Hotels Choosing to Locate Outside of Downtown

I’ve been here since 1987 and it’s definitely always been North Hills. From say, south of Millbrook to Anderson. Midtown is stupid and should go away. Realtors and developers should respect the actual history of the area and not foist their silliness on us. The way back on it, is that the Shopping Center, then mall, now new urbanist shopping center, sits on part of the first escarpment of hills north of Raleigh. Heading east, they terminate ultimately at Anderson Point.

1 Like

I like to have a little faith and see if it steers back on track. :wink: If it gets to into the weeds about North Hills, I’m happy to shut it.

At the same time though, it’s important to talk about North Hills and why that is working with or without DTR. As far as hotels go, I’d put money down that downtown events draw visitors to the area and they stay at North Hills but Lyft it to downtown. You know what. I’m ok with that cause some people want that North Hills, more managed, predictable experience. I don’t think we’ll get away from that and other cities have comparable set ups.

4 Likes

I agree…DTR will add more Hotels and North Hills will be fine. Lets focus more on Downtown Events and the hope of more Hotels coming to DTR,

I figured someone would have beat me to it long ago; 18 story permit application and assumed zoning variance request filed for Westin hotel at Crabtree, still named Soleil Center.

https://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2018/09/05/exclusiveplans-reveal-more-details-of-18-story.html

2 Likes

Lassiter Mill is a nice historic name.

1 Like

Rediculous location for a Westin or any hotel, should be downtown, this developer is clueless, there is nothing unique about the area for a hotel guest, I travel all the time, do not want to spend that kind of money per night to stay next to a mall, especially one that is prone to flood, want to be able to walk in downtown atmosphere.

2 Likes

There are already hotels near crabtree, have been for decades, and they’ve since remodeled so something is working there.

6 Likes

The location is hardly ridiculous. As far as malls are concerned, Crabtree is one of the premiere malls of the southeast. Look at Tyson’s Corner in Virginia for examples of what sort of development a shopping mall can support. What I take from all of this is that downtown Raleigh isn’t quite were it needs to be for developments such as this to take place. There have been several proposals for larger hotel projects, but nobody has taken the next step just yet. I think the downtown market for “premium” hotels in downtown hasn’t (yet) matured.

5 Likes

When the initial version of Soleil Center was proposed, I was opposed. Since then, I’ve come around to the idea of Raleigh being a polycentric city. Our focus should be on directing these secondary centers to develop into interesting, dense, and (to the extent possible) walkable urban nodes. This means a focus on infrastructure in terms of sidewalks, street grids, bike facilities, and transit.

6 Likes

Crabtree has great connections for transit and has direct access to the Greenway system which downtown currently lacks. There is a cool unofficial skate park adjacent to the site. It also is closer to the airport and RTP than downtown is. Its cheaper.

I’m no fan of going to the mall, but there’s no denying Crabtree is a successful retail center.

I can’t wait to get rid of the half-laid foundations / vacant lot that’s been on site for what - a decade of more? Just hope we don’t lose the skate park and they keep the Greenway open during construction.

5 Likes

Connecting them via transit is the key here. The BRT and Commuter rail corridors don’t go towards Crabtree or North Hills, mostly because the infrastructure isn’t there, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be frequent (15 minutes or less) bus service connecting them in the near future.

6 Likes

The City is way behind on the supporting infrastructure. It’s too bad, because stitched together properly, Crabtree could be North Hills-like in some ways.

3 Likes

My favorite fantasy transit project for Raleigh is BRT on the Beltline. Buses could run on the shoulder (like they already do on I-40) when there is congestion. There’s quite a few destinations along this route, a great deal of existing density, plenty of potential to add more, and lots of significant intersecting bus routes.

The primary corridor for this would be Crabtree to WakeMed (Glenwood to New Bern). Buses could continue onto surface streets (like Glenwood, Blue Ridge, Edwards Mill, New Bern, Sunnybrook, etc) for extensions beyond that.

Anyway, the sooner we embrace the fact that Raleigh should be dense and urban well beyond the traditional confines of Downtown, Hillsborough, Cameron Village, and Five Points, the better off we will be.

6 Likes

(Before I begin, quick memo to Leo: if you think this part of the conversation should move to the BRT thread, please go for it)

Crabtree and North Hills both serve different purposes, but they both clearly have a market that they’re addressing pretty well. They have their pros and cons, but the three of them together have pretty much every function you could want that’s not downtown. Those two regions work in Raleigh, beyond a doubt.

The obvious thing that could help the market grow even more and attract hotels in all those areas (Crabtree and North Hills alike, and maybe even downtown?), to me, is to address congestion.

…but… this makes me wonder: where is it all coming from?

I’ve tried looking for data and hard evidence to show where people are coming from/going to from the mall area, but that either doesn’t seem to exist, or is so poorly communicated that someone who’s not a traffic engineer can’t understand it. I’m a fan of a BRT/light rail service eventually popping up along 440, as well. But that’s because it makes sense in my gut -and that’s not the right way to do public policy unless you can prove with evidence it makes sense to do so.

Is there any evidence out there to show people would want a Crabtree-North Hills-DTR connection, and/or that would encourage more, higher-end hotel development?

1 Like

I think that transportation planning based on absolute sources and destinations is difficult or impossible since they’re such a fleeting thing. People move and change jobs all the time.

The best we can reasonably do is to just connect as many people to as many places as efficiently as possible.

I should also mention that Beltline BRT is useful far beyond just connecting people from one place on the beltline to another. It would make a (for example) Capital Blvd @ Mini City → Crabtree Mall bus ride much shorter. Instead of having to ride all the way to Moore Square on the #1 and then back out the #6 to Crabtree, you could just change at the Beltline and probably save 30 minutes.

5 Likes

It doesn’t need to have absolute sources or involve constant, permanent tracking (that’s super disturbing). I meant more like knowing general areas where a bulk of people go, as well as what routes they’re taking.

For example, are the majority of people cramming into Crabtree actually just from an equally random distribution of places and funneling through Glenwood Av.? Or are there a solid fraction of people coming from North Hills? Wake Forest? And at what times and how does this change? Is anyone really using Millbrook as a bypass route?

I agree that a Beltline BRT could be far useful in and of itself (just imagine all the citywide tourism and events that could go along with the State Fair!), but I’m having a really hard time believing that you can’t be smarter about it, and that there isn’t a better way to do this than to just shoot in the dark.

Street capacity and where people are vaguely from (on a municipal or county level) is something that’s already being done, but I’m pretty sure it could be done realistically, in more detail? All the hardware you’d need to do this is already out there in theory, since security cameras are all along 440. You’d just need to track the flow of cars from the cameras’ videos -and that’s nothing groundbreaking (though AI could make that easier, and Cary recently started a similar initiative).

I mean, they do do ridership projections and modeling and it does take this into account to some extent. The census includes data about home and work location, so there’s some real data to draw upon. Using this to project ridership makes sense. This is part of the study process.

But if you’re trying to get more exact than that, why? This isn’t already being done for highway projects, and it isn’t being done for transit projects elsewhere - why should this be a condition for building something in Raleigh?

Jarrett Walker (Human Transit)'s whole philosophy is that the idea of ridership estimates are a very imprecise science because they have to make assumptions about the way people will act in the future. The best they can do is to assume that people 30 years from now will continue to act just like people today, but that’s often a mistake. Instead, don’t get bogged down in the business of precisely predicting the future, and instead follow the simple ridership recipe of:

  1. Density
  2. Walkability
  3. Linearity (A route should proceed from endpoint to endpoint in an efficient manner)
  4. Proximity (Are there gaps of low density along the route)

The idea is, if you have a corridor that meets those four criteria, run a frequent transit line and you’ll have high ridership. It may take a while to grow as people adjust to it, but you basically can’t go wrong.

For the Beltline:
#1 Density is a lock.
#2 Walkability clearly needs some work but that’s something we can and should do regardless of transit.
#3 Linearity is in the bag.
#4 Proximity is perhaps the weakest point of this idea, but if buses are going a steady 60mph in free-flowing traffic, and 30mph along the shoulder when things are congested, they will move between stops fast enough that proximity is less of an issue.

2 Likes

Looks like a 10-story Westin is being planned for RTP. Not sure on exact location.

https://www.raleighnc.gov/content/PlanDev/Documents/DevServ/DevPlans/Reviews/2018/SiteReview/SR-090-18.pdf

Arco Corporate Drive runs roughly parallel to 540 between Glenwood and Lumley. I hate BC with a passion and would rather see all of those development dollars going back into the actual city.

1 Like

I know why hotels (especially brands like Westin) are doing it: close to the airport, massive new affluent development, near RTP, between both Raleigh and Durham, etc. But I agree, it does get a little frustrating to see this and then ((gestures to empty Courtyard and Garden Inn sites downtown))

2 Likes