City of Oaks history on City of Rhetoric blog

This story has an amazing amount of information on the history of Raleigh's Growth, and delves into the unique mixture of good and mixed motives.

City of Oaks | City of Rhetoric

Design Lunch by Raleigh Planning 02.16.11

Please join us at the Raleigh Urban Design Center (133 Fayetteville Street, Suite 100)

Lunch Forum on Wednesday, February 16, 2011 from 12:00 to 1:30 p.m. for the following presentation.

Quality Design and Affordable Housing

Georgia Bizios, FAIA, Professor of Architecture, College of Design and
Katie Wakeford, NCSU Home Environments Design Initiative

• How can design guidelines empower a community?
• Why is quality design so important in affordable housing?
• What are the opportunities to collaborate with NCSU Home Environments Design Initiative?

Contact trisha.hasch@raleighnc.gov, 919-807-8480, with questions or concerns
or visit the Lunch Forums website for more details. All events are free and open to the public.

City of Raleigh | One Exchange Plaza | Raleigh, NC 27602 | United States

Best Sign of the Day

http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/07/20/590187/16-protesters-arrested-at-school.html

And Back on the Development Channel ...

This notice from the City of Raleigh:

Please join us at the Raleigh Urban Design Center (133 Fayetteville Street, Suite 100) Lunch Forum on Wednesday July 21, 2010 from 12:00 to 1:30 p.m. for the following presentation.

Complete Streets
James Westmoreland, NC Deputy Secretary of Transportation

• What are Complete Streets?
• How does NCDOT plan to implement its Complete Streets policy?
• What role do Complete Streets play in developing Sustainable Communities?

Q& A Panel: Presenter, Eric Lamb, Manager, City of Raleigh Transportation Services, Raleigh Public Works Department, Elizabeth Alley, Planner II, Raleigh Urban Design Center

Contact trisha.hasch@raleighnc.gov, 919-807-8480, with questions or concerns.
All events are free and open to the public.

City of Raleigh | One Exchange Plaza | Raleigh, NC 27602 | US

Growing Pains

Cash Michaels has put together a PSA on the coming event for diversity in our schools.

HERE



And Steve Ford of the N&O explains how the clash of the cultures began.

HERE



Mayor Meeker certainly stepped in it when he recently tried to describe the problem facing older neighborhoods in Raleigh when it comes to the effect of this new school board's education policy. Quoting Steve Ford's article:

Don't be shocked, but Southern resentment of Yankees once was focused on the Northerners' determination to stamp out the Confederate rebellion and the practice of slavery, on which the ruling class of Southern whites believed their way of life depended.

Now we see a Southern mayor - albeit a District of Columbia native educated at Yale and Columbia - articulating that familiar cultural tension, but from the standpoint of someone convinced that the perspective of long-time Southerners (of whatever race) is more closely aligned with black residents' interests.

There is of course a disconnect in Wake between 1) the old-timers who went through desegregation of the schools, merger of the former city and county school systems and the crafting of diversity policies, and 2) the many newer arrivals, often settling in the rapidly growing suburbs, who put prime importance on stability in school assignments and on having their kids attend school with kids from the same kind of background.

No matter how it is pointed out, it is an important point. So hooray for the Mayor with goo on his shoes. Let's make sure all this sudden growth in Raleigh leaves no family behind.

Raleigh's Union Station

SHARING THIS TASTY TIDBIT:

Union Station

Raleigh's Multi-Modal Transit Center

A draft report for Raleigh's Union Station has been completed for public review. The objective of the design and development strategy is twofold: first, to prepare a conceptual multi-modal transit center design that coordinates the location of various existing and future transit service areas with convenient connections among service platforms; and second, to prepare a development strategy for properties within and in the vicinity of the transit center.

A public open house will be held on May 12 to present the report findings and answer questions. The Raleigh Urban Design Center (133 Fayetteville Street) will host two opportunities to attend:

12:00 to 1:30 p.m. - Informal information session with City staff available to answer questions

6:30 to 8:00 p.m. - Formal presentation followed by question & answer

After the open house, a 30 day comment period will be provided followed by the preparation of a final report. Comments must be submitted to Martin Stankus by June 11, 2010.

City Planning News

May 4, 2010

Planning Commission's - Committee of the Whole Meeting

Agenda HERE

May 4, 2010 Raleigh Municipal Building - Room 305 at 9:00 a.m.

of interest to neighborhoods:

TC-2-10 Rezoning Review Process. Amends the City’s rezoning process related to required neighborhood meetings, trip generation study, third party rezonings, time period for Planning Commission deliberation, prohibitions on certain zoning conditions, and specific time periods for submitting revised and amended zoning conditions

Springing forward

Fallonia Parker, she lay low.

Or to borrow from other famous philosophers -- this is a fine mess you've gotten us into this time, Stan.

Empty lots are still empty lots, where young families could be living, thriving, and paying taxes. Speculative mansions are still for sale at rock bottom prices, unless they have been rented out temporarily. Multimillion projects in process are stalled. No taxes there. I just don't see how this was good for the community or the city economics. Actually, Fallonia's neighbors are paying double the property taxes for their houses because of the (unsold) speculations up the street. But not the speculators?

The only positive developments in this neck of the woods have been owner driven. Several really nice private renovations up on Anderson. And on Cooleemee, a new neighbor is building an appropriately fitting home. Square footage is larger, but it tries to fit the era of the neighborhood, has its garage in the back, and does not take the entire lot.

This gives Fallonia hope that the excesses may give way to more reasonable revitalizations.

Fallonia does not want to be a negative force in this battle for sound economics and neighborhoods. Having posted examples of unsustainable practices, her focus can now shift to the search for positive examples of change for the better. Stay tuned.

Candidate Forum

2009 MUNICIPAL ELECTIONS

CANDIDATE FORUM

Sponsored By

WAKE UP WAKE COUNTY
LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS
RALEIGH DOWNTOWNER
RALEIGH CITY COUNCIL
CANDIDATE FORUM

Thursday, September 10th
6:30 - 8:30 pm
Doors open at 6:15

Temple Beth Or
5315 Creedmoor Rd. Raleigh


Election Day is coming up quickly and I sincerely hope that you will either vote early starting September 17th at the Board of Elections, or on Election Day which is October 6th!

Please consider attending this upcoming candidate forum to learn more about current local issues, as well as get your own questions answered!

Looking forward to seeing you there.

OpEd on Toad Mansion in N&O today

The N&O ran an editorial today on the effects the economic crisis has had on the building boom in older neighborhoods.

Bizarrely, the teardown craze hit neighborhoods whose value lay precisely in their small-scale charm.

Harrop notes that the real estate crises has run in three waves:

This is part of what experts are calling the third wave of the real-estate crisis. The first wave was speculators fleeing when prices began to fall. The second was homeowners hit hard when their interest rates "reset" from their very low introductory rates. Many of these adjustable-rate mortgages were subprime.

The third wave has hit prime mortgages held by the cream of the borrowers. Many of these homeowners had suffered a job loss or collapse in business income.

Here in oldish Raleigh, Anderson Drive shows 8 properties for sale in a three block stretch. Not for sale at this time are a couple of occupied spec houses, who are riding this wave out as rental or owner occupied. Yet several of the adjoining side streets have a serious case of culture shock.

Chateaus were plopped down on intimate village streetscapes. Why do that in places beloved for their neighborly settings ....

Why do that, indeed.

For we who mourn the homes that the giants replaced, the sadness lingers. The builders of bigness may be moving on, but they've left their pyramids behind. Charming rows of bungalows in Seattle and Denver still sit in the shadows of bulky villas shoehorned on small lots.

Full read is here.

Raleigh's Hillsborough Street

Keep Hillsborough Street funky
Independent Weekly | 27 MAY 2009 • by Bob Geary, rjgeary (at) mac (dot) com
After the city's open house for the Hillsborough Street roundabouts project last month, some of us walked over to Players Retreat, a 51-year-old neighborhood saloon, to watch our Carolina Hurricanes battle the brutish New Jersey Devils. It was Game 7, and the Canes stole a 4-3 victory that night with two goals in the final 80 seconds, which caused everybody in the place to go completely nuts.

This, I thought, is what Hillsborough Street must've felt like in the glory days. ...


Virtually everything that gives Raleigh its identity is on Hillsborough Street or connected by it: The Capitol, downtown, the university, the old fairgrounds, the new fairgrounds, Glenwood South, Pullen Park, the Oberlin community, the Democratic and Republican state headquarters. I could go on, but it usually clinches such arguments to note that the YMCA where Andy and Barney stayed is on Hillsborough Street—or it used to be. There's a new "Y" where the old, Andy-era one stood, and the new one bares its back to the street.

Explore here.

or here.

Stop and hear the water ripple

A little trip down Fallon Park lane, with a Hasselblad.

HERE

And MORE by Holden Richards.

How to Save a House and Create a Home

The current Independent Weekly has a cover story on Builders of Hope. Bob Geary begins the story this way, embedding the beginning of the real story here.

It wasn't only the spike in Raleigh teardowns, though the sight of perfectly habitable homes being reduced to rubble helped Nancy Murray settle on a strategy. She already was on a mission to learn all she could about affordable housing and how to build it. Call it audacity, call it a ministry, but Murray—an advertising executive turned builder and social activist—thought she could supply top-drawer, affordable houses in good neighborhoods to working-class families.

Then it clicked: Murray would save the homes imperiled by teardowns and have them moved to a new location. She would upgrade them using the best green techniques while preserving as much of their old wooden bones as possible, then sell the houses at prices high enough to recapture the costs but below their new appraised values.

Such was the genesis—the biblical as well as temporal meaning—of the nonprofit organization Murray created in 2006, Builders of Hope.

This most amazing story of hope becoming reality can be read here. The chance for hope to recycle itself into the future is the best development of all.

An Over the Top Award to Builders of Hope for this Positive Development.

The world is a stage ....

KAI RYSSDAL: There was a tiny glimmer of hope for the housing industry this morning. According to the Commerce Department, construction spending didn't fall as much last month as experts had been guessing. But it's still plenty hard to sell the houses that are being built right now. That's especially true in places like Nevada and California, where suburbs that were overbuilt and overpriced look like ghost towns now.

Developers are more desperate than ever to clear those foreclosed or unsold homes off their books. So they're stealing a page from the realtor's playbook. Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman tells us some builders are trying to stage the next real-estate turnaround.

HERE

What Happens in Texas

... let's hope it stays in Texas.

The nightmare is reported here.

On the Town

This is the latest story produced by WUNC-FM on Raleigh's growth. Raleigh's position at the top of the fastest-growth ranking is a surprise to some, and not a surprise to others.

"Well, we have a lot of green here in terms of the trees, the parks and greenways, a school system that is generally in good shape, traffic is not too bad at the moment…. just all kinds of positive things that we have here that other cities don’t have the combination of."

-Mayor Meeker

The Comp Plan is certainly a significant effort at trying to manage our growth so that this which is so positive remains a part of our fair city. Fallonia believes getting a plan onboard could not come soon enough. Ask any of the older neighborhoods how spot growth is going.

Story can be heard here.

Download

The Comp Plan can be studied here.

I hope it becomes a little park

Courtesy of flickr.com - tonyjcase

Day 074/365 - the Bugs Bunny house

You remember that old Loony Toons where a building is being constructed over Bugs Bunny's hole, and he goes to war to save his home. The end result is this huge skyscraper with a divot taken out of it where his hole is.

This house is kind of like that. The Big Evil Conglomerate bought up all the surrounding land save for this one house - the owner refused to move - so they built around her.

Makes for a very odd looking building, donchya think?

(The full story here)

This is an update to an earlier story about a woman in Seattle who held out against progress. An unlikely friendship developed between her and the super on the building project. He looked out for her until the end. From her obit:

During her last days, Martin said he made sure that she was comfortable at home.

"She got to do it the way she wanted to do it," Martin said. "She had already made up her mind, and that's the way it was going to be."

He still wonders what drew him to the cranky, stubborn woman who seemed to do all she could to discourage friends or visitors.

"I think we were a lot alike. I am stubborn and so was she. We had some incredible arguments," Martin said. "She was amazingly smart."

It's unclear what will happen now to the tiny two-bedroom, two-story house built in 1900. Macefield said she doesn't have any relatives. Her only child, a son, died of meningitis at 13.

Martin isn't holding out much hope for the old house. It leans seriously to one side, he said. "I straighten the pictures every time I come over," he said.

"Eventually it will all go to progress."

. . .

She adored animals, and could be seen almost every day standing outside her front yard tossing out seeds for the birds.

Heard at the Comp Plan Public Hearing

"What made Raleigh what Raleigh was?" asked the speaker. "It's the people, caring about each other -- whether they are people who have, or people who didn't have. We cared about each other."

"When we look at a thing like this plan, we need to ask ourselves 'who is gonna win from this? and who is gonna lose?'"

"We need to make sure Raleigh is still home to her people when we are done."

Bob Geary Writes Again!

Please see the Independent for the complete article:

Imagine Raleigh without sprawl

18 MAR 2009 • by Bob Geary, rjgeary (at) mac (dot) com

In the run-up to this week's public hearing on Raleigh's draft comprehensive plan, the advice to city leaders from a stream of visiting experts has been remarkably unified. Success, experts say, depends on taking city life "back to the future."

The era of suburban sprawl is ending, these planners maintain, not simply because of high gas prices, but because it is fundamentally unsustainable. As Christopher Leinberger, a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., put it in a recent talk, the more "drivable suburban" neighborhoods a city allows, the lower the quality of life becomes for everyone living in them. The fastest-growing market now, said Leinberger, a developer, is for "walkable urban" places: the kind Raleigh doesn't have, yet needs to create, that are modeled on what cities were before cars took them over.

Such places are far more complicated to build and manage than the suburbs, Leinberger said. But done right, these areas improve as they grow. They have more cultural diversity and housing options—and with public transit, the chance for people to save money by owning fewer cars, or none. If Raleigh fails to create them, Leinberger warned, "You will be left in the 20th century."

The question for Raleigh is where these walkable urban places should be. ...

Hope you will be at the Comp Plan Hearing tonight: details follow, courtesy of Bob's article:

• What: A public hearing on Raleigh's draft comprehensive plan
  
• Where: Raleigh City Hall, 222 W. Hargett St.
  
• When: Thursday, March 19, 6:30 p.m.
  
• What to expect: Raleigh Planning Director Mitch Silver will present the draft plan, a blueprint for the city's growth over the next 20 years
• What's next: After the public hearing, the plan goes to the city planning commission. It is expected the commission will consider the plan this spring, then sent it back to City Council, which could adopt the plan as early as June.
  
• More info: Read about the process at Planning Raleigh 2030: tinyurl.com/6l8myd
  
• Learn more about the plan for the city's neighborhoods: tinyurl.com/dldeyc
  
• Leinberger's analysis and the other experts' jibes with the basic goal of the comprehensive plan to curb sprawl and guide development into designated "growth centers." Yet it also raises the issue of whether the plan identifies too many centers—including some in places that can never be urban.
  

Love this:

At the same conference, Mindy Fullilove, professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, said true urbanism is characterized by a sense of connectedness that allows people of diverse backgrounds and incomes to nonetheless feel that they live in the same community and share an identity with the same "great place."

At a time of rapid upheaval in the world, Fullilove said, people yearn for the kind of stability and belonging that existed—before urban renewal cut through it—in the Hill district of Pittsburgh where her parents grew up. It was a relatively poor, predominantly African-American community of row houses, storefronts and apartments. There were no high-rises, nothing fancy. But it was a place where people believed "whatever problems you have ... you can get together and solve them."

Hopes for a Happier Hillsborough Street

News & Observer has a story on the Hillsborough Street Renaissance Festival held yesterday.

Rhodes' association joined campus environmental groups, local restaurateurs and bands, and student chefs on the street Saturday. In one tent, people formed a drum circle, banging empty water jugs and detergent bottles. In another, they tasted barbecue prepared by the school's fraternities.

The idea for the festival started with three NCSU engineering students who wanted to raise money for campus charities and draw attention to environmental causes. But as they began organizing, a grander concept emerged.

They saw it as a way to erase the street's image as a divider -- home to rowdy bars that irritate nearby homeowners -- and turn it into a place where families, business owners and students could come together for a day.

Looking forward to that day to become real life again. Many of us remember the simple life -- where a trip to the A&P was just one stop that could be done on foot or bike from your home.

Extra credit for remembering the names of the places that Hillsborough was home to.

I'll start: Hamburger Hut. Gateway Restaurant. ...