For the life of me, I don’t understand why this conversation has an either/or narrative attached to it. Why can’t we both provide housing for seniors and have a signature historic hotel downtown associated with our city’s namesake?
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What if COR or Wake County built a shiny new ADA compliant residential building on a portion of the (mostly parking) block where Enterprise is currently located. The residents will get nice new digs a block over from their current location and the City can get its namesake hotel back for the one-off highrollers who visit approximately once a decade. 
I know it is all privately owned. Can you say #EminentDomain? haha
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one shouldn’t be a requirement for the other…but it seems to be with Raleigh.
I don’t want to hold myself out as an expert on eminent domain law (even though I am an attorney and have written about eminent domain cases a lot for my job), but I don’t believe that the city’s limited powers of eminent domain would allow it to repossess the building and turn it into a hotel (at least not anything like what’s being contemplated here), even if that were something the city council would ever contemplate in a million years, which obviously it wouldn’t.
As it stands, the building is privately owned (and very recently purchased) by Capital Realty Group, and as best as anyone can tell, they’re not looking to sell it and they have zero interest in converting it into a swanky hotel. Unless or until something in that sentence changes, then we’re done here and there’s not really anything to discuss in terms of what to “do” with this building.
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Seems I recall just a year or so back there was a proposal to turn it back into hotel and there was a huge uproar over kicking out the old folks.
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Where is that Sarcasm Font button??? Folks, we are getting way to serious here.
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That was my impression as well. That due to public and political pressure they agreed to continue with affordable housing. At the time it seemed like it was a temporary solution, and that as the downtown core continues to grow and increase in value they can sit on it.
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The developer that owns the building is a low income developer.
It didn’t hurt that the former City Council agreed to give them $3MM/year in taxpayer money to “keep it subsidized housing”…look it up if you don’t believe me.
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A complete waste of a beautiful property.
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WRAL posted an article about a Speakeasy underneath the Sir Walter.
Just another reason to dislike what is currently happening to the Sir Walter.
Also with pictures like this of the lobby, incredible amounts of lost potential.
The article also says someone will live stream the inside of the speakeasy today at 11:45.
I’ll try and post that once its available.
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It’s a damn shame that we can’t find a way to save this building as a grand hotel and still provide for the need it’s being used for today.
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Stop accepting new residents and the issue will fix itself in a few years. I don’t ever want to kick old people out of their homes (if they want to remain there; I don’t know if many of them actually want to be downtown or not.) But there’s no need to keep adding new residents other than the short term profits of the owner.
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So the owner should just let the occupancy rate dwindle down to 0?
If the city had will to restore the hotel, seems that tourism tax funds could begin renovating a portion of the hotel while letting residents live on other floors
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Ideally (for me), yes!
LOL…
I mean it would have to take some creativity, like a developer who wants to convert it and subsidize the current owner as things wind down, etc. I don’t really know how this would work. Dare to dream tho
I toured this space a few years ago with 2 guys who were in talks of updating it and reopening it. One is a local architect we all know and another is a longtime business owner downtown . Deal fell apart before it got too far along.
Could have been awesome.
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Even Wilson can get a developer to restore their ‘grand hotel’…WTH?! Raleigh can’t seem to restore a classic building and return it to its former glory…nor can we get a freaking stadium downtown. Even Wilson has a downtown baseball park…
https://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2021/11/28/cherry-hotel-wilson-redevelopment.html
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Where? Fleming Stadium is the closest I’m aware of but I’d hardly consider that downtown…
It’s the City of Raleigh that wanted to keep Sir Walter as affordable housing.
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