I was in Durham last weekend. While it’s nice, I won’t say it overshadows Raleigh in any way. I think it’s silly when people say Durham is doing something right and Raleigh isn’t. For every development building that’s happening in Durham, there’s equal/more happening in Raleigh. On the flip side, I won’t say just because Raleigh has more development that Durham is doing something wrong. Durham is smaller.
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Are you talking about all the 6-7 story buildings under construction? If so, there are three 27-30 story towers under construction or around the corner from starting construction, and also three towers in the 15-story range in the pipeline.
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No - far from ‘everyone’. I have been going back pretty much daily for close to a year now.
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I’ve been going in several times a week if not daily for the entire pandemic. And I’m a white collar worker, if that’s a thing.
It seems to me that we forget about all of the towers that are in Raleigh’s pipeline right now.
Simmer down. Raleigh will be fine.
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I work for a large engineering firm and we moved into an open concept office mid-pandemic and I’ve back in the office 3-4 days per week since June 2021 with the exception of 6 weeks in Jan/Feb when they asked us to stay home due to Delta. Looking around right now I see another 16 people around me. Offices aren’t dead.
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I may have overstated it a bit but I do think downtowns are far better off with residents as opposed to office workers.
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Agreed, but I like a mix. Unless the residents all WFH, it’s nice to have the lunchtime and happy hour stuff supported by workers. It makes it seem like a bustling city. The few times I’ve been downtown during weekdays (jury duty, etc) it’s amazing how different and busy it is compared with a Saturday afternoon.
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Let us not forget that 50 yrs ago Durham, esp DTD was in serious trouble. The death of tobacco and the old cigarette factories left it as an aging and decaying industrial town. They were forced to reinvent themselves, which they have, much to the benefit of the the greater metro, region and state.
Raleigh on the other hand was created for the state government, anchored by the state government, and is not going anywhere. The city never faced the existential crisis Durham (and Winston) faced.
Durham’s “cool” factor still surprises me, lol. If you only had gone to a few of the Bulls’ games in the old ball park from the 30’s, parking across the tracks, paying a dollar for tall boys of Schilitz malt . . .
Has DTD leap-frogged DTR? In some ways yes. I am just glad they found their way. But as @John pointed out, Raleigh will be just fine.
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Yeah I’d rather not frame it as either/or. I see them as highly complementary.
Office workers bring daytime/weekday activity. Residents drive evening activity. Ideally, tourists (whether from Garner or Goldsboro) would take the place of office workers on weekends.
It’s a lot easier for a restaurant or store to stay afloat when they have customers all day long, every day of the week.
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I enjoy both. Envy is a funny emotion. It’s relative…
In this discourse, geography plays a part in reality and perception.
Smaller footprint of downtown scale in Durm. Different historical real estate use, as others have referenced. Durham county has sorta one focus, outside of its RTP adjacency.
Sprawleigh is a real thing, both in how land use / the districts within DTR play out around the government entities and historical land use. Pan out and Wake county has always had lots of mouths to feed on the whole…It works more like the spokes on a wheel (or moreso like a whirlygig… 
) with all of the outlying 'burbs trying to place make on their own and, in truth, with RTP.
Still feel we all benefit from all things happening on the whole.
Better partnership would yield better cumulative result.
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Now that site prepping has been going on for a while, Hub RTP’s finally approaching groundbreaking time!
According to the TBJ, the 366-unit apartment tower is expected to formally break ground “in the coming months”, while the 130,000 sq.ft. “Horseshoe” office/retail space is expected to do so this October.
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Oh wow. There’s a webcam for this that I used to check out weekly, but basically all they ended up with was a lot of flat dirt and a new Wells Fargo. I assumed something happened and they never found anyone who wanted a building there. Great news if someone is finally happening!
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Just found that Richmond Hills Apartments (51 units) is going to be torn down to make way for 280 additional units https://cityofraleigh0drupal.blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net/drupal-prod/COR15/ASR-0052-2022.pdf
This is in addition to the 260 units for Clairmont at Crabtree and the senior facility Waltonwood (4 stories I believe).
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Wow, it will look just like NH, lol.
Seriously, how will people know where they are? So much new development is looking just like interstate exits.
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When you want to create dense, walkable mixed-use communities but your society is too dependent on cars, the closest thing you get to a transportation hub is a highway interchange. In that sense, I’m pretty sure people aren’t so geographically unaware that they can’t tell the difference between RTP and North Hills?
Besides, it’s all but certain that the RTF will plaster the whole Hub district with in-your-face RTP branding. Plus, unlike anywhere else in Raleigh (maybe except along Crabtree Creek in the future), there’s a creek flowing right through the middle of Hub RTP.
Case in point: Surface678, the landscape design studio that worked with RTP for this project, has a map and images showing exactly that:
EDIT: while I was looking up sources for this, I also found out more about what’s going on with the Frontier (the renovations of existing buildings between Hub RTP and the Boxyard). It turns out that developers are thinking about augmenting (and eventually replacing) the 200 building so that it looks out at the riverfront and acts as a transition between the Hub and Frontier districts! Compare this to the existing building, which is the building in the middle in solid white here:
The new building extension could make for a cool photo angle of Hub RTP and a nice landmark halfway between the two development clusters. If the day comes when the 200 building needs to be demolished and moved (since it is next to a floodplain), then this structure can still thrive on its own:
That idea was shown by designers at Evoke Studios -though I couldn’t tell from other sources how committed the RTF is to this idea.
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I don’t disagree - certainly folks will know they are in RTP - there was a fair amount of sarcasm in my statement. But this does seem to demonstrate increasing homogeneity of the buildings going up, and not just here. I guess we should be happy they aren’t all blue glass. The giant architectural Xerox machine strikes again!!
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I was about to give a shout-out to Evoke before your edit. Good friends of mine; some of the most talented designers around. They’ve got physical models of this in their office. No idea if it’s gotten the green light or not but I can check.
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That’s a really expensive deck
Lol… JK, super cool
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