Don’t cities like Atlanta, Houston, and Los Angeles all have outer-ring suburban residential high rises?
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There haven’t been 1,200 units added from 3 buildings in 3 years, especially when just 150 feet away are single-family homes on 1/4-acre lots. Disregard the high-rise component, it’s simply an excessive number of units for such a small area. Development happens incrementally because you might have 36 months of lease up at 1 new lease a day!
In Nashville, they added around 600 units to the Metrocenter area (much larger neighborhood), and concessions are still being offered at 3 months of free rent.
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Excessive, maybe so, but I applaud Kane and son for starting the process of densifying the areas connecting Downtown to Dix Park. Also, this SFH neighborhood will not look the same 5 years from now. I expect at least 3 non-Kane related developments to be proposed in this neighborhood, but of course that’s my opinion.
Edit: I do hope that we see affordable housing developments pop-up in this immediate area to get the kind of mixed-income make-up needed to curb displacement.
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No doubt ambitious, I just hope it works out, but it’s an extremely risky move. There are only so many capital groups that can weather the situation if projections don’t pan out. I previously covered what kind of rents they’ll need, and it’s a huge quantity of renters - for context, there are a little over 9,000 housing units in downtown Raleigh, and this development alone is adding over 10% of the existing supply. What happens if it doesn’t fill up as expected, say averaging only 20 units per month and getting 85% of the underwritten rent?
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They are betting on a “flight to quality”. Dix Park is a hell of an amenity, and I’m betting it works out. They will initially probably poach quite a few of their renters from those 9,000 other downtown units, as their leases run out. This will have the likely effect of driving down rents elsewhere downtown but I don’t expect it to be a big drop.
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All new apartment construction helps stabilize and even bring down prices for everyone. As the Weld leases up it will steal some tenants from other places making those complexes more agressive in getting new tenants. New supply is good for the market now I think this will take some time to lease up as it is a lot of apartments to hit the market at once. But Raleigh is growing and there will not really be any new completions of high rise apartments for a while in Raleigh. None have recently started either. So I think there will be some good move in deals with free rent with certain lease terms to get it going there but in the end I think it will be successful especially looking out a few years.
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Anyone have a refresher on the render/proposal for Phase 2 (or is it 3)?
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First 2 buildings were Phase 1. This third building is Phase 2.
There’s room for 1 more building as Phase 3, roughly massed in the background here:
Also to add to the upcoming density are 2 more mid-rise buildings on the Rockaway side of the street.
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If they could get some ground floor action going on in their retail spaces, this could turn out to be a nice little district. Speaking of which, is there much retail at that ground level of phase 1? I don’t remember.
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Retail facing the park seems like it should be a no brainer… there will (hopefully) be scores of people across from there on foot in the park, especially with the Gipson play area there. A cafe or brewery or whatever facing the park seems like it would be a big draw. I wonder why they didn’t do this and put the retail facing Hammell instead? Maybe the traffic on Lake Wheeler is seen as a disadvantage?
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Thank you, yes I hate that they’re seemingly doing all inward-facing retail, creating - YET AGAIN - another isolated, insular development and NOT integrating into the existing city fabric as any downtown/adjacent development should. Seriously, WHAT is the deal with this stuff???
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It’s about making the place appealing (marketable) to tenants, not improving the streetscape and connectivity of our downtown. They’re looking after their bottom line.
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I would think “improving the streetscape and connectivity of our* (aka now their) downtown” would be, you know, part of what makes a new downtown residential development appealing??? lmao
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Yeah but that would require bigger, long-term thinking. These developers are looking at short term gains.
And maybe I’m completely wrong. But it just feels like that, as we see this pattern repeated again and again.
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Seems like it will connect better with this district to have the retail along Hammell. Would’ve felt more isolated to push it to the Lake Wheeler frontage.
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Fair enough - but as I often have to ask… why not both? lol - city blocks should exist as multi-use city blocks… on every block IMO
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Even Manhattan doesn’t have retail wrapping every high rise. That requires so many people walking by to justify.
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…Manhattan also has 3000% the development that Raleigh has so it’s still got plenty of retail and street level activation, an ABUNDANCE, I’d argue. Raleigh simply doesn’t, there’s more blank walls, loading docks, and parking deck entrances than there are actual activation on any given building. I’m of course just pulling this from my @$$ but it’s coming from a place of thinking ahead towards Raleigh’s future. Even if RIGHT NOW there aren’t enough “people walking by to justify” it - there likely will be in the future, and by then all the blank concrete walls that line the sidewalks will not be able to be converted into actual active uses.
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That’s why it behooves us to identify “high streets” like Fayetteville and Glenwood where we can build a substantial amount of demand around them. That demand used to be business, but the future is looking much more likely to be hybrid with worker and residential demand for Fayetteville. On the other hand, Glenwood South is almost exclusively residential demand.
While The Weld and Rockaway will create demand for retail and services, they alone aren’t likely to support the sort of retail density that a lot of would like to see. The prior comments about demand being generated from Dix Park across Lake Wheeler is a good way to talk about additional demand to augment the residents.
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