What purposeful steps do you have in mind?
I agree, Raleigh should focus on making the city great for its residents first. While cities like New Orleans rely heavily on tourism for tax revenue and economic growth, this can be unpredictable since travel trends are influenced by many factors. There’s nothing wrong with benefiting from tourism, but the city’s core economic pillars should come from sectors that provide long-term resilience.
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Literally what Durham and Cary have been doing with a lot of success. Hence why both have downtown libraries and downtown Raleigh has to contend with a basement mini-library that is mainly children’s books and very little programming. Programming that, mind you, helps draw in people and thus crowds and culture.
Why can’t the City of Raleigh Campus support a library building, sure the library system is county-wide but Raleigh is the county seat and thus influence AND we can also provide the bulk of the funding.
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I fully support the addition of more civic buildings in downtown Raleigh. I love visiting libraries around the world, and I’ve found that many of them serve as much more than just places to store books.
In Denmark and Norway, I have first hand seen how these buildings can act as community hubs, offering a variety of resources, facilities, and that enrich the local community.
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I disagree. You don’t have to be a top 10 tourist destination to benefit from tourism. Some of my favorite cities in Europe are the less touristy ones. Raleigh has tons of tourists who visit because it’s the capital or because of museums or simply because they’ve heard it’s a nice place. We benefit tremendously from heads in beds. Tourism revenue helps reduce the tax burden for residents and helps us to build and maintain sports arenas, parks etc. Making Raleigh just a residential enclave is not that great of a goal. Having things to do enhances residential living. If there’s nothing to do then I guess you could live in any suburban enclave just as well. It doesn’t have to be all residential or all tourist and the city doesn’t have to compete with Nashville to be a nice pleasant place for people to visit. However, the city should not ignore the tourists who come here and we should definitely make it nice enough that they tell people they enjoyed their stay here.
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Many years ago, my wife’s cousins who live in rural Virginia spent a long weekend visiting Raleigh. They thought it was a great place and kept talking about how much they loved it here. I kept thinking to myself… WTF… it is boring old Raleigh, our best features are 2 hours east or 4 hours west. But they thought it was great. I guess my perspective is biased from living here for so long.
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Yeah we’ve seen and toured some really cool libraries on our travels as well, specifically in Scandinavia as you mention. I really do like the idea of a central downtown library on even 20% of that kind of scale. Hell, even my crappy college city of Worcester, MA built a nice new downtown library when I was there 20 years ago. And their downtown was um, not great.
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I Agee and I love library visits as well. Two I love are the Newberry Library in Chicago and the Boston Anthemum in Boston. Both are well worth the visit.
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Building more housing with a variety of price points both rental and owned.
Prioritizing pedestrian experiences
Heavily pursue practical retail (day to day retail needs of residents including services)
Increase density of bike share
Streetscaping and tree planting
Public investment: Parks/Parklets/libraries/community centers
Entertainment options beyond bars including movie theaters, bowling, and other activities.
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“Drawing more than 1 million users a year, and designed after extensive focus groups with the city’s residents, the new library, like De Krook, hosts lectures, conferences and concerts as well as all the activities of a cutting edge, 21st-century library.”
No reason we can’t yearn to have the same. Durham Central Library certainly has many of the same elements that modern European libraries are achieving.
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I don’t think that anyone is saying to not pursue tourism; I know that that’s not what I am saying. What I am saying is that we are not and will not be an Austin, Nashville, New Orleans, etc. when it comes to our downtown personality and brand.
We have made substantial progress in housing this century, and I think that creating excellent urban neighborhoods is the key to building our urban brand & enthusiasm for others wanting to be there. I don’t think that we can even start to pursue a tourism forward growth strategy until we make downtown a more interesting and desirable place to be, and that sort of place needs to be somewhere people want to be during the daytime and nighttime, on both weekdays and weekends. It needs to fully function as an urban place, and given how small our actual downtown footprint is, that should be an achievable goal for the city. Once achieved, the tourism will come because it will be desired.
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Yeah this isn’t just a European trend; it’s been the case here too for some years. I work a lot in library design around the country these days… In the academic world, institutions are often reducing collections by more than 50% and moving to off-site storage. And public libraries are now social spaces with amenities like STEM Labs, podcast studios, maker spaces, Lego rooms, Sensory Rooms, so many others. Our latest is opening this Friday in downtown Carrboro. It’s small (and attached to a massive parking deck) but it’s packed with cool public amenities. Check it out!
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Raleigh is a strong tourism destination! But it’s a regional draw, rather than national. We get people driving in from places like Greenville, Goldsboro, or Greensboro, rather than flying in from New York or Indiana.
Trying to bootstrap an identity for Raleigh as a tourist destination on the national scene would be a fool’s errand.
We should focus on things that enhance our regional draw, get the folks out in Kinston to come up 4 or 5 times a year instead of once or twice.
Shopping, performing arts, sports, restaurants, nightlife. Passenger rail to ENC would be both popular and impactful.
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IMO, the transformation of libraries to centers with more activities and functions is a good thing! Congrats on being part of this interesting work.
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I know it’s maybe a little controversial on this forum, but the nightlife is already a huge draw, and could – should! – be even more so.
Speaking for the early 20’s crowd, it blows every other NC city out of the water. Probably SC, too. Having most of the nightlife all on one strip like Glenwood is the reason for this. I went to State, but I keep up with lots of folks who went to universities all over the southeast. Seemingly all of them know and love Glenwood.
This is why I think it’s doubly important to nail the improvements currently being studied.
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The week has 7 days and 7 nights. It needs to function for more evenings, and especially more daytimes.
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Let’s say all of those things happen. Isn’t that just a version of Falls River/Brier Creek/Granite Falls/etc neighborhoods all over?
What is going to encourage people to spend more money to live downtown compared to all those other places?
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IMO this is why I think pedestrianizing it sometimes during the week to allow for special events, markets, etc. as the study suggested is a great move
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Shame though that development on Glenwood South has stagnated. Really hope the Creamery Project starts this year, if at all. Amenities and infrastructure improvements are badly needed to keep up with all these suburban park-and-play cardboard downtown.
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Correct. 1BR rents in a new building in downtown…
Nashville high-rise $2300, mid-rise $1600
Austin high-rise $2200-$3400, mid-rise $1300
Tysons Corner high-rise $2550, mid-rise $2000
Raleigh high-rise $1700, mid-rise $1300
North Hills high-rise $2000, mid-rise $1400
High-rises cost a lot more to build & operate = they cost a lot more to live in. If you don’t have 100s of people willing to pay that premium, they can’t get built.
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