Chatham wasn’t really the main street (the few businesses clustered around the railroad, eg the Page Walker) until after it was built… as US 1. So Cary’s main street was, from the start, a highway strip.
That contrasts with, say, Apex or Fuquay Springs, which had main streets before the highway age.
I spent much of the 1980s in the reference section of the Cary library, which is perhaps a testament that the downtown was not exactly thrilling then.
As much as we may still pine for 2 or 3 story vertical mixed use buildings on Main Street USA, or Salem Street Apex for that matter, they’re functionally impossible to build under modern zoning and building codes. We get 5-over-1s instead because that, not a 30’ wide 3-story building, is the minimum viable product for vertical mixed-use.
Chicago has hundreds of blocks like this – previously single family, but redeveloped in the 21st century to low-rise multifamily. It helps that its zoning is relatively generous, and that it has its own building code that doesn’t set up a huge distinction between 2 and 3 unit structures.
Yes, incremental densification is possible in American cities!
If you look at the rebirth of downtown Raleigh, this one-by-one strategy to renovate small existing structures has been largely paired with some small stand alone projects, as well as some larger multifamily buildings and single/partial block mixed use. The advent of Dillon & Smoky Hollow seem were initial outliers, and both are by Kane. While I don’t have anything against these larger projects per se, I do hope that we continue to get more individual projects that weave a more interesting downtown. I don’t really want a downtown filled with just Seaboard Stations and Smoky Hollows where developers provide what appears to be public spaces that they privately control.
Yes Concord has a historical district and as noted was once much larger than Cary. Concord is revitalizing theirs with lots of new housing. However Cary is building a new downtown which is fine and their new Downtown Cary Park is probably the best new urban park in the country. It is absolutely fantastic. Several people I know from Charlotte have been there and all left blown away. Cary is adding a lot of housing downtown which is great as their ability to sprawl into multiple counties is ending. The only way Cary can grow is to densify or some new growth to the west in Chatham County. Here are some photos I took on a cloudy morning a few weeks ago.
Few more from downtown Cary which is really adding housing and concentrating on their downtown now. That last parking garage will be wrapped with apartments.
I have a lot to learn here, but its clear this development pattern (decentralized, many actors making decisions) is very different from a Fenton style development and why the latter feels so Disney-esque and doesn’t seem to achieve critical mass. Much prefer what you described. On the other hand, it seems like zoning/planning has a role, having seen the effects of no planning.
Spot on - Fenton, North Hills, Seaboard Station, etc. are top-down products stemming from top-down planning. The web of requirements and constraints create a development environment where only large players with lots of capital, legal representation, and negotiating power can successfully navigate the process.
There’s a lot of interesting history to dig into to understand how we got here.
Staying on the topic of Cary for a moment as illustrative of this process. Last year they announced that they were willing to sell government properties adjacent to downtown to open up development and included conceptual drawings like this:
This seems like a great idea, but how do cities open up new areas for development without it turning into a “top down” big developer process? It seems like if they aren’t careful, then these downtown extensions will end up like North Hills (cosplay downtowns), which isn’t preferable to me and but more problematically because the whole thing becomes “too big to fail” instead of engaging in lots of little bets, any one of which could fail, allowing something better to arise.
Towns can act as developers – they can purchase land, lay out (and most importantly, pay for) infrastructure like streets and parks and parking lots, and resell smaller parcels. This was more common once upon a time, and used to be more of what “city planning” was about. Nowadays, because cities have much tighter budgets, they tend to just do zoning – which costs cities nothing and puts all of the development risk on the private sector, but also puts individual developers in control of planning.
The downtown Cary park site originally extended all the way south to Walnut Street; it includes the library, the parking garage, and the two-phase Walker development – the apartments wrapping around the north side of the garage and the second phase commercial building that hasn’t been built yet. The town built out the infrastructure, including the park and the parking garage, and then sold the Walker sites; the initial idea was to have several developers build small buildings, but the highest bidder was a group that took all the sites. (The town can’t undo the larger economic forces that make larger projects easier to finance at that scale.) Having buildings at the edge of the park creates activity, better frames both the park open space and key streets (Kildaire Farm and Walnut), shelters the park from street noise, and generates revenue – indeed, captures for the town some of the value that the park has generated.
IIRC, Knightdale also has some development parcels adjacent to its new downtown park which they were also looking to sell.
Meanwhile, Wake County’s biggest municipality has the biggest downtown park underway…
I love the fact that our local suburban municipalities now understand the importance in densifying their downtowns, in order to combat over-suburbanization.
We’re running out of local “blank slate” forested land and SFH developments will not provide our towns or state with enough housing. Massachusetts is a state that learned this the hard way.
That is some great additional detail; didn’t know it was common for cities to actually build (vs repair/maintain) the infrastructure.
One thing that stuck out was cities having less money now than in the past (I assume relative to income share). Given how much richer we are than in the past, this was a surprise. Do you happen to know how that funding was secured and when local (vs federal) tax rates/revenue decreased?
How awesome would this look on the N&O block? All we need to do is land a massive hedge fund company in DTR. @John will have something to watch going up on his trips, as if there is nothing else going up in Miami, lol.
Nice! That first one is right by the park and tall white townhomes. Fits in nicely with the Walker across the park too. The other 2 are on the outskirts of downtown, I guess. Happy to see density popping up in little pockets too.
I put these on a map in case anyone else wanted to visualize where they’re going.
