The nicest wealthiest CAC probably shouldn’t be required to have “equitable” housing, but they should be required to … build housing. More stuff built in wealthy areas means less gentrification pressure in other areas.
Glenwood Avenue from downtown to the Beltline should look like Peachtree Street between midtown and Buckhead, or Wilshire Blvd between Beverly Hills and Westwood.
I think we must have come away with different impressions of what @ADUsSomeday was trying to communicate. He mentions “equitable growth”, not “equal prices”. He didn’t say we need to be building Affordable Housing™ (i.e subsidized / non-market rate housing) in this neighborhood. His post didn’t even even suggest that there needs to be “little a” affordable housing (median market rate, affordable on a median household income) in the area.
He basically just questions why, when demand for living near the urban core is at an all-time high, does this area still have such strict SFH-only zoning?
If there is demand for more housing in the area, why not relax zoning regulations even incrementally and let the market meet that demand? Is there a good reason that it is currently illegal to build a duplex in this (or any) neighborhood?
…but that Glenwood location is not in the urban core. Frankly, I want to see urban development happen near the very core of the city to leverage accessing more of our daily lives activities by foot, by bike share, by BRT, or by RLine. Putting multifamily in a perpetually suburban district will not make it urban. It will only put more cars on the road. That district will not be changing into anything significantly different than what is already is.
Let’s develop our core with dense housing from the inside>outward, in areas that are in (or can reasonably be transformed into) walking neighborhoods.
No argument there. I’d be ecstatic if suburban sprawl halted in it’s tracks here in Raleigh and elsewhere. But SFH-only zoning ITB has not helped us do that. It’s helped us do this:
This is the real sprawl that Raleigh is dealing with. You don’t stop sprawl by disallowing densification a few miles from the urban core; all that does is push the sprawl out, a mile at a time. In fact, having only a small area where dense building is allowed makes dense building even less likely in that area; since there are many fewer lots where a developer may be able to build those new condos, land speculation in that area drives the prices way up due to less competition. This is why we still have so many surface parking lots in downtown; because all the owners know they’re worth millions of dollars to a developer that wants to build tall because they can’t build it 2 blocks over.
We could try to disallow all sprawl by implementing an Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) like Portland has. But even Portland’s UGB extends anywhere from 6.5 to 25 miles from the center of the city. The very furthest point of this former CAC is almost exactly 4 miles from the center of downtown Raleigh, and the closest points are maybe 2.1 miles out.
And Portland implemented their UGB when their population was 366k vs Raleigh’s population today of ~500k. Besides, this wouldn’t actually help unless we were able to force basically the entire Triangle to adopt similar policies, which is unrealistic.
Again, I’d love to stop sprawl, but protecting the artist formerly known as Glenwood CAC’s SFH zoning is only going to make housing in Raleigh’s core more expensive and force everyone everyone who lives in a dense configuration to continue to subsidize the cost of their utilities maintenance.
Terrible — it’s even worse now
Some of it is so-called “hipsturbia” walkable suburban developments. The red blob just south of I-87 is Wendell Falls, the one along 540 near Triangle Town Center is 5401 North. The red blob in the NW is the Alston district in Cary. Sweetwater in Apex is part of that huge blob. I mean, I agree with you on the merits that we need to do more ITB, but if sprawl is gonna happen I’m glad it’s developments like these.
There is definitely going to be high-frequency bus service running up and down ITB Glenwood, no matter what. It’s just a matter of building the density to take advantage of it.
There are some developments going in along this corridor, but there could/should be more. The R-4 zoned stretch between St. Mary’s and Oberlin is crazy. Expensive houses, to be sure, but the lots are big - ranging to over 2 acres. There’s OX-5 and OX-7 right next door and nobody’s melting. Why not there too?
As for buses, why not turn one lane in each direction into a busway? There already the bottleneck created by time-restricted street parking at Five Points; supposedly there’s supposed to be no parking there during rush hour - but particularly in the afternoon, it’s not always clear. Just make that bottleneck a round-the-clock thing.
To make up for businesses at Five Points who would lose parking, plan for a mixed use development where the Walgreens is, and have the city chip in to include some (probably underground) public parking.
North of Oberlin, or perhaps north of St. Mary’s, I could buy that Glenwood needs 2 car lanes in each direction, but there the corridor is mostly wide enough that it could to get a treatment similar to what they’re planning on New Bern between Raleigh Blvd and WakeMed.
Having the bus run along Glenwood is fine, but you have to have people who will actually ride it. Along that stretch of Glenwood, as is, I dare say that nobody living there will get on it.
I continue to be unconvinced that the most expensive SFH area in the city is a worthy target of onesy-twosy densification. It’s not going to make a difference, and it’s not responsible for what’s happening in the Triangle at large. The only thing that could make a real difference here is wiping out those homes en masse and redeveloping it completely differently, and that’s simply not going to happen. We are much better off taking our dense nodes and making them denser. We are much better making the immediate walkshed of transit stops along corridors such as Glenwood for TOD. For areas like the greater Glenwood, it’s about a surgical response IMO, and immediate walkshed is just that, immediate. If people have to walk more than 5 or 10 minutes from those stops, they aren’t going to use them. Even so, in an area like that Glenwood corridor, the land values are insane, and all dense development is going to be very pricey.
Regardless of what people might think, there is still so much untapped opportunity ITB that’s much lower hanging fruit than worrying about going to battle with people living in established neighborhoods of million dollar + homes in areas with pathetic walk scores, no natural grid, and a completely auto-oriented context.
Not saying ITB Glenwood is going to transform itself into North Hills, and the bulk of these neighborhoods may be forever untouchable - but I think upping the density facing Glenwood itself is almost certainly in the cards.
In fact, it’s been underway for decades, continues today, and appears to be picking up steam - mostly at the hands of Grubb Properties (our second most prolific hometown developer, after Kane of course.)
Lining Glenwood with midrise apartments from St Mary’s to the Beltline, like the ones already springing up across from Glenwood Village, or at Glenwood Place near Womens Center Drive, could ultimately add up to 10,000 units - more, even. Now, Is that Manhattan? No, certainly not - but it is more than a drop in the bucket for our city and could easily double (or more) the population of this district.
I guess what I’m saying is, we don’t need to “go after” these neighborhoods - but if developers want to build here (which they do, because they are!), we should do nothing to stand in their way. I don’t want to aggressively stick a finger in anybody’s eye; make sure lights from parking garages are properly screened, and - yeah, sure, vegetative buffers and all that- but “neighborhood character” should not be an argument against density, since (obviously) there is plenty of it already.
Agreed that the opportunity is along Glenwood itself. Unfortunately, even that has its challenges because there are still so many SFHs actually on Glenwood as part of Hayes Barton, Country Club Hills, Bloomsbury, etc. There are also plentiful established SFHs immediately behind a single layer of commercial development along Glenwood. The node where Oberlin meets Glenwood has seen some redevelopment, but it would take the re-imagination of Glenwood Village and some adjacent parcels to do anything really significant from a TOD perspective to make a stop active there. Five Points itself can see more development as well, but it too is “thin” in terms of available land outside of SFHs. That mostly commercial re-development where Glenwood meets the Beltline is already done, and it won’t see any real changes for at least a couple of decades. This basically leaves the former Beckanna apartments on the opposite side of the street as the most significant (yet isolated) opportunity for TOD along that corridor.
I mean, just follow along Glenwood in aerial on Google maps and it’s really quickly evident the challenges and limitations that the corridor faces.
I personally think that for most SFHs directly facing Glenwood, out past possibly St Mary’s, or certainly Oberlin, their days are numbered. There are some nice houses there, but Glenwood is a busy road and that both suppresses their value as single family houses and increases their value as potential mixed use development sites. Even mansions can eventually become tear downs when the value of the house is exceeded by the value of the land it sits on.
South of St Mary’s, the houses along Glenwood are close enough together to form a cohesive neighborhood and I could see an argument for preserving that, but somewhere between St Mary’s and Oberlin it gets spotty and inconsistent enough that, to me, it stops feeling like a neighborhood and starts feeling like just a road with some houses on it. Especially areas where there are large-ish houses on even larger lots (up to 2+ acres), like both sides of Glenwood just east of Oberlin (where the houses back up to a golf course on one side, and a school on the other) I could see large multifamily redevelopments getting approved right now.
I actually came here to say something about housing OTB, but to stay somewhat on topic, there’s quite a lot of onesie-twosie densification in the area between roughly Hill, Oakwood, Edenton, and say Linden or Swain. There’s little enough political power there and much of the housing isn’t owner-occupied, so it’s really a story about gentrification, but it’s one of the few areas ITB where I actually see subdivision permitting going on, turning SFHs on large-for-the-core lots into two to five townhomes. I think this trend is more likely to pick up steam and spread through the east side of downtown, and make a much bigger difference in ultimate density and population, than is any trend toward knocking down millionaire’s row homes on Glenwood. I think the housing that’s present will stay. Just my guess, and if I’m wrong I won’t complain since I don’t use that road much so won’t suffer the traffic.
Now then. That heatmap from a couple days ago.
North Zebulon has 3 or 4 good sized subdivisions on going with more already planned and you should see new streets appear in Imaps just about anytime. And it looks like that other blob is mostly Auburn Village. They look to be building about 100 new homes in about a year so far. Within the Garner city limits already annexed for that subdivision they could do quite a bit more this year.
“The only thing that could make a real difference here is wiping out those homes en masse and redeveloping it completely differently, and that’s simply not going to happen.”
Why not? Look at, say, the Gold Coast in Chicago. $10M mansions and skyscrapers with $150K condos, side by side. It’s not exactly rich and poor living in happy harmony, but plenty of middle-class people get to enjoy a choice location. And that’s only because densification was already underway in 1923, when zoning was adopted, and it mostly wasn’t downzoned to “protect” those mansions.
Why mansion owners deserve “protection” with city law is beyond me. And what are they “protected” for? Not from large buildings; you can build a truly leviathan palace on those R-2/R-4 lots. For instance, there’s one MLS listing at 3900 Lassiter Mill for a proposed $4M, 10,000 square foot palace. What harm would result from allowing exactly the same size of building, but as eight 3-BR flats instead? They’d each cost $500K, which is spendy, but right now the only houses available at that price in the area are mid-century ranchburger maintenance headaches.
Absolutely Orulz it would have started with the Grubb Ventures proposal out by the I-440 beltline leading into Glenwood ave, the Nimbys shot it down behind the scenes and Grubb is just building Apts instead of the sizable mixed use project he first orginally planned for the area, but I could have seen that starting it off and leading the growth your talking into Downtown along that corridor.
Interestingly, St Mary’s/Lassiter Mill is where the trolley left Glenwood and went up to Bloomsbury Park. The housing to that point was reflective of a trolley line’s influence. I imagine the existing median is also a result of deciding to put in where the tracks had been. That median provides for the cohesion. Beyond there its all the influence of the automobile and the built space, is as you note, decidedly different. The large estate lots and the country club probably still wield enough influence to prevent anything from changing but you never know.
Duplex for sale near 5 points. If this was for sale 2 years ago I would have jumped on it.
I considered it. It should at least break even on day 1, or turn a small profit, deferred maintenance notwithstanding.
190 New Apartments coming to the Raleigh Blvd area behind the Food Lion.
1031 N King Charles Rd. will be the location with 132 One-bedroom and 58 Two-bedroom units.
https://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2020/08/26/greenville-developer-plots-apartments.html
