What makes the least sense of this drawing is that they’re requesting a 12-story rezoning I thought? And the tallest building in this drawing appears to be 5-over-1s…
12 stories would appear at least if not slightly more than half the height of the Maeve right there in the drawing…
If you look at the plans in this link it makes more sense:
In typical TBJ fashion there is no capacity to explain such vagaries as “alternatives” or “subject to approvals”.
Yeah I’m confused about that as well. Why not have multiple 12 story buildings if it’s zoned for that?
This is definitely an improvement over what’s there. My 2 concerns are, as someone mentioned above, that this gets monkeyed around with during approvals, comments, etc. but also that what they start with is the back end and the part fronting the downtown core remains crappy looking for like 6 more years. Though that is just me being pessimistic.
Lots of valid reasons to choose low and mid rise construction over high rise. Cost per square foot to build may result in less units constructed due to higher subsidies required to make the unit affordable exhausts the budget sooner. Includes higher maintenance costs as well.
Plus high rise life is not compatible for families. Seeking higher zoning may be for technical design reasons and/or financing. Plus re-re-development in the future.
Certainly better than what it is replacing, particularly with the goal of keeping existing residents in place.
HUD design standards make it near impossible to build new high-rise public housing. Virtually all federally funded housing projects built in the last 20 years have been low or midrise.
To be clear, families can totally live in high rises. I partly grew up in a high rise in Houston. But the US botched that so hard with public housing in the 60s - 80s that I completely understand the longstanding blowback.
Other parts of the world have successful high-rise public housing, notably Vienna. There’s an interesting backstory here, dating (at least) to Le Courbosier’s “towers in the park” intended as utopian urban communities (“machines for living”) that would inspire a generation of 60s radicals to take up urban planning. The failure of highrise public housing in the major US cities probably had more to do with the concentration of huge “projects” in isolated areas, at distant remove from jobs, services, transport, etc. Also the “failure” of public housing became a self-justifying cycle, leading to the defunding of HUD under Reagan, leading to more failure. But easier to blame building height than integrate public housing more deeply into the urban fabric.
TLDR: For both proponents and critics of public housing, architectural design was saddled with more responsibility than it could handle – either the cause or the cure for a host of social problems. Re: Heritage Park, 12 stories might be just on the cusp of what’s considered allowable, so who knows?
Some great points. I know RHA has been going hard in the paint on this one considering the financial and regulatory constraints, particularly with federal funding attached. It’s hard to even get a 12-story development of any kind financed right now, let alone low-income housing.
With this project and others in mind, the RHA board switched to a new CEO that had more development experience. I just took a look at the RHA board and see Gregg Warren, Yolanda Winstead, and Joe Whitehouse who are each developers. And Eric Braun from Raleigh Forward.
I hope it doesn’t get psychically or financially engineered down or delayed but this is a tough environment so I expect there will be some bumps.
They’re not proposing all 1k units be affordable housing, are they?
I can’t find the detail in the pdfs anywhere.
It’s the Raleigh Housing Authority so, by default, yes. That’s kind of their thing
You’re right, the large building closest to the Maeve tower is slated to be 10 stories, so the illustration is outdated/inaccurate
By my understanding this has been discussed as a mixed-income development since the beginning, as with all RHA redevelopments over the past 2+ decades?
Word is getting out. Credit to Raleigh Downtown Community online post.
The Raleigh Housing Authority (RHA) is proceeding to redevelop Heritage Park into a mix-used center including filing for rezoning from 3 stories to up to 12 stories.
Heritage Park was built in the 1970s as a 122 apartment community on 12 acres in southwest downtown Raleigh at 405/416 Dorothea Drive.
The buildings are outdated and costly to maintain, which provides RHA an opportunity to rebuild and expand the community to over 1000+ residential units to better serve low- to moderate-income families, community spaces for walkability, and built-in amenities and retail services.
Current residents will be temporarily relocated, with those in good standing have first priority in returning. All residents will maintain housing assistance and RHA will pay for relocation costs.
Construction is slated to start this Fall with residents moving in by the end of 2027. Upon completion, the property will transfer to another entity, however RHA will still control the site.
Wow. When you hear that the existing project is 12 acres with only 122 units on it, it’s really telling just how under-utilized the site is! That’s just 10 units per acre. For comparison, my building is on an acre and we have 82 condos, and some of them are combined units that reduced the number of residences. If we go by the density of my building with some of those units being nearly 3000 square feet, you get 984 units. If you go by the original 85 units, you get 1020 units. 1000 units at Heritage Park is completely reasonable.
1000 units is the bare minimum for what is reasonable. 2000 is possible without even exceeding midrise, 5-over-1 construction. Adding in 12-story buildings would only push that count higher.
One thing to note is that the current units at Heritage Park are larger than the typical units in market-rate developments. HP has units ranging up to 5 bedrooms, while the typical urban apartment complex contains mostly one-bedrooms, a few studios, a few two-bedrooms, and generally stops there.
Of course student apartment complexes have bedroom counts closer to HP’s, but those often have at least 1 full bath per bedroom which HP does not.
At any rate I do expect there will be a market rate component here, and those units will wind up being whatever the market wants to build - but it will be interesting to see what RHA does with floor plans for the public housing units.
When I said that it was reasonable, it was to ward off any consideration that 1000 was too many. I agree it could be more, That said, 2000 units in 5over1 configuration would likely result in VERY small units.
I think that we need to have a discussion about what is built and for whom. What sort of family unit are we addressing here? If the existing HP has units that are up to 5 bedrooms, are we saying that we are building the same as replacements? Is that the right decision? I don’t know, but I would be curious to know if those conversations are happening. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that they aren’t because they could be difficult conversations to have if larger families need to be relocated as a result of the redevelopment.
In the end, is there an entitlement to living in this specific location regardless of personal family configurations, sizes and requirements? I suspect that this is potentially a very contentious conversation. In market rate housing, there isn’t an entitlement to living downtown. Should there be entitlement for publicly subsidized housing or should people be offered different lifestyles in different locations? What I mean by this is should everything that everyone wants be offered here, or should more suburban things be offered in more suburban locations for folks who want to choose that lifestyle?
Just Caught on Camera. Janet Cowell’s number one priority is more housing units. Heritage Park would be a good start??!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iLSe6PAU90&list=TLPQMDIwMTIwMjXH-tA9uj0gMw&index=2
Assuming that Livable Raleigh will say something like, “We agree! As long as the housing is thoughtful and respectful of the areas around it, we’re happy to see more housing!”
Then they’ll continue to fight every single new housing development.
The typical 5+1 complex in Raleigh ranges from about 100-150 units per acre.
If you take just the existing 12 acres and build out at these densities you come up a bit shortnof 2000, at 1200-1800 units. But if you take out the interchange, that increases the land to about 15 acres, which would be 1500-2250 units at “typical” density.
As mentioned, HP will likely have some larger units, and some shared spaces/facilities which impact density somewhat, so 2000 in a 5+1 configuration might be unrealistic, especially given that it looks like they are still planning quite a bit of lower density stuff too.
But they are going for 12 story zoning, so it seems they are not constrained to 5+1, making this a pointless argument anyway.
All these years later I am still trying to get over the Livable Raleigh label. But I digress yet again. I look for the LR to not be in favor of this development just on general principles.