TBJ posted an article about Stanley Martin building a similar development in North Raleigh to the Grey.
Anyways at the bottom of the article they give an update on The Grey :
" In Raleigh, Stanley Martin Homes continues to pursue approval for its plans for The Grey, calling for 10 buildings totaling 100 condominiums with eight to 14 units per building."
Please tell me this project hasn’t started because our City Council wont give them approval for construction.
To be fair, they keep using that rendering from their project in Richmond. I understand its maybe just to give a sense of the buildings, but probably hard for the city to give approval with fake information.
I assume this is that project.
Weird site plan.
Ok that is ugly as sin. Looks almost Soviet.
Aesthetics aside, what drives me crazy about it is that what should be the “alley” is a spacious car-oriented courtyard.
Meanwhile, the “front” of the townhomes, where they’ve spent all the money on materials, is this narrow path that seems like it will never actually get use.
It’s basically a “slot home” configuration, with the buildings not really having a street presence. Their butt ends face Main St. and are across from vacant land that I can only imagine will be developed some day in the near future.
This is why I feel like the big-name out of state builders are often a mixed bag. The care of the product’s impact often doesn’t extend beyond the immediate site… Hopefully they bring a more thoughtful approach to Raleigh.
We should crowd source a small development with ideas and funding from the message board. Would be interesting to see what that could end up creating.
The site plan for the Raleigh development seems much better, the buildings are fronted on Blount and Person, and the courtyard that the mid-block units face seems large enough to be a useful public space. 30 units/acre is a little lower than I’d like to see in this area but not bad overall. The only major improvement I would like to see is to have the end units do more to engage with the side streets.
Do you think the larger car oriented side was designed for trash truck maneuverability? I see a lot of waste bins back there and unfortunately those things need a decent amount of room.
That’s possible, but I also feel like trucks probably wouldn’t even turn into this nook because it would still be pretty hard to make a three-point turn? Could be wrong, but I imagine they’d just stop at the intersection and grab all the bins. And some of the alleys in the development are more reasonably sized.
In any case, I wish they’d just rotated the street orientation and designed these like a true alley where trucks can pass through. Modern development seems to be so scared of creating an actual connective grid and loves to limit access to residential areas as much as possible.
Yeah, I’ll never understand that. I mean I get you don’t want people just flying down these tiny alleys, but if you don’t connect then you just end up hamstringing yourself in the future it seems.
Yea the Raleigh site plan looks a lot better. The alleyway building-to-building distance = 56’, the front courtyard building-to-building distance = 69’
No, it’s so that there’s a driveway that can fit a second car between the garage and the alley. These are some pretty big units (the upper is ~2400 sq ft) so two-car households are to be expected. The single-car garages are pretty tight, especially if people have big cars - the garage is 12’ wide, since the pair fit into a 24’ wide x 40’ deep footprint. (By comparison, most of the million-dollar two-car-garage new townhouses are 20’ x 40’.)
Rowhouses tend to be shallow, since they don’t have side windows. That often means a pretty awkward fit in places where house lots are 100’+ deep. And anything that’s designed car-first, from the garage up - whether it’s a mall, a SFH, or a townhouse - is almost guaranteed to look awkward to human eyes!
Slot homes done poorly are the worst!
Wouldn’t it be nice to extend the downtown grid pattern south. Maybe remove MLK BLVD has a highway and instead just make parts of it into city streets. The Western/HWY70 cloverleaf can just be a 4 way intersection. Given that there’s stop lights already far up and down the highway why does this exchange need to exist unless it was designed to redline neighborhoods in the past.
I’ve played around with a couple different ideas for south of downtown. (Edit to add link to the post in Downtown Gateway Downtown Gateway - #188 by atl_transplant) Overall yes this is a good idea. Only nit pick as an engineer would be that the MLK Saunders intersection would need to be a 90 degree angle.
I agree, it is weirdly over designed.
I like how this idea redevelops Walnut Terrace into something befitting its downtown location…though I know that this is a pipe dream. I won’t live to see the day where that redevelopment happens.
I drove by the Grey site today and appears that Stanley Martin has installed relatively large banners on all 4 corners of the site fence. Might not mean much, but could indicate some movement at this site since they are marketing it.
Came by to post same thing.
Glad to see this is still moving along
