(not directed at you, thanks for sharing the PR)
Count me as not impressed…
Spec Lab space surrounded by low value auto oriented commercial sprawl.
Hopefully one day Wall Street and its many tentacles will value true sprawl repair. This site is near my home, and trust me when I say no one working at this proposed lab is going to want to live near it. This area needs social services, schools, affordable housing, walkability…
This proposal will create daily car trips from Cary and Apex into Garner, and then right back out of Garner at the end of the work day.
I agree with you. Hopefully with BRT and planned road improvements (see picture below) this area will get a well deserved clean up that will spur some better growth.
The Town of Garner has a bad habit of rubber stamping anything that comes across their desk not thinking about any real master planning or following of comprehensive land use docs. The elected officials are up for re-election and the current Mayor is not running again. I am hopeful there will be new thoughts and actual planning going forward. TBD.
This may be a perverse viewpoint but some percentage of me is fine if the surrounding towns around Raleigh fight development and stay low-density. I see it as some virtual geographic boundary that stops Raleigh from spreading out and forces us more to start filling things in from within.
However, I recognize that then towns even further out may expand and regionally it becomes a problem so I feel density everywhere is really the right call.
The longer this land sits, the more valuable (expensive) it becomes and the more units will be required to make a project financially viable. Kicking this can down the road only assures that the housing built there becomes much more expensive, more densely packed in, or both.
At the end of the day, I think that Americans are generally predisposed to think of themselves first and protectionism at a very personal level.
Honestly I think the developer was over-confident with that one and the density was way too much for a plot of land that drains directly into Lake Benson. One of the RARE cases I’m with the nimby’s. If he goes back with something considerably less dense, he’d probably get it a approved. That whole area is full of wetlands, floodplains, etc. The amount of buildings he was gonna put there was a bit loony, IMHO.
. Maybe something denser will be built instead but that’s highly unlikely.