Venice, Italy is a good example of a city basically becoming a theme park.
AI Overview
Raleigh, NC, has over 170 historic landmarks and a diverse range of historic districts. While a precise number of houses within these districts isn’t readily available, six areas are designated as Raleigh Historic Districts: Blount Street, Boylan Heights, Capitol Square, Moore Square, Oakwood, and Prince Hall.
Here’s a more detailed breakdown:
- Historic Districts: Raleigh has six areas designated as historic districts.
- Historic Landmarks: The city boasts over 170 historic landmarks.
- Historic Preservation: The Raleigh Historic Development Commission (RHDC)works to identify, preserve, protect, and promote Raleigh’s historic resources.
- Specific Districts:
- Historic Homes: WRAL.com reports that North Carolina has over 3,000 historic homes.
AI also tells us that there are about 100K single family homes in the city. So, we are below the 5%.
@john In areas like Oakwood, there are challenges such as a one-year penalty for demolishing a house and requirements for stricter building designs than the underlying zoning mandates. These factors are relevant when assessing Raleigh’s preservation even when the property isn’t officially designated under historical preservation.
Also, I would argue you can’t take the 100,000 “homes” in Raleigh as consideration for the 5% rule, but instead take the eligible properties for historic classification and only include them as the base calculation. So if Raleigh has 28,000 structures that are 100 years old, then 1,400 would be classified as “historic” and the other 26,600 could be redeveloped immediately should the owner choose to.
Agree, the bar should be higher than merely being an old house. It should have some sort of ‘higher’ value.
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If we only have 3000 historically designated homes in the entire state, then we surely don’t have an over-abundance of them just in Raleigh alone.
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@John It’s not just the historic preservation classification, it’s having an area like Historic Oakwood that has hundreds of houses that can’t easily/economically be redeveloped into high density. If you take the land area in Raleigh that carries ANY preservation component, that is certainly excessive, especially given how walkable places like Oakwood and Boylan Heights are.
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We can’t get UNDEVELOPED/CRAP lots in downtown proper rezoned for more density just because of proximity to “historic” single family neighborhoods on downtown’s edges, but go ahead and fight that fight. Frankly, I’d be happy to leave their @sses alone if they would stop sticking their noses into the business of densifying our actual downtown so that we could get some functional, robust, and walkable urban neighborhoods.
Let downtown do downtown things.
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I do tend to think that historic preservation can go too far and it turns your city into a museum. Charleston feels like that and I heard Santa Fe is there already.
For Raleigh, I agree with @John, let them have their historic protections, cause I enjoy those neighborhoods but outside of the boundaries, the rest of the city should be an economic engine that’s trying to allow people to live their lives.
There’s an argument I think that we are “weighed down” by allowing historic places to be protected. It’s worth it! But the tradeoff is that we allow more dev nearby.
If you squeeze a balloon in the middle, the two sides go up! 
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In the near future, transforming most of the single-family properties just outside the downtown core by constructing 3-story, 15,000-square-foot buildings (including office spaces, retail shops, apartments, etc.) could significantly reshape these areas. This manageable size not only allows for accelerated construction, but also enables diverse architectural designs and ensures their introduction blends more seamlessly into the surrounding neighborhood.
Long term NC/Raleigh needs zoning to allow 6-7 story buildings, single stair apartments, and mixed-use occupancy inside the belt line and then the city wouldn’t need 20 story towers. This would sufficiently provide enough volume for necessary density.
As @John mentions, there are undeveloped lots in downtown which creates for fragmented streetscape, giving most of the area an unfinished and incomplete feel.
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im no expert on this issue other than having gone to the charleston tennis touny and rode my bike around daniel island.. first..is all ‘housing’ the same for those in the market? are stacked boxes or a patch or grass, fencing and two or three stories of dense SFH sought after in the same way? and how much would keeping historical areas actually lower costs for..stacked boxes or a patch of grass and two stories, perhpas a bit farther out from town?
I hear you there but most of what I see during my walks on the Five Points area are 1 to 1 tear downs with a smaller house replaced by a bigger one, more expensive. No density increase.
I don’t really see how increasing density is being incentivized right now. There is missing middle but without combining multiple lots together I don’t feel it’s the right tool yet.
Most of the cities in Europe have height between 3 and 6 stories but usually no setbacks on the sides.
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Charleston is an interesting example to use for historic neighborhoods, because it shares geographic similarities with Manhattan - mainly being landlocked around the peninsula. Since it can’t build out and historic preservation prevents a lot of tall structures. A notable challenge to the city’s restrictions was Sergeant Jasper and the Bennett hotel which fought the Board of Architectural Review and Charleston’s historical preservation approach. The peninsula now sees properties selling for over $1,000/SF because of this scarcity.
Ideally you have a high degree of consistent development/activation in an urban area. When you mention “a bit farther” out of town, you start to require more transit which paves the way for sprawl.
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In some case lots are losing density. Here’s an example of a duplex that was recently torn down in favor of a large SFH:
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Also Daniel Island is not really what Leo was referring to (or what anyone means when they say “Charleston”). The entire island was undeveloped until the 90s, and was master developed after I-526 was built.
Charleston is not a great comparison point for a lot of places because the City kinda views its historic preservation ordinances as the goose that laid the golden egg, probably correctly. There’s a direct through-line from their preservation efforts and massive tourism economy. But yes it absolutely has pushed up a lack of supply and affordability.
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Charleston is also a high wind, very high seismic, and has generally poor soil properties. It’s not a hard limit to taller buildings like historic preservation/etc, but it makes a big difference $-wise to build up.
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And Hurricanes and prone to flooding.
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Yeah, in some cases. On aggregate, there’s far more density being added from tear downs. Some are SFHs, but plenty are SFHs on subdivided lots (going from 1 SFH to 2 SFHs on same property), duplexes, and townhouses. I haven’t seen an actual analysis on East Raleigh, but I take inventory daily and track every Zillow transaction. Not worried about new, isolated SFHs in East Raleigh because there’s just so much more evidence of density being added.
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