Did you know we have local elections this year in Raleigh? With the primary election coming up soon on Tuesday, March 3, 2026, we all should be looking at the candidates that will be on our ballots, even sooner when you consider early voting is February 12-28.
With that said, I have planned an AMA with At-Large Candidate Clark Rinehart (@clarkrinehart) here on the Community. Clark will be available at 1pm on Thursday Jan 22nd so get your questions in now.
If you’re new to this website, please be sure to make an account (it’s free!) so that you can post questions and be a part of our community! Anyone in the public can read this thread, but you must be a signed-in member to participate.
Post questions ahead of time and Clark will answer them during the timeframe above.
As someone who’s been splitting time between Miami Beach and Downtown Raleigh for the last quarter of a century, I am curious about Clark as a candidate. I’ve read through his website, and there’s no doubt that many of his priorities are issues that concern many in Raleigh, and in particular this community. To that end, I have a few questions:
What steps should be prioritized to move Raleigh toward more car-light living in the near future? While aspirational goals require longer term commitment and implementation, what things should the city be doing now to move the ball forward?
What are the barriers to a “next generation approach”, and what steps need to be taken to ensure that it’s successful?
I think that everyone is aligned with public safety, but I also think that people are often in disagreement about what to do about it. What overall approach do you recommend, and what specific actions can the city quickly take to move us in that direction?
What lessons did you learn from living in Miami that can be leveraged by Raleigh (both good and bad)? In other words, what should Raleigh mimic and what should Raleigh avoid doing?
Do you accept that Raleigh is growing and will continue to grow whether you/the council continues to “allow” for it? And would you thus consider yourself “pro-growth?”
John! I hope you’re well and having a great Thursday so far. Thanks for the thoughtful questions.
I love that you have a Miami frame of reference. I moved here to attend Duke Divinity School in August 2009 at age 22, so I’ve been away from the 3-0-5 for a bit now. However, it is certainly a huge part of my life and culture. I was raised in the Little Haiti neighborhood and moved to Miami Springs later in my childhood.
So much here. Happy to share more detailed response, if helpful. In short, we have to address car storage/parking. Downtown is a neighborhood and should be the most walkable/car-light experience in Raleigh. It is no longer a static “Central Business District,” but needs to be experiential and our economic opportunity center for as many people as possible IMO. People who come downtown need to be able to find parking that they prefer and have access to appropriate data. I’ma actually building an aggregator app to do some of this work. Then, they need to be able to get around to points of interests without having to move that vehicle. For downtowners, we need to ensure that car dependency isn’t a constraint. We have removed parking minimums, which I thought was a great first step, and national benchmark for cities like ours. However, we have still prioritized cars too much in the urban core (think original boundaries of DTR, but my definition of “downtown” doesn’t match the MSD definitions) and built our original urban center like a suburb for the last 50 years or so. We need the city to be the city and the suburbs to be the suburbs vs allowing our urban center to be formed more and more like the suburbs.
People are simply not engaged in discussions around local issues. We don’t force conversation around data and nuance. We simply look at the “R” or “D” (even in non-partisan races) like mine and then type cast folks. I’ve made it a point to talk to young voters (high schoolers and college, in particular), but also to ask elementary school kids what they think are the problems in our city. Then, I’ve tried to make some of the proposed solutions clear, concise, and compelling and offer for them to push back. I want to hear their opinions. Do they like Austin? Or, do they want us to be more like Amsterdam? And why!
great question on boundaries. I think they extend beyond those initial barriers. For instance, I live on the 500 block of New Bern Avenue and technically outside of those barriers, but I experience the city on foot or bike almost everyday. I think we’re looking at most of the parts of the city inside of the belt line these days.
1000% here. Over policing is not the answer. Having police officers respond to mental health and social work concerns is not the answer. Nor is a “defund the police” strategy in my opinion. I have said that I want public safety and security to be a baseline standard and I think that requires additional investment. We are understaffed at RPD from the data that I have engaged with. We’ve doubled in size over the last 15-20 years and have roughly the same level of staffing. I want to follow the Chief’s recommendations. I want to see better tech usage, when legal and appropriate, and I also want strict accountability.
There are definitely different lived experiences across the broader ITB part of Raleigh. One can be in the heart of the city and truly experience a car-light lifestyle, but there are other parts of ITB that feel extremely suburban with 100% car dependency.
The MetroRail in Miami went nowhere when I was a kid. It was car dependent unless you live right downtown. You planned your whole day around traffic. Now the City of Miami and the Tri-County area have invested more in public transit and multi-modal options that connect to housing and jobs. I love the underline system that Miami is building…a more commuter-friendly and active greenway than ours. We also need to avoid the sprawl that Miami has faced. They have the water as a geographic boundary, but I want to protect our tree canopy as much as possible, so I’d like to see the more dense growth centers power our growth rather than sprawl power it. High level, but would be happy to say more.
My wife hates when I say this, but I truly love people. I love our city. My adopted city. And, I love our people. I have been so fortunate to be raised with Raleigh in some ways. I’ve seen the change and it’s not all good. I think most reasonable people see that folks are being displaced and sidelined. I wanted to run because I believe I bring a multi-disciplinary skills set to the Council table and I have multi-sector relationship (after living here for 17 years) that will allow me to hit the ground running and truly focus on getting work done vs just talking about the work or virtue signaling.
FWIW, the MetroMover in downtown Miami and in Brickell has seen its ridership explode due to more dense and substantial residential construction at the existing stations.
