Raleigh’s Climate Action

Politics
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Citynerd put out a video this week about Project2025, which fills the space vacated by a rather empty Republican Party platform, and its impact to transit, sustainable development, etc. While this video might trigger some, I thought it was a thoughtful summary about how its implementation might/will provide a serious challenge to many things that this community finds important around issues that address climate action.

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I think this would be political suicide for any politician(s) who propose this, given the lack of existing alternative modes of travel (adequate transit & connected and widespread bike infrastructure). I think it would be better to follow in Austin’s footsteps by introducing parking maximums.

This would influence loan requirements from banks that still require a certain amount of parking to be included in developments.

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It would be viewed as anti business for sure, but if it only applied to lots with 100 spaces or more, it would pretty much only be taxing publicly traded REIT entities

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There’s clearly a local mindset that revolves around the car because, frankly, that’s how it’s always been in everyone’s collective local memory.
We have a chicken and egg sort of situation here regarding how we think about parking.
Getting over that hump requires retailers, services, and hospitality having confidence that their walk shed customer base makes up a substantial percentage of their business. Of course, we can’t have that confidence without proof, and we can’t have that proof without more feet on the sidewalks.
Given that Raleigh’s center struggles like other cities with more & more folks working hybrid or remote, we have to find ways to do a few things:

  1. Get more residential downtown to fill the sidewalks! This is something in play already and over the 20 + years that I’ve been downtown, it’s noticeable to me that it’s improving. It just needs to be accelerated.
  2. Raleigh needs to attract hybrid work centers for more and more businesses. We cannot rely on the expectation that large employers will have 1000 employees or more downtown every day. While their may be business entities that will eventually have their employees essentially return to the office daily, I think it would be unwise to expect that it will be every company.
  3. Raleigh needs to understand how people spend money locally today vs in years’ past. As someone who’s been splitting his time between Raleigh and the very walkable South Beach for more than 2 decades, I’ve watched the transition from mom&pop to more national retailers, and especially discount retailers. While folks might turn their noses up at this, it’s how people shop today. If I was told 20 years ago that South Beach would have 3 Ross stores, a Burlington Coat factory, TJ Maxx, Target, Marshall’s etc., I would have told you that you were crazy, yet here we are. Downtown cannot sustain on boutique retailers, expensive restaurants, high-end cocktail bars, etc, alone. These are not the sort of places that most Americans frequent daily or often enough to sustain them. Publix in Smoky Hollow is successful because it’s the sort of business that folks need in their daily lives, and it’s very encouraging to me to see folks walk their grocery’s home to the residences in the store’s walkshed. More of this please!
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This right here!!! I’m not a super fan of chains, but the OTT restaurants we have in DTR are places that I will NEVER visit myself. We need more of what folks actually consume regularly with more modest pricing and you will have a lot more customers walking through the door IMO.

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And those feet on the ground that busy establishments provide are the gift that keeps on giving. It’s the reason why small retailers in strip malls want to be co-located with busy grocers. For example, when I and others walk from our homes to Publix, we pass other retail/services storefronts. That sort of traffic is important to urban businesses. They don’t want to rent in places where nobody ever passes their business by foot, and they know that they can’t rely on folks driving to them (and likely paying to park), when that puts them in direct competition with the suburbs.

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Yep - High end retailers are fine. But need more every day type businesses.

Corner deli / bodega
Convenience stores
Small Target like the one on Hillsborough
Pharmacy
Dry cleaner
etc.

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I almost completely agree with you. I work as a remediation contractor for NCDEQ cleaning up current/former drycleaning sites (a few have been discussed at length on this forum :wink: ) and I would NEVER recommend to open a DC business around where people live. Just not good practice. Mitigating vapor intrusion and air quality issues keeps us very busy, not to mention the soil and groundwater contamination they cause. Besides, with folks WFH and fewer and fewer going to regular church services, who uses drycleaners these days?

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Well, I do, but more of a once a month thing than a weekly one to be sure.

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What I’m about to say is probably a little less for this thread and more towards the wild ideas for Raleigh, but for shopping I was hoping that the Urban Outfitters was going to lead to more national retailers downtown. With the new train station, I was hoping the RUS Bus station going to be was actually going to be a shopping center similar. This was going to remind me of the train station in Hamburg where there’s shopping right there once you get off the train. Other shopping options such as the Oculus in NYC (although smaller), The Fulton Center, or something similar. This would give an active place where people could travel downtown via the train, do some shopping, and then head back out. It would be ideal long term when commuter rail would come in. Even an expansion to the train station to where there would be shops similar to Union Station in DC.

Turning the Nexus block into a shopping center or I guess just east of Smoky Hollow would be other options.

City Center DC is an example of an outdoor shopping Mall. M Street is another good shopping district.

We’re just really missing shopping for normal people.

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When that Urban Outfitters opened, I rolled my eyes. It was not because they were downtown and part of the Dillon project, I was because it was “banished” to the outside corner of the action. Urban Outfitters needed to be adjacent or across the street from Weaver Street Market to form the nucleus of a shopping district near the food hall.

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I can’t even remember the last time that I used a dry cleaner.
That said, it’s easy to imagine a business that offered laundry, tailoring, AND dry cleaning, but the dry cleaning was sent to a central location away from residential exposure.