If this site, which again is 2 miles from the Capitol, is not appropriate for townhouses, then I’ve got some really bad news for you about where we build townhouses around here:
What we’re getting – and what you’re inadvertently advocating – is a bunch of “oh shoot, we forgot to build densely” townhouses out in sprawl. High housing demand and the token anti-sprawl laws we have crash against closer-in subdivisions that are gated off from additional density, and so we get the worst of all worlds: high-density exurbs surrounding low-density suburbs. The path out of this is to legalize high density closer in, like in Hayes Barton, one of Raleigh’s closest-in suburbs.
7 DUA density is absolutely appropriate everywhere ITB. This site has a substantially higher Walk Score (41) than the Raleigh average (31) and substantially higher than neighborhoods that are zoned for TOD (e.g., King Charles in the east).
A glance at Raleigh’s zoning map (I put a 
on the site) shows that:
- Hayes Barton’s pale-yellow R-4 sticks out like a sore thumb for its low-density, exclusionary zoning – and again, what is the moral argument in favor of retaining laws that exclude?
- Hayes Barton isn’t just surrounded by bright-yellow R-6 zoning (i.e., 6 DUA, about as dense as these townhouses), there’s even spot-zoned R-6 within Hayes Barton.
- Pretty much every neighborhood this close to dark-red downtown is the ochre-yellow R-10, which has always allowed townhouses.
- Therefore, it’s not that the townhouses are “out of character” with the big SFHs, it’s the big SFHs that are out of character with everything else around them.
The whole point of the MMH text change is that the place for townhouses is not just in a one-block strip right behind a few corridors (and this site is one big block off Wade Ave) – it’s everywhere. Our housing needs are far too immense to say that only 1% of land is special enough for houses to touch; that approach is what led us into this affordability crisis in the first place.
Let’s look at some other very desirable places that were largely built before zoning. You’re familiar with Miami Beach:
North Beach is zoned the way you’re suggesting, with parallel stripes of high-rise, mid-rise, and single-family. But it’s an awful place. The special part of Miami Beach is South Beach, where slightly higher-density mixed-use strips are backed by multiple blocks of low-rise, high-density multifamily.
Here’s a density map of Newton Centre, Mass., median home price $1.9M, town drive-to-work mode share of 60%, and where hundreds of kids bike to school:
Density in historic communities does not neatly and linearly fall away from the station. It’s patchy and random, just like real life.
You’ve set up a chicken/egg problem here: when old Rex is redeveloped, Williamson suddenly becomes even more appropriate for houses whose walls happen to touch. But why do we have to wait until then? Why wait generations for multiple cycles of redevelopment, when we can start laying the framework now?