Finally, height restrictions just means boring looking buildings.
In Miami, it typically means flat topped buildings without crowns because they want to maximize occupied space. Due to the proximity of the airport, the FAA limits heights of buildings downtown and Brickell.
Things could be worse for DT Raleigh, we could be San Jose California where the tallest building in America’s 10th largest city is less than 300 feet.
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While I like Richmond’s density, the large percentage of brown/beige boxes and lack of a signature tower really brings it down in an architectural sense. No building is terrible though, just most of the 250+ ft buildings are boring.
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Richmond is a great city but they are the perfect example of the towers being the worst part of the city. All the shops/resteraunts/residential areas weren’t at the same location as the towers.
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Yeah Richmond looks great from I-95, but exit off the freeway and downtown just has next to no pedestrian scale. A ghost town.
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This brings up a point, sort of, that I love to reiterate. Those miles and miles of land keep being developed in the lamest, strip mall and curl-de-sac fashion imaginable. If we could get some miles of street grid, especially street grid connected to downtown with transit and walkable/bikeable corridors, I’d be a happier person. A proper, gridded high-rise district was once the plan for Mini-city…thats’s where the moniker came from. It just never happened. It has some small semblance of a grid that got started though. It would make north Raleigh, and any commute down Capital Blvd, immensely more enjoyable, if that area was a real urban style mid town.
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Sounds just like Jacksonville, FL. Some tall buildings in a small core in DT, but the few times I visited it was absolutely dead to pedestrians in the middle of the day on the weekend. The huge mall a few miles away however was packed.
I’m really encouraged to hear people pointing out how Raleigh is better than a lot of its sister cities in the Southeast. IMO, for way too long there’s been too much self deprecation of Raleigh’s core.
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Here’s an idea, just let the market decide height rather than finicky city councils, committees and “whoa is me… it’s turning into drunktown” neighbors.
100% Terrible idea…
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While the idea of letting the market decide is not a great idea, the city council is not doing a good job either…imo
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Hey when I lived in Houston Texas they had no zoning laws and I think it is still that way to this day… but they have height restrictions downtown due to the Hobby Airport. But they still have a building 75 stories tall which I think may be the utmost limit. And Houston has incredible sprawl due to the lack of any zoning.
I lived in Houston in the early nineties and it was a shit show.
The lack of zoning or control at the city level meant miles and miles of crappy development along major arteries. You could literally have a day care next to a tire shop, next to an adult store, next to a nursing home. It was a giant mess IMO.
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No zoning requirements is absurd. Artificial height limitations in the downtown of a capital city are also absurd. There doesn’t need to be only one extreme or the other.
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This is true. The height restrictions, especially on the 40 story parcels, needs some serious explanation. If it’s city services or infrastructure, let’s hear how that gets rectified and what it costs. When a decision comes out without context, the presumptions about it run wild like it does here in the community.
What’s the real story?
Did the city intend for developers to NOT challenge the zoning or ask for Individual variances?
What was the basis for the relationship between floor counts and height? I ask because it neither makes sense, nor is it consistent.
Agreed, they are too conservative across the board (no pun intended).
I somewhat agree that there should be more graduation and/or parcel by parcel consideration. All zoning and height limits are ‘artificial’ sort of by definition. I do think the City would save some troubles up next to neighborhoods if they’d encourage taller stuff in the most central part of the core. Say 60+ along Dawson, McDowell, Fayetteville and such. I would then personally (I know you and others will disagree) only be at like 10 around the mansions on Hillsborough St and the warehouse district. Then we both kind of get what we want instead of a mesa top of 20 story stuff.
The Planning Commission Agenda for December 11th shows discussing changing the feet height in 7 , 12 , 20 , & 40 story projects ! Council referred this possible change back to them for their opinion .
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Thinking this belongs in a different discussion topic- but how exciting!! I bet this may change plans for Two Glenwood- someone on here said they did a site tour of One Glenwood and was told that the developers would’ve built taller if it weren’t for the height restriction. So perhaps they will keep Two G at 12 stories but could build to a taller maximum!!!
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This is good news, though the real disconnect between floors and height that needs to be solved is for taller towers. Below are heights per floor for each UDO classification:
3 floors/ 50 ft. - 16.67ft./floor
4 floors/ 62 ft. - 15.5ft./floor
5 floors/ 75 ft. - 15.0ft./floor
7 floors/ 90 ft. - 12.85ft/floor
12 floors/ 150 ft. - 12.5ft./floor
20 floors/ 250 ft. - 12.5ft./floor
40 floors/ 500 ft. - 12.5ft./floor
I argue that the height for 3 and 5 floors is a bit overblown since those buildings are likely to made of wood and be residential or small hotel in nature. Conversely, we have a real problem with 12 floors and up. It’s nearly impossible for concrete or steel buildings of a commercial nature to be built under those height limits with the maximum floors allowed. At minimum, these buildings should be 15 ft. per floor like the shorter buildings are allowed, and they should have some sort of add-on height for a crown on top of the building so that we aren’t left with a bunch of flat top buildings. My hope is for numbers more like this:
12 floors: 200 ft./ 15ft. per floor + 20 ft. crown
20 floors: 330 ft./ 15ft. per floor + 30 ft. crown
40 floors: 660 ft./ 15ft. per floor + 60 ft. crown
One could also argue that the floor count is inconsequential. For example, why not build a 60 floor hotel & residential building with 10’-6" slab to slab height and still stay under an expanded height of 660 ft.?