As someone who has spent my entire thirteen years of Triangle residency in the suburbs and drives to downtown more often than I take the bus, I can tell you right now that I have never once had significant trouble finding parking. In fact, more often than not, I find free parking within a block or two of my destination.
Fayetteville is dead for… a lot of reasons. Hardly anyone lives on it and office occupancy is down significantly. There’s a serious lack of street activation: entire sections are tower lobbies or government buildings.
But all of that would probably be salvageable if it weren’t for one thing: the death spiral. New, interesting businesses and restaurants don’t want to move onto a street that is seen as unattractive. This makes it hard for new vacancies to be filled, and abandoned storefronts reduce the appeal of the street further. This has been happening on Fayetteville for years now, before the pandemic or the riots. It’s just not seen as a “happening” place, but you’re still going to pay the rates of a street like Glenwood or West. If you can afford that kind of rent, wouldn’t you opt for a place where you’re not surrounded by abandoned storefronts?
If I were opening a business right now, Fayetteville Street wouldn’t even make my shortlist. I only ever go there to visit Foundation or if a festival is happening. And that’s the whole problem: no one wants to be there, so why would anyone go there? It’s cyclical, and I have no idea how to even begin to address the problem.
OOOoooOOOOooOOO! I have an idea! How about some sort of program where the city significantly covers a large portion of rent for new/local businesses who need a space but can’t afford downtown retail rent anywhere? Badda Bing: new/small local businesses are given a chance at success in their city, Badda Boom: Fayetteville St’s stretches of dead/unoccupied space become occupied and given new life.
I have no clue if the City would go for that, but I love the idea, at least in theory. I think the biggest advantage that Raleigh’s downtown has over a lot of other peer cities is that retail space is primarily occupied by small, locally-owned businesses. That’s not incredibly common, and I think it’s a huge selling point for us (and something we should advertise more). The problem we’re running into is that local businesses are starting to get priced out, and we may see rents get to a point where only larger chains can afford them. Anything we can do to prevent that is a win for our “brand” (or lack thereof).
Use one of the abandoned spaces as a commissary kitchen (Oxford?), relax permit rules on food vending carts, and make Fay st. the Street Food capital of the state.
mic drop
EDIT: To add, I recently sipped and strolled DT starting at Whiskey kitchen, to Faye street, down Faye st South to the convention center, then back up McDowell. It was… completely dead. If there was any critical mass of street food on Faye, we would have gotten a snack, hung out, maybe even found a nearby bar to buy another to-go beer.
A good restaurant would not have trouble drawing in people on Fayetteville Street.
If we had a made-from-scratch Japanese Udon Noodle Shop on Fayetteville Street it would be packed daily. A ‘fusion’ restaurant that services a mess of items would not.
Currently researching my trip to Japan next year and wish we had something like this udon shop:
What I’m saying is no one will go to a restaurant on Fayetteville Street if you can get the same cuisine with the same quality somewhere else.
I like this idea. Instead of trying to replicate what’s happening on Glenwood or West, make Fayetteville its own thing: Raleigh’s international street food hub. While you’re at it, remove some of the parallel spots to let food trucks park there full time (on a city-run schedule, of course), then run power to them so you don’t have noisy generators belching out toxins.
Right, this is the problem. Not a single restaurant on Fayetteville has that kind of pull currently. All it takes is one, in theory, to cause a ripple effect. But again, a lot of new business owners prefer going to spots that have a draw, especially if they’re not coming in without the existing fanfare of a new AC or Crawford concept. Foot traffic is king when you’re short on clout: you’re going to want to be close to other trendy bars or cool restaurants so that folks walk by and go, “oh, that looks interesting, we should go there soon.”
I can’t even imagine how many decent restaurants have come and gone in the Triangle because they were located in a place that nobody wanted to visit. Not everyone can be the best in the city, but they can still stay afloat if they’re in a place that people want to be.
Yeah, in a lot of US cities, fusion usually means “dialed back so it will appeal to the average American pallet.” Good fusion exists, but only when it’s a true synthesis of authentic cuisines done by someone who actually understands just what it is they’re trying to fuse. It’s a happy marriage, not a dumbing down of taste and culture.
One of the best actual fusion restaurants is now gone - Papa Shogun. Italian and Japanese fusion. Super unique, actually drew from the best of both cultures. Gone.
I can’t help but think that Fayetteville Street’s high water mark was only a short time after the “renaissance” re-conversion to allow cars was completed in 2006. There was understandably a lot of optimism, but the foot traffic never quite materialized to back it up. It’s been a slow downward spiral since then, and really started sliding fast, with COVID and the BLM protests and the opportunistic vandalism that followed.
There probably is no gimmick that can bring it back because, sadly, the fundamentals were never that strong to begin with.
The only hope is for
The return of in-person office work to pre-COVID levels, or higher, to provide daytime activity, and
A massive boost in residential density within walking distance of Fayetteville, strong enough to form a good baseline of patronage for businesses on evenings and weekends
The two factors above would bring it to a critical mass where it would be a strong enough attraction to consistently draw more people from even further away.
Heck, convert some of the office buildings into residential. Plenty of other cities have figured out how to do that. Don’t see why we can’t.
Alternatively, start subleasing. Lots of office folks want to do hybrid work these days, which means you can serve more employees with fewer desks. That’s more or less the model my company has shifted to: we use an application that makes desks bookable and give folks the option of having a dedicated desk if they plan to come in three or more days per week. These guys occupying five floors of a downtown office building could probably easily consolidate to two or three and sublease the others. Add some coworking spaces for the remote work crowd while you’re at it. That gets you more businesses in downtown on a smaller footprint, win-win.
I’m willing to bet we’ll see a lot of offices shuffling around as leases expire over the next few years. Hopefully, we see more of them shift downtown (including mine so I’m no longer stuck with the same three mediocre restaurants in a pseudo-urban office park).
My company is downsizing from a boring office out by the airport into WeWork (primarily in Durham, but I’ll have access to the common spaces/reservable desks at One Glenwood as well). It seems like that model might have legs.
Office → residential conversions are tricky. The large floor plates that are good for office, are not great for residential.
I would rather keep every office building, as offices, and spend the money that would go into converting them to substandard residential units, on building new, purpose-built residential structures.
Only when the choices are “tear it down” vs “resi conversion”, should conversion be on the table. (IMO)
Been a few weeks since I was through there but tough to tell if anything was happening there in early Oct…still, yes!! - this kinda thing AND retail incubation strategies are what Fay St needs…
The Fayetteville Street Strategy, if you could call it that, after the opening in 2007 was to drive people down there using events. It’s debatable but I think it worked. City-led events were the first ones there and private events came afterward. More recently, like mid-2010s, the city eased off and let the private side do it’s thing. That seems reasonable, the city can’t run it forever.
Today, the events seem to still be there, more or less, but I feel the collaboration is lost. What ever happened to the Raleigh Main event? I always called September (and parts of October) “Raleigh power month”. It was so alive and buzzing on weekends.
Now it may still be like that, I’ll admit I’m bad at following events, but some kind of brand for these events may be needed. Restaurant week is probably the best thing I can think of but my perception of the last one was that it wasn’t as exciting as pre-pandemic.
I too have talked to people about how slow the street is on say a Tuesday night but I’m not sure we ever had a lively street on weekdays pre-pandemic. I’m not ready to say that the street has died by any means. It was OK but never lively or dead off-hours.
The street was built for events and conventions. It only helped that it had almost 20,000 workers around it. If conventions are down and office workers are absent, moving your business is only rational.
The fix? Recruit office tenants and not retail until the office market is stable. Also, get the events rolling again cause that’s a formula that’s already been proven.
I did notice today all the work on 100 block parking deck retail spaces. Also, it looks like they are redoing the floor/front of Wells Fargo building. Laying new tile today, and digging in the planter areas.
