I work for a development company and we also build this style of Apt. I am working on one in Mooresville right now. They are a very popular floor plan. It’s like a townhouse/apt hybrid.
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Happy Funk Friday Fam!
Tower of Power knew what it was in 1975
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Urban renewal was the hip thing in 1975, but what is hip today might become passé.
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ohhhh you knoww it!!!
Nonsense. If that were the case, the City would not be approving every voluntary annexation petition that comes its way. But the City does, even into Durham County. If the City really believed it loses money on suburbs, it would stop in a heartbeat. Of course, Cary is 100% suburb with no downtown – yet they are doing quite fine financially.
$68M sounds like a lot, but how many are there? My single subdivision in north Raleigh has a $600M tax base without counting the adjacent commercial buildings. You count high-rises, I count subdivisions, and I guarantee that I’ll win. And new subdivisions continue to grow just as fast as new high-rises, without even noting that some of the high-rises are in North Hills which isn’t downtown.
The City certainly does provide services to downtown… security, repairs to an outdated and undersized water sewer infrastructure (which the high-rise developers are not paying for, by the way), transportation (which is nearly all downtown centric), etc.
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Nonsense. If that were the case, the City would not be approving every voluntary annexation petition that comes its way. But the City does, even into Durham County. If the City really believed it loses money on suburbs, it would stop in a heartbeat. Of course, Cary is 100% suburb with no downtown – yet they are doing quite fine financially.
You’re incorrect again here. Yes, acquiring new land in annexation gives good initial tax dollars for the first 20 years. Developers install the initial infrastructure and the tax dollars the city gets come without expectations to maintain the newly installed infrastructure.
Then the chickens come home to roost. After 20 years or so, which I’ve already mentioned, that surplus turns into a liability. If you don’t have new land to develop on, suddenly all communities you have are liabilities. So, what’s the best way to get fresh new money? Have more new developments paying you tax dollars that don’t come with that liability cost. It operates like a ponzi. New taxed developments fund old liabilities.
If you want a video on the math, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
By the way, the city of Cary has worked with the company Urban3 mentioned in the video and has publicly stated that their future plans point to it becoming more urban:
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/counties/wake-county/article161380008.html
Why exactly do you think they’re doing that if Suburbia is so successful at making tax dollars? How about you show some evidence, studies, or research instead of making assumptions?
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are there any 20 plus year old burbs still doing ok? do 20 plus year old burbs exist now in the triangle? my old neighborhood at north ridge villas had a private snow plower come in with the hoa funds and street resurfacing. what is the major cost factor of the ‘burbs’ above what a 40, (oops) 25 story building cluster would cost people.
Roads, sidewalks and pedestrian paths, water and sewer systems, power and telecommunications lines. For a highrise, these are centralized and a lot easier to maintain. For a large suburban neighborhood, it costs a lot due to the complexity and large scope and size of the systems required.
Most neighborhoods aren’t private like that. The developers create the neighborhood then pass off the critical infrastructure to the city. IMO, it probably shouldn’t be like that. Pretty much just leads to suburbs being subsidized by people not living in the suburbs.
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Intuitively, this doesn’t make sense either.
Think of it like hot coals of a fire. When the coals are gathered close, they feed each other and the heat intensifies. When they are spread, it kills the fire. Likewise, when we take a wealthy society and spread it out horizontally, it doesn’t get wealthier - it gets poorer. This is because land is finite, and we must look at city building as a value per acre equation, not a gross value or even value per capita, because generational wealth differences will change the equation.
My generation certainly can’t afford to assume the liabilities of North Raleigh homes, so who’s going to subsidize those maintenance and tax bills when the current owners pass away and there’s not a full generation of folks to buy them up? Locally we will do better because of migration, but other us cities literally have rotting suburbs.
But even locally there are examples of suburbia being a waste of hot coals - a failed development pattern. Cary Towne Center, the K-Mart(s?) on Western, the original North Hills mall… These aren’t just failed business plans. These are failed built environments; even while being in Cary and Raleigh proper, the as-built infrastructure of these developments weren’t valuable enough to last 1 generation.
Otherwise put, like many things in the US, suburbia is a 1-lifecycle, disposable development pattern.
Happy Monday!
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Also think about things like entertainment (Internet/TV). If you’re Google or ATT or Spectrum, do you want to run cable/fiber around the neighborhood to 50 homes, or to 1 building and up conduit to 200 units?
I mean no matter how you look at it, it’s WAY more efficient to have a single concentration of residents vs sprawled out. Doesn’t mean it’s what everyone wants, but you really have a hard time arguing the economics.
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The just-adopted-yesterday federal budget (“omnibus”) includes a pot of CDBG money to reward cities like Raleigh that have adopted pro-housing policies and want to go further. From the subcommittee’s summary:
“Provides $85 million for a new competitive grant program that will reward communities that have made progress in improving inclusionary zoning practices, land use policies, and housing infrastructure that will ultimately increase the supply of affordable housing.”
It’s on pages 1744-1745 of the enacted legislation. Grants can “develop, evaluate, and implement housing policy plans, improve housing strategies, and facilitate affordable housing production and preservation,” and should prioritize cities that “demonstrate progress and a commitment to overcoming local barriers to facilitate the increase in affordable housing production and preservation.”
The program is apparently based on the YIMBY Act, as introduced by Sens. Young (R-IN) and Schatz (D-HI). That bill enumerated 20 pro-housing local government policies that CDBG should reward, and Raleigh under the previous council made progress on 16 of them!
It’s time to remind Raleigh’s new city council that Democrats, from Biden on down, are pro-housing.
Also of interest: “significantly increases investments in distressed neighborhoods through the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative program.” This is a grant program for public housing redevelopment, and Raleigh has been evaluating several sites for such efforts.
And dang, I’d forgotten that Price chaired that subcommittee, should’ve taken advantage of that more often!
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What does this mean? Are some people anti-housing?
Functionally, yes. In my book, those that would impose conditions on housing construction to the point that not enough of it can be built, are de facto anti-housing, no matter what they may tell you.
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Whenever someone says “we’re full” that’s what they mean.
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…Or “I wish people would stop moving here” or any such. Those who came to the area at some point (whether last week, or generations ago) and wish to shut the door behind them by doing things to make it harder to build housing.
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“Screw you, I got mine” is essentially what these arguments always boil down to.
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Sort of zoning related, especially in our grid-based downtown, so I’ll drop this here:
The Economist had an interesting article about the history and advantages (and potential disadvantages) of building cities on a grid.
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Same group complaining about Missing Middle Text change when cleary doing nothing is better /s
What happens when we leave zoning as is:
Summary: New luxury homes starting at $1.75M while tearing down homes that go for around $500k
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This is definitely on the racial, and social lines. I have that feeling because they just don’t want poorer or less privilege and inhabitants of color.
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I like how the example building was a new duplex next to older ones… The humanity!
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