.
Now if that doesn’t sound like Livable Raleigh was putting something in their ear, I don’t know what does. Halting all potential for growth until the absolute lowest rung is accommodated sounds great but is the easiest way to turn Raleigh into Chapel Hill 2.0, where the closest workforce housing is the next county over in Clayton/JoCo.
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Lowest rung??? 