To be more blunt, it is and will continue to be weaponized.
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Character should be allowed to evolve. This is Raleigh, not Rome. It takes hundreds of years to develop a sense of place and most of the city outside downtown is basically new.
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“The program is massively successful and drives affordability but rich people don’t like the way it looks so it has to change”.
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It needs to become objective before I will buy into any use of it. It can’t land in a place where an “I don’t like it” is enough to derail a project.
That said, I wouldn’t negotiate anything objective about character unless us urbanites also get something out of it. Specifically, I want to remove NIMBY voices from outside of Raleigh’s downtown core from dictating or determining what happens within the downtown boundary.
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This has come up I suspect because City Council Patton has an agenda that aligns with the people trying to prevent MM from being universal. I’m guessing she’s seeking to limit MM around her home/neighborhood which is why she’s so insistent in getting this text change through while not entirely derailing MM. It’s a “F you, I have mine!” mentality.
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Isn’t that what Neighborhood overlay districts are for?
Tree preservation is really tough with any kind of suburban retrofit.
Trees grow really fast around here, given a chance. Historically, trees didn’t have that chance, because our area’s longleaf pine forest ecosystem is fire-dependent:
So people today see big trees and assume they’re primeval forest – when in fact they’re much bigger than shaded forest trees, since they were planted by some little kid in a sunny exurban/rural front yard a few tens of years ago, back when 50’ deep front yards were what city planning required. Now city planning requires 10’ front yards, which is great! Small yards means better sidewalks. Except now the spot for houses is smack in the middle of the old yard, and that’s right where those big trees stand.
I’m working on a project where the only notable trees there were planted in the 1950s around a strip-style commercial building parking lot. The Town wants the street redeveloped as a walkable mixed-use street; they don’t want a parking lot there. But they do somehow still want the trees there – even though those trees are literally rooted into the very specific confines they’ve been given, which means they are dependent on that parking lot being in the exact same spot.
When a demolition crew comes to remove the parking lot, they will necessarily damage the tree roots right underneath it. So we have to remove the trees – but first we still have to go through $000s in motions with documentation in triplicate, and calculating replacement trees, and whatnot. Oh, and any new building or parking lot has to be surrounded with dozens of new trees anyways.
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Meanwhile to our south…
Remember that pretty much all of these new residents will be driving on Wake County roads, so it’s not as if this is somehow a good deal for us.
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How about we charge them a tax for coming into Wake County? And Harnett County can charge them a tax for going back? Seems like a win win to me? PS. I used to live in Harnett County and that is a s$$t ton of lots - just sayin’
Meh. I’ll let the DTR/RTP commuters from Fuquay or Holly Springs deal with that. It shouldn’t affect those who live within Raleigh as much considering the shorter driving distances. One of my colleagues moved down right along the border. He hates his commute. I tried to warn him.
I don’t understand wanting to live that far out and have a long commute. Even if I was to drive to work, my commute would be about 25 minutes at the worst. It’s way better than having to potentially deal with an hour commute.
If I worked out that way, then I’d probably live out there. I don’t blame people who live and work out that way. It makes sense. Generally I like to live where I spend most of my time.
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I read a pretty fun book called The Geography of Happiness, where an NPR reporter went to all of the countries with the happiest people on earth and tried to find what they had in common. Breezy, fun read.
But in his introduction, part of the reason he said it was hard to quantify happiness was that the only thing that could be quantitatively tied to lower quality of life and less satisfaction with life across cultures and geographies (besides deep poverty and war) was long commutes. People are less happy the longer they have to make the same travel to work every day.
And yet people keep choosing them!
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Many people are enamored with the size of their house, the newness of their house, the amount of land, or some combination thereof.
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Being able to afford it also comes into play.
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Clearly that’s a factor for buyers, but there are lots of houses being built way out for a lot of money. For them, it’s not that they can’t afford to be closer in, it’s often that they want more house, more land, and new(er) construction.
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I think the real issue is where a lot of the jobs are vs where the houses are. I bought a house downtown when I worked downtown. Now I work in RTP, with requirements to be in office every other week (for the full week) starting September. I love my house, I love where I live, and I don’t want to move. Even if I was willing to move, there’s nothing close enough to my office that has any of the walkability and amenities I’m looking for, let alone the charm or sense of community I’d be giving up. So it becomes a choice between loving where I live and hating my awful commute, or hating where I live but being close to work. For now at least the choice is obvious for me.
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i know this isnt cheap but is this considered missing middle and doable in other parts of town? https://maps.app.goo.gl/qVUmN5kawjKVfZRo7
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That is a small apartment building (between 5 and 50 units) and might be doable as part of a frequent transit overlay in R6 or R10 sites, but the big hurdle there is commercial building code for accessibility, fire, and egress.
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Quick Redfin comparison: median (50th percentile) sold price in Raleigh is $441K. Only 13% of houses sold in Harnett County were at or above that price.
So almost all of Harnett County homebuyers are getting something cheaper than they can find in Raleigh. Sure, some are perhaps commuting to southern Wake, but a great many would move closer in if they could.
Correct. Right now, it’s possible to build small flats buildings, but only at really high prices – something buried in this article:
A big factor that will make this easier in the near future is that NC will soon be the first state to allow residential homebuilders to build 3/4-unit buildings. Right now, those require commercial contractors.
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And the NIMBYs will be SUPER AMPED to tell everyone how unsafe that is
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Try that for Cary, Apex, WF, Holly Springs…
Surely jumping to Harnett County is going to lower the prices.
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