Woah that’s very phallic. Where do you put the batteries?
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Miami is doing something with a very similar shape. Not sure what’s driving this boot shape trend?
http://skyrisemiami.com/
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Downtown Greensboro getting a bowling alley, new performing arts center, new minor league baseball stadium.
What would it take for downtown Raleigh to get a freaking entertainment option that isn’t food or drinks?
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Raleigh did just approve the zoning for the stadium. Let’s not forget that we have a performing arts center, 2 top tier museums downtown, Red Hat Amphitheater, the convention center which has pulled in some good events. I will admit that I would prefer we had Broadway plays coming here vs. going to Durham. Greensboro is lucky in getting that as well.
Dorothea Dix is going to take some time, but there are plenty of things in the pipeline.
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If Raleigh had been assertive, there’s every reason to believe that we could have had those broadway shows. The city sat on its hands, played nice, and just watched Durham take it away from them. Now, to make matters worse, Durham fills up that center with lots of Wake County patrons. Durham likes to act like they don’t need Raleigh, but there’s zero chance that Durham would’ve found a way to justify that performing arts center without using Wake’s population numbers.
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Here in north/central/east Alabama the hot development is a movie plex/bowling alley/arcade with food. One in Pell City, another going up down the road from me in Oxford. While they are both suburbanish, I’d think this could work in the right development in DTR.
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Agreed that we need entertainment options like this! I’d love for a bowling alley downtown. It’s actually why I’ve started looking into opening an entertainment space idea that I have. I’ve been exploring options to open up a rec hall / bar concept nearby in some of the cheaper warehouses spaces close to downtown.
Think large warehouse with full bar, food, live entertainment, and games. Games like corn hole, ping pong tables, bocce, dodgeball, billiards, fowling (look it up, super fun), etc. Stage for DJ or band. Lots of TVs for optimum sports watching. Potentially use part of the warehouse area to host 6-8 food trucks as well!
If anyone is looking for a fun place to invest into, let’s chat!
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That sounds great, all the power to you! Would love to have something like that downtown. I once went to a shuffleboard hall and bar in Brooklyn that was super popping. I think there was a 2-hour wait to get a shuffleboard, but in the meantime there was billiards, drinks, and foosball.
I’ve said on here before, the first brewery around here to build a legit outdoor stage area with all the infrastructure to bring in small to medium-sized touring bands would crush the live music scene.
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If I were Niall Hanley, I’d be looking at that church space next door for expanding to add a bowling/cocktail concept to the complex.
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On the topic of ‘softening density’ policies in DTR adjacent neighborhoods to create missing middle housing, how about more of this kind of thing…?
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yikes, i had no idea what all went down in Richmond. What a lost opportunity for their downtown.
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I ran into this article about Charlotte’s recent progress in becoming a better tech hub (ever since Raleigh beat them out as an Amazon HQ2 finalist).
But as I started reading their work and their to-do list, I realized Charlotte is doing some great things that I think Raleigh could also improve. A regional dashboard to keep an eye on how many jobs we create/recruit in the Triangle (and each city in it), better talent retention and meaningful business-local partnerships, capital to fund early-stage startups,… I don’t know about y’all, but I wish Raleigh had more of those perks.
Click here if you want to see other 'nice-to-have' lists people made in the past.
Friendly reminder: we have a separate thread to fawn over how Raleigh is currently getting attention. I’m here to look beyond the hype, talk about constructive criticism, and see how we could get even more of those headlines.
For starters, there’s a state-level report from 2016 at:
You could also read the original report or read the key takeaways of their most recent report.
NC State also recently made strategic task forces. They came up with ideas to re-envision education as a lifelong process, get their heads out of the sand and make the most out of external partnerships, and pushing State’s brand to thee world more thoroughly.
Want to look back in time? The Harvard Business School has a 2001 case study (see PDF page 134; print page 105) that looked at the Triangle as a model of regional high-tech innovation. Here’s a figure that summarizes key observations back then:
Would you rather look at things at the human and social level? Equity and growth was examined systematically by the University of Souther California back in 2015.
Something more recent? Here’s a 2020 retrospective about the HQ2 pageantry on TBJ.
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Nashville got a major Amazon campus out of the HQ2 thing and it’s clearly not a tech city. I don’t think Charlotte’s issues was due to workforce. Nashville is currently a hip “it” city and that’s what tech companies want–to be hip, cool companies to work for. That means Austin, Nashville, in some ways NOVA area.
“We got universities!” is clearly not an effective way to get these halo projects but at least it works for all these minor job wins that keep rolling in.
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I don’t know about whether Charlotte’s workforce problems are true, but I agree that the whole “we got universities!!” thing doesn’t really click for anyone outside of academia and tech transfer.
With that said, though, I think the tech reputation of a city is less important compared to the tangible benefits a city actually has to offer. “Coolness factors” help for marketing, sure. But if I was a corporate bigwig, I would think about the headlines and buzz only after I look at the practical facts that directly affect my business. After all, y’know, that’s how we’d make money.
It's funny that you bring up Nashville, though... (Click here for more!)
…because I think Nashville is the perfect counterexample to your point.
Nashville’s new Amazon facility isn’t really a tech headquarters, so I think it’s misleading to call it that. Their “Center for Operational Excellence” is really a control center for their retail operations, so more of their job openings are related to retail and operations than computer science. So I think whether Nashville is a “tech city” is a moot point.
In that context, I think Nashville would be more promising than Raleigh with things like Vanderbilt’s strengths in IT/systems engineering, or peer headquarters for transport-related companies like Nissan and Bridgestone. This local article and this article by TBJ’s sister outlet covers this in more detail, though we obviously have the benefit of hindsight.
What does this all mean? I think the idea of “tech hubs attracting tech jobs” gets over-simplistic and stops making sense once you zoom in from a national level to a person/company-level. It’s a real emergent behavior, sure, but I don’t think the same rules apply in individual cases. This is why my original post was talking about regional approaches and not about the decisions oof any individual company.
Going back to your comment about “we got universities!”, though. That’s clearly meant to recruit big projects (since it shows that we have local talent who could become future employees). Do you think that matters? …or are we just pitching that with the wrong words?
Business Insider: Amazon housing fund: $2 billion for 20,000 affordable homes - Business Insider.
Raleigh gets nothing.
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It’s like dating. You can match with two people that love cars but one is more attractive. You’re going to be more interested in the one that is more attractive.
Raleigh and most cities in NC are better than cities in other states. I saw a graphic recently of the amount of affordable housing units in each state and NC is among the states with the highest amount of units.
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Where was this graphic? I’m having a hard time finding the graphic you’re talking about (and that’s making me wonder if they were measuring “affordability” in a weird way).
It was in one of the chats possibly the affordable housing one