Windows are at least a little bigger now. Looks slightly less “hospital/prison” than before. Slightly.
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CityPlat owns this lot - and then the old Arby’s lot further up the street. I think Live on Hillsborough owns the old farmhouse frat house lot across from where the Arby’s was. Would like to see all of these lots get developed to stitch together that stretch between Meredith and NCSU. Lots of talk the last few years about these, but nothing making me think they’ll be a reality at this point.
Does anyone know the story on the massive Alsco linen/uniform cleaning service on this area of the street? Other than it backing up to that electrical substation, I’ve always though that could be an interesting rehab project if that business ever sold/moved out.
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I wholly agree! I would love to see more student oriented bars and concepts on Hillsborough. My first year at NCSU was when Valentine commons was a dirt parking lot and they were just ripping up the street for the revamp. There were a few bars but nothing really lasted and I think the problem was, and still kinda is, that Hillsborough St is really only conducive to on-campus students, most of whom are underage and are probably going to get their booze at a house party off campus or use their fake ID to get into some clubs downtown. Most of the students/recent grads who are old enough to legally buy a beer (or several pitchers lets be real here) are in off-campus housing and most of that has historically been situated well far away from Hillsborough St. I do hope that the added apartments here though will help support a couple bars.
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Bringing the discussion into this thread.
Currently I count 3886 beds across 1457 units in completed, privately owned apartment complexes marketed exclusively to students in the immediate Hillsborough Street corridor.
The under construction Hub on Campus contributes a whopping 2195 beds in 667 units, totaling 6082 beds in 2124 units.
Next there are two buildings that were built privately but are now university owned and are operated as dorms: North Hall and University Towers (Yes, NCSU owns it now). This grows the count to 7209 beds in 2736 units.
Next including the apartments that are available to anyone but are near NCSU and popular with students and you get 8051 beds in 3200 units. Mind you, this does not include any of the Village District complexes north of Clark Avenue, which tend to be more expensive and less focused on students.
There are a few more in various stages of planning but I’m not sure how likely any of them are to follow through with construction so I won’t count them.
Figure once Hub is complete, we’re talking somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000 students will live on Hillsborough Street. Total enrollment is about 39,000. I can’t figure out how to know how many of these are distance education students versus attending in person this year, but in 2019 there were about 34,000 students attending on-campus courses.
So that means once Hub On Campus is done, there will be room for about 20-25% of the entire student body to live on Hillsborough Street. Yeah, that’s quite a lot.
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No if only there was more sh*t for them to do on Hillsborough! Hopefully that will come in time.
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~10,000 in on-campus residence halls - most of which are just a couple blocks off of Hillsborough St.
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It’s still crazy to think that this project somehow slipped by the NIMBYs’ radar. It’s absolutely massive development. A tiny 5 story apartment on Hillsborough Street by NCSU: NO WAY JOSE! but this one not even a peep.
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I count 5209 in residence halls that could IMO reasonably be considered “near hillsborough”.
Ones that I wouldn’t count: “on main campus but kinda far” (Wolf Village and Wood Hall); West of Gorman (King Village); South of Avent Ferry (Avent Ferry Complex, Wolf Ridge, Greek Village)
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The key to Hub On Campus is that it was a by-right development. There was no rezoning. The Brownstone Hotel property had a 12 story entitlement from the day the city was remapped for the UDO. The developer identified:
- The hotel property, which was older and somewhat distressed, and had a massive zoning entitlement but was underbuilt compared to that entitlement - making it a teardown target
- A significantly underserved market: student housing within walking distance of campus. With 34,000(?) students attending classes on campus, but less than 15,000 units specifically targeting that market (including on-campus options!), the opportunity is obvious.
I actually think Hub will have a pretty big impact on affordability throughout Raleigh. A massive flood of well-located and hopefully decent but reasonably priced student apartments could get thousands of students to move out of other apartments around the city. Could be a boon for students as well, drive down costs for well-located apartments.
Compared to my days as a student there (2000-2005) it’s pretty nice to see so many housing options within walking distance of campus. Back then if you lived off campus, Avent Ferry corridor was pretty much the only option.
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I’m counting 10 or 11 stories - 1 or 2 more to go? Plus parapet wall … this is BIG for the area!
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Yeah, I’m counting 11. So 1 more story and the parapet wall. You can actually see the rebar for the 12th story columns at the top. This has gone up so much faster than, say, the Tempo hotel…
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True but student apartments need to hit on time or they basically lose a year of revenue, so the incentives are there.
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This rezoning of 2601 Vanderbilt:
https://community.dtraleigh.com/t/the-raleigh-wire-service/748/2378
Is pretty innocuous; it’s billed as allowing the owner to charge for parking on an existing parking lot.
However the owner of the property appears to be Dogwood Residential who appears to develop apartments in mostly university towns - including Union Chapel Hill at 425 Hillsborough (Chapel Hill’s Hillsborough Street of course, not ours.)
So while their short-term plan appears to be charging for parking, my guess is that there’s some mid-range plan in the works to build apartments on the site of the old Wachovia/Wells Fargo branch (which closed last year.)
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What rezoning are they requesting? 10 stories, 20 stories?
NX-3. 3-story zoning, but since this is a frequent transit area they get a 2-story bonus on top of that. Nothing super big. But plenty to put a mixed use student apartment building there: the lot is 3x the size of 2604 Hillsborough (the 16 unit building which is right next door) and roughly 1.5x the size of 2811 Hillsborough (30 units, at the corner of Dan Allen.)
Based on those comps we can probably expect a 4-5 story, 40-50 unit building, with ground floor retail facing Hillsborough Street.
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Wish we could get a drone video of this site
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Density near a transit corridor? Sign me up!
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The LLC that owns the Arby’s also owns all the lots down Turner. They are looking at two 4-6 floors of apartments with power lines in the middles.
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