Right, and I’m asking why he thinks that. The policies being proposed are not based on race, and working class people of all races would benefit from them. If the assertion is that there’s an unequal focus on issues of equity in certain areas of the city and not others, there are completely reasonable explanations for that too, beginning with a long history of discriminatory policy that shaped the urban areas of our cities.
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One, it’s not about one race, I honestly don’t even have to clarify or explain that. Two, you can’t just say “oh it’s happening regardless” and let the problems occurring continue because it doesn’t effect you (not saying you could change anything anyway). Three, some of these people they’re fighting for can’t afford to move or stay in their homes nor have family members to move in with and we all know what the outcome of that is… Be more open-minded just because it doesn’t effect you doesn’t mean it’s not a problem.
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If OneWake is successful in lobbying a substantial housing solution at DTS, it will be ironic that there’d be affordable urban style housing in a location that’s arguably not walkable to downtown, while north of it, Walnut Terrace continues to provide affordable suburban type housing in a walkable location.
I know that it’s a rather new development, but when does the amount of land it sits on make redevelopment of Walnut Terrace a real option? The argument has always been to provide affordable housing in a walkable location, but Raleigh’s solutions have always prioritized the car. This happened at Walnut Terrace and it happened at Capitol Park. The aging 122 unit Heritage Park community (suburban) is also sitting on an enormous plot of land that can support a much more significant number of units in an actual walkable location.
Like I’ve said before, if development is going to prioritize the car in a suburban style development, it needs to be built in the suburbs, not the city center. Otherwise, we are just wasting land & an opportunity to serve a larger need in the community.
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At some point one has to ask themselves, why isn’t this much push-back being thrown towards the new Billion-dollar development in Cary? Is it the income of the residents surrounding the development? Their race? Social economic status?
How about this, if this soccer/stadium proposal was pitched for the middle of North Hills would we be having the same conversation?
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I feel like at some point this discussion could use a basic primer on Democracy, and How it Works.
- People who live in Raleigh have the right to vote on who gets the privilege of serving on the Raleigh city council.
- People have every right to be for, or against, the Downtown South development for any reason, good reason, bad reason, or no reason at all. They also have every right to vote for or against any city councilor on their ballot for any reason at all.
- Lots of people in southeast Raleigh are opposed to this project. There are a lot of strawman arguments being conjured up here on this thread, but at the core, they’re worried that if this gets built, the cost of their rent will go up, maybe in some cases to the point that they might need to relocate. That’s a perfectly reasonable thing for them to be worried about. A lot of people in this forum would be irate if their taxes suddenly got jacked up, and most people would prefer not to have to move. And since the opponents don’t see any upside to this for them personally, yeah, it makes complete sense that they would be opposed to it.
- In any democracy, the intensity of support or opposition often matters as much or even more than the amount of support or opposition. If you put the rezoning request to a citywide referendum, I’m quite confident it would pass. But most of the support would come from people who don’t really care all that much, and so it’s not going to change their decision about whether to vote or who to vote for. On the other hand, a lot of the people opposed to this project certainly sound like in 2021 they’re going to be one-issue voters, and this is going to be their issue, so city councilors ignore them at their peril.
You don’t need 100 percent support from the electorate to get something done, of course, but you do need to make the opposition small enough that you don’t have to worry about it. I think a lot of the people on this forum who would like to see this rezoning approved would also be very unhappy if NIMBYs like David Cox and Stef Mendell stormed back to power in a few months on the back of opposition to this project and block every development for at least the next two years. So that’s something to think about, because it’s certainly a very plausible scenario.
To borrow an analogy from Hamilton, right now we are living out City Council Battle #1. Kane’s going to need city council approval, and right now I’m not sure he has the votes, so he needs to convince more folks. Trying to ram this through is a non-starter–drawing up plans is easy, but governing is harder. OneWake might be intransigent, but they need to find a compromise being warring sides.
So now we need to move to The Room Where It Happens: Kane and OneWake need to walk in a room, diametrically opposed foes, and emerge with a compromise having opened doors that were previously closed.
When you’ve got skin in the game, you stay in the game, but you don’t get a win unless you play in the game. Well, this is how the game is played, the art of the trade, how the sausage gets made. Let’s see if it happens.
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Well, from what I have heard, the objective reasoning for prioritizing downtown locations is based on car-less households, and the need for residents to be in a location that can support either a walkable and/or bus service access to employment and community resources. Also, I’m not sure that Raleigh’s Housing Authority has jurisdiction in Cary, but I could be wrong. Their website says “greater Raleigh community” in their mission…I’m not exactly sure what that means.
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I think that it’s highly likely that we get a ping-pong sort of council over the years. This particular group might push through as much rezoning as they can, only to be supplanted by a council that will do their best to stop everything, and then back to a council like the one we have now. I think this is a real possibility to have recurring backlash politics.
Even so, with enough pushed into the pipeline during the tenure of our current council, development could be set for years on just those rezonings. Consider how many rezonings have been approved in just the last year alone. All of these properties are not going to be developed before the current council’s term is up.
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No, no one cares what anyone who lives in North Hills thinks. There are actually quite a few long time retired residents who have owned their homes for decades and are on fixed income, so the fact that the piece of land they own just went up 50% in 4 years means it’s hard to pay the increased taxes. These people aren’t frequenting Peter Millar and Restoration Hardware. So they just quietly pack up and move - and yes, have the benefit of being able to sell their house that they’d probably rather stay in in a matter of days. Some good things happen, some bad things happen - but I don’t think developers care about these people or their opinion so the answer to your question is “no”, I think.
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In case anybody hasn’t noticed taxes have been increasing a lot the past 6 or 7 years. It doesn’t matter if the development is happening near you or not. Wake County has raised taxes for 6 straight years due to development and the increase of population all over Wake County as a whole. Cary and Raleigh have raised their taxes. Revaluation done by Wake County has caused my taxes to go up each of the last two times they were done because my property was evaluated at an above county average and there is nothing being built anywhere around me. If you are living on a fixed income it’s pretty much not good news for anybody living anywhere in Wake County.
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A) It IS one race OneWake is focused on period. As another poster noted, where is OneWake’s outrage in North Hills for the white folks that have been priced out of their neighborhood because of increasing tax values. I can answer that: nowhere to be found
B) I can say it is happening…because it is. Nobody has a constitutional right to live anywhere in America. If market dynamics are such that they get priced out…thats what happens. Nobody is guaranteeing I get to live where I want to live. There are other areas in the region they can move; other towns, counties, or states for that matter.
DTS is PRIVATE land…it is not publicly owned yet one group is interfering with those private owners ability to do what they wish with that land. If they were so concerned with the well being of SE Raleigh, why are they not cheering from
the mountaintop about the job creation DTS will create?
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There are no low-income white, Hispanic, or Asian families in SE Raleigh? They’re not here for middle-class families just low-income ones anyway. Also, like I stated before not everyone has the privilege to move or go live somewhere else, that’s literally one reason why we have an increasing homeless population no one cares about
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you’re argument is that because someone is poor they don’t have the physical ability to move? This assertion would never survive a courtroom cross-examination. The “privilege” term is a tired argument.
You never answered where is OneWake’s outrage over “displacement” of people being priced out of the North Hills area?
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Just because you get priced out of a neighborhood doesn’t mean your life has been ruined.
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@John, @daviddonovan I think you two are on to something, something I am a bit concerned about. However, we have one major data point in the recent affordable housing bond. That bond passed no problem yet the Livable Raleigh folks (group behind the past council) were strongly advocating against it. So does that group have clout these days or is no one listening to their noise? Will DTS passing give them more clout? That’s what I’d be interested to see.
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All, there’s some good (and just ok) chatter on gentrification and displacement. Going forward, I’m going to move it over to the Gentrification and Displacement thread. Feel free to point your armchair over there if you want. 
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Still a lot of really weird arguments here about what certain people “ought” to believe. People are free to believe whatever they want! Kane and Co. need to find ways to change people’s minds, and politicians have to work within the constraints of what their constituents believe is a good idea or not. Here’s a typical strawman argument:
This is true! But if I got priced out of a neighborhood, or worried that I might soon, and I thought that the choices that my local representative had made were responsible for that state of affairs, I probably wouldn’t vote to re-elect that politician. I could probably quote a dozen different examples of that happening on this thread, but you get the point.
There’s also a really good lesson here about the power of political organizing. While we were all on the internet talking to ourselves, OneWake did the actual legwork of political organizing, and that’s why they have a lot of political power right now. If the leaders of the opposition can come to the table and say, “We have hundreds of people in our group, and if you don’t address our concerns, they’re going to spend next year trying to make sure you don’t get re-elected,” then, given the size of the electorate for a Raleigh city council election, the councilors have to take that group very, very seriously.
Anyway, sometimes people who live in the same city you live in have different political ideas than you do. If you want to pretend like that’s unreasonable or something, that’s fine, but elected officials don’t have that luxury if they want to get re-elected again. For instance, I’m a leading proponent of the idea that landowners should be pretty free to develop their land however they see fit, regardless of what the neighbors think about it, but that’s very clearly not the world we live in, so we’ve got to operate in the world we find ourselves in.
@John Yeah, I’m very worried about this potential for ping-ponging city councils. And while it’s true that YIMBYs have an inherent advantage in that once you approve a denser development, the next council can’t tear it down and they’re just stuck with it, the flip side is that once land gets turned into low-density single family housing, it’s really tough to get it upzoned into anything else. So I’d really, really like to keep the YIMBYs on the next city council as much as possible.
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Cox is a wealthy landowner. This bond means he pays more for land in taxes. Therefore he disapproves and is using gentrification and other equity issues as a tool to accomplish a lower tax burden.
I mean look at his voting record and is actions when his NIMBY coalition had complete control of the city council. Did they ever make sweeping equity or affordable housing measures? I don’t recall. Actions speak truer than words.
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Oh that’s embarrassing. 
Thanks; that’s fixed now.
And the “inevitable” is exactly what I want: time for Kane to come up with a more thorough proposal.
This is why I think the next comprehensive plan (and also the Dix Edge study that has a survey open right now!!) is super important. These are long-range documents that force specific expectations onto City Council in rezoning and permit reviews, whether they like it or not.
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