CNE has greater potential as programmed - particularly where residential is factored.
RIW / Dock 1053 (even if you include all the plans along Wicker / Atlantic) doesn’t meet the CNE scope.
Apples and oranges. Both nice when ripe, however you slice it. 
4 Likes
I don’t think you’re supposed to zest or squeeze apples.
Sorry if that’s too controversial for this thread.
Also on brand…
I don’t care.
I didn’t know that this was the sort of thing that we are supposed to be in a battle over. I don’t see these sort of developments being in competition, and neither is really a downtown (ahem, uptown) project.
I did a quick google maps search and I’ll say that I am not terribly excited about Camp North End in the same way that I am not terribly excited about RIW: car dependency.
If the Charlotte project were a mile southeast of its current location and accessible to their light rail, I’d have different thoughts to share. As it stands, it’s a 37 minute walk from the Parkwood LR station. For comparison, it’s a 38 minute walk from Oak City Cycling on N. Person to RIW. Both are per google maps.
As for just RIW, I would be much more excited about it if it were closer to the city center. I feel the same way about Downtown South. In my more perfect world, RIW would be in the Seaboard location. Alas, it’s not.
9 Likes
RIW also has a phase 2 that will double its size. But clearly if our main metric is scale CNE beats RIW hands down. No argument there. But they’re broadly in the same category of project - adaptive reuse in a formally industrial zone a couple miles north of their respective downtowns, both featuring openair plazas and play areas anchored by craft brew pubs. There’s probably more similarities. Whatever one thinks of these projects, CNE has been a big draw at least regionally, wondering if RIW will have a similar impact once build out is complete.
3 Likes
Camp North End doesn’t have the stench of a developer who supports far right wackadoodles that RIW is.
I’m sorry, I just can’t support John Kane anymore. Not when he endorses tacitly horrible people like Mark Robinson and Michele Morrow.
3 Likes
Ironworks is developed by Grubb Ventures partnered with Jamestown.
11 Likes
Fair but Charlotte and Raleigh are not really competing for market share, so as the forum title suggests, this is not a battle, it’s a flamewar.
Yes, I would prefer that RIW were closer to downtown, but it’s separated only by Mordecai – one of our denser and more vibrant urban neighborhoods – and a highway/rail interchange. Not ideal, but not insurmountable either, especially with better transit and bike connections. Just as the area around CNE has branded itself NoDa, I think we have the potential for a new arts and entertainment district around RIW, especially once you include the Lynwood complex/ Bloc 1053, future rock gym in the old Big Boss warehouse, and some underutilized properties in the immediate vicinity that will likely get bought up and converted if RIW is successful. So we have the makings of a multi-polar urban environment here in Raleigh. Even if some of this development is coming at the expense of downtown in the short-term, I’m not so convinced it’s a zero-sum game.
5 Likes
In a perfect world Raleigh would have a plan to connect downtown south to downtown via a pedestrian heavy street that maybe has a tram that runs through it. Getting the city and NCDOT to convert S Wilmington St from a dead, often under capacity highway to a local street would be a miracle. Maybe a citizen initiated campaign like the one in Durham to get the rid of their downtown highway is in order.
8 Likes
Thankfully Raleigh doesn’t have an equivalent of the Durham Freeway slicing through its downtown.
401 on either end of downtown and the couplet of roads passing through downtown proper aren’t nearly as damaging as an actual freeway. That’s not to say that it can’t and shouldn’t be improved.
As for the Durham folks who want to get rid of the Durham Freeway, I wish them luck because they’ll surely need it.
5 Likes
Where is Musk’s Boring Co to tunnel thru traffic under downtown!!!
Wilmington St will be home to the southern BRT which should improve it quite a bit.
My pipe dream is to eventually have a tram running down the median of S Saunders 
1 Like
Yeah but S Wilmington Street is a highway what good is a BRT when most of the route is a highway with no destinations?
2 Likes
I personally would have preferred it on S. Saunders, but it’s a done deal now. I think the goal is lots of new greenfield development along it… thus, eventually, maybe it will not be a highway. Plus it’ll still hit DTS.
2 Likes
This article articulates why many people around the Charlotte area do not look favorably upon Raleigh. Obviously, it is more “guilty by association” than disdain of the actual City of Raleigh, but having to play ridiculous games to gain approval from state leaders in Raleigh, who have been intentionally knee-capping efforts here and elsewhere in the state to build non road-based transportation infrastructure, does not reflect well on Raleigh.
…new legislation local leaders are proposing would cap the spending of new sales tax money on rail transit at 40% of total revenues. Under previous estimates, rail accounted for 80% of the costs, giving CATS much more to build rail lines.
The change could help the sales tax gain support in the Republican-controlled General Assembly, whose leaders have repeatedly told Charlotte that any transportation plan needs to focus on roads. Their support is necessary to put the sales tax before the voters in a referendum.
…
…at a pair of public meetings this week, details of some of those discussions spilled out into the open. Higdon, at a meeting of a regional transportation planning group on Wednesday, criticized what he said was the decision to replace a portion of the Silver Line with bus service.
“I think Matthews is getting the shaft in this deal,” he said. “… We spent thousands of hours planning for a train, and at the last second [were] told, ‘No, sorry, we will give you a bus.’ … We are getting a really, really raw deal in Matthews.”
1 Like
To the extent that people use “Raleigh” as shorthand for “state government”, then sure. But we should clarify that Raleigh’s state and city leadership isn’t driving Charlotte’s issues. That does happen elsewhere, ie where one region kneecaps another’s appropriation to secure limited resources for their own project. In SC for instance a lot of metros outside the lowcountry resent Charleston for soaking up all the money and being arrogant. I don’t get the sense that thats what’s going on here.
1 Like
Charlotte has light rail and street tram. Raleigh has nothing. Seems like Charlotte is still up ahead of Raleigh by miles.
3 Likes
Raleigh feels like a real city that grew organically instead of a 1980s office park LARPing as a city. No amount of government money can fix that.
On a side note… the people that say “Raleigh” when they talk about the state government piss me off. I have noticed that from other cities… as if implying the city of Raleigh is in any way more sympathetic to the medieval laws coming from our General Assembly, or that it isn’t in the same handbasket the rest of the state is in.
1 Like
That’s normal in any state. When they talk about their state governments, New Yorkers say “Albany” and Californians say “Sacramento.” Heck, I was in Montana recently and locals were complaining about “Helena” forcing restrictive brewery laws on them.
6 Likes
Such a weird and insecure take…Charlotte grew with the demands of its economic base which mostly required large office spaces in its CBD. Every other city responds to whatever its needs are in a similar manner, in the style of the norms of the time. I don’t see how that is somehow less “organic” than up in Raleigh or especially Durham, which both had pretty stagnant downtowns through most of the 20th century until development interests finally began returning to urban areas for more than just office users. Fwiw, I’d rather have more of the ~100 yr old buildings from Raleigh than several of the towers here, but that’s not what the economic demands of the past century in Charlotte have dictated.
The success of the Blue Line in completely transforming South End and revitalizing NoDa over the past two decades says you are wrong (or willfully ignorant) about fixing things with government money…
10 Likes
I fixed the above with the insertion of words that I guess need to be reinforced. 
1 Like