Raleigh never had serious interest in annexing the far-north subdivisions in the Falls Lake watershed. The ultra-low density requirements up there, required for environmental protection, are too expensive and too distant for the City to serve. The abolition (practically speaking) of involuntary annexation didn’t make a difference there.
Somewhere I remember seeing that contrary to common opinion, much of the City’s apartment stock is actually OTB. It’s a myth that 27609, 12, 13, 15,and 16 are all single-family dwellings. 27614 is, but that’s watershed.
Thanks for the current number. It seems to be one of the hardest numbers to find in the city, and nobody seems to be updating Raleigh’s Wiki page in the same way that Charlotte’s gets updated. At just under 147 m2, the land area of Raleigh hasn’t significantly changed since 2010 like it did in decades past. While I realize that land gobbling can’t go on ad infinitum in the context of competing municipalities, I have to believe that the new law slowed it even further.
I completely understand about the NW Raleigh watershed and the highly unlikelihood of annexation, especially north of 540, but that’s not the area that I was referencing as an example. I was talking about the areas around Ray Rd/Leesville Rd, south of Strickland and west of Creedmoor. I also understand that developers can chip along the edges of these areas, especially along major corridors, to assemble and redevelop chunks of property. However, that will take decades at best, if ever, to fully integrate into the city.
The only trouble with this logic is that it ignores the outsized land area and infrastructure that OTB contains, that will also need maintenance and overhaul as it ages.
The whole point of the discussion for encouraging DT development is that it’s financially more productive for the city. Nobody is trying to take away your suburbs, or vilify them for existing. We are just trying to point to mechanisms/developments/policies/etc. that will allow them to be sustained over time without accelerated tax rates that can bury future homeowners.
Looking at it from a suburban perspective, it’s also more financially productive for the city when development or redevelopment is built more densely in suburbs, since there’s more tax revenue collected per acre. To a lesser extent tear-downs, replaced by more expensive houses on the same property, also increase the tax base, but it’s more incremental and less impactful.
Aside from donut holes, each of which has a story, there isn’t much space between 540 and 440 that the City doesn’t already have… a handful of subdivisions: the northern half of Stonehenge, Brennan Station, Wildwood, Bridgewater, Springdale, etc. You’re probably talking 15,000 people, not a significant number relative to the City’s population. These areas were built with private community water systems to less strict Wake County codes (they pre-dated expansion of the ETJ). I suspect that’s why the City never wanted to annex them involuntarily when it was still politically possible. In other words, the City defended against the very worries that you identify.
I don’t like the donut holes and they shouldn’t have been allowed to happen, but little can be done about them now unless the property owners seek voluntary annexation.
OTB Raleigh. at least northside, is little different from Cary. I don’t see that Cary is having financial difficulties serving its population and maintaining its infrastructure, nor does anyone believe that Cary will have such financial difficulties anytime within 50 years. After 2070, who knows but that’s true for Raleigh as well. I say again, if Raleigh really thinks that OTB will be a millstone around its neck, then deannex it. The likely result is that those OTB subdivisions will become part of Cary, which then becomes the most populous city in Wake County.
When suburban infrastructure ages at the same time, as will be the case with suburbs that exploded with growth in a short period of time, you can bet your life that they will have a financial problem on their hands. Why else do you think that cities like Cary plan for and pursue corporate campuses and other high tax revenue projects? Cary is too “new” to have experienced these issues.
If you think Cary is too new, take Fairfax County in northern Virginia; Reston, Herndon, etc are 15-20 years farther along than Cary, but there’s no sign of rot or financial distress there. Or look at older suburban cities near Boston, Chicago, LA, SF, Toronto, etc. If you have to push the timeframe out to 50+ years to prove your point, you’re just speculating. There’s little or no hard evidence that suburban cities hit a wall financially so long as the inner city they’re adjacent to remains healthy. Sure, there are suburban cities in Michigan and Ohio in deep distress, but so are Detroit and Cleveland.
Meanwhile, Cary isn’t stupid. Of course broadening their tax base is important, and it also caters to people who don’t want to drive long distances to work. Neither is Raleigh, which could have refused rezoning for the office complexes at Brier Creek (for example) even though they are physically closer to downtown Durham than downtown Raleigh. Raleigh has been happily green-lighting projects all over OTB. Indeed, Raleigh managed to move much of its low-income public housing out of ITB into OTB, specifically northeast Raleigh… but that’s an argument for another day.
Suburban areas within a city like Raleigh have a built-in advantage because they have an in-place mechanism to manage future financial imbalance: their cores.
We can choose to ignore the experts on this issue or we can listen to them. I choose to listen to them.
This is an interesting conversation that’s admittedly out of my depth. I think the comparison with Rendon is especially interesting. I think the eastern gateway in Cary and the general east side including SAS, Cary Towne Center, will eventually go taller like Rendon Town Center. I’d love to see the BRT spur development and at some point see some kind of fixed-path transit (either light rail or some future transit vehicle when I’m retired 50 years from now). Suburbs can actually be pretty dense, too. If Cary had the same density as Herndon, Va, it would be close to 350k people. (Raleigh, by comparison, would be over 800k).
Yes, we listen to experts or not. I choose to discriminate between experts that make sense and experts that don’t. Global warming experts, yes. Peak oil experts (remember them?), no. History is full of experts whose predictions were wrong, if not in an absolute sense, then in timing.
Anyway, the free market and the political apparatus (which Raleigh ITB doesn’t really control) will ultimately determine the outcome of future development in the Triangle and the finances of its local governments. Meanwhile we wait to see if Google HQ2 goes center-city (Atlanta’s railroad gulch) or not (Arlington and Crystal City, Va). If urbanists were completely persuasive, Arlington wouldn’t even be in the running.
I don’t understand this assertion. Crystal City is directly across the river from DC and within the original boundary. It’s closer to the Capital than Tribeca is to Central Park, and has two nearby Metro stops, a commuter rail stop and a BRT line. Seems pretty urban to me. I consider myself an urbanist and I think a site like this would make most urbanists pretty happy. It has density, transit, proximity. Is Long Island City suburban? Is Midtown Atlanta? Is Oakland?
DC had its own offer for HQ2 that would have been truly urban. Apparently it fell out of favor a while ago. I know Arlington and Crystal City pretty well from business travel… intermediate between North Hills here and Buckhead in Atlanta. Arlington still has lots of single-family suburban homes (although most were built in the 1940s and 1950s on smaller lots) and is traffic-choked despite WMATA. It’s a quirk of history that the mammoth Potomac railroad yard was ripe for redevelopment. Building height is still limited near the airport. As you go into Fairfax County the density rapidly drops, until you reach 495.
It is interesting to note that Raleigh and Cary both have more density than Charlotte. (Raleigh is ranked 3rd and Cary is 7th and Charlotte is 9th in North Carolina).
The reason that Charlotte is at 9th is due to the annexation of all the land? This will be a benefit to them over the long haul as it allows for that much more tax base and then will climb the latter of density…imo
Agreed. LA is kind of famously car-centric, but it’s probably a lot more dense than people realize (>8k/square mile). All the large cities in NC will get denser over time. There are several big projects in CLT that are adding lots of SFH in higher densities than traditional patterns, similar to 5401 North in Raleigh.
LA is indeed the most densely populated metro in the nation. While it has its urban pockets and gracious suburban areas, it’s mostly packed-in, low rise, car dependent development for seemingly forever. It’s land area is highly financially productive since there’s a lot of tax value in each square mile.
That said, it’s a model that the Triangle can’t replicate if it wanted to (as if it would even want to!), without starting over. Some of the newest suburban SFH development in the Triangle is moving in that direction twith lots now being measured by their square footage, instead of fragments of an acre. When I was a kid in California, our 1960s era single family home lot measured 6,000 s.f. When we moved to NC, it was measured as 1/3 acre. Infill developments ITB are seeing more of these small lots that are in the 5-6000 s.f. range, and even the suburban areas are going to much tinier lots as land becomes more scarce and expensive. Still, it won’t undo the hundreds of square miles that are already developed in a much more gracious model.
Here is a snip-it from a blog that I have followed for a long time. The author moved from NYC to Raleigh, then back to NYC less than two years after living in Raleigh. In his blog, I think he pretty much nails it. Just wonder how many other “transplants” feel the same way and end up leaving.
"Raleigh is a “city,” but it isn’t a particularly centralized one. The so-called downtown is spread over several separate areas and, as a result, it isn’t much of an actual downtown. The walk-ability factor is low, and after close to a decade of living without a car, it wasn’t a lot of fun suddenly having to drive everywhere . To the grocery store, to the pharmacy, to the library, to daycare, to restaurants, to the wine store, to the beer store, to bars… everywhere.
Despite my concerns, the culture wasn’t really an issue. The Triangle (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill) is a pretty liberal area, with a lot of like-minded people, and a lot of transplants from the northeast. It even has its own hipsters! It wasn’t the southern-ness of the area that ended up being the problem; it was the suburban -ness." - Dad and Buried
Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Org is updating the plan for the Northeast part of Wake County. Here is a website about the activity including an interactive map and a survey. Take a look, especially if you live or travel in the area - place points on the interactive map and take the survey to give them feedback about how the area should develop.
NEAS Update | Northeast Area Study Update | United States
okay…