Spatula

I'd be sad to lose the Archdale building, but I wouldn't shed a tear for many of the others in the state government complex--particularly the 80s buildings around Halifax Mall. Those are probably the least objectionable opinions I've heard from McCrory since he's taken office. The general idea of converting the area back into actual city is a good one and I'd support it.

I can't really say much for or against Charlotte as I haven't had a chance to visit for several years. If I were to judge Raleigh based on the way its downtown was several years ago... well... you get the picture. Based on the amount of development over in Charlotte I'd assume things have picked up significantly in NoDA and South End. Maybe it's all suits though.

That is impressively tall for the plot it will be on. 17 floors! Possibly the thinnest building in the state if it gets built.

...And no Republican imagined that a Black man could win the state in a presidential election. I think many of us saw the state slowly shifting in that direction, but we thought it would be another decade or two before such things were possible. It's important to be skeptical, but there's a point where skepticism morphs into cynicism. True skepticism is neutral. It acknowledges the positives as well as the negatives.

Purdue's failure as a candidate the first time around, and her failure as a governor hinged on that. The good ol boy formula was used for the past century and it isn't working anymore. The rural areas no longer support democrats, regardless of the candidate they run with. They need to recognize their new constituency. It's younger, it's more urban, and it's more socially progressive than the candidates they've been running. If they don't appeal to their own base you can look forward to a hundred years of the current situation. I think Cooper's in a better position to win the primary and contest McCrory, but I think a candidate like Meeker is fully electable in this state. Bear in mind this state is also more competitive in presidential elections than it ever was before. To a large extent in the past we were a deeply red state, but controlled by 'business democrats' as you say. I'm not in the camp that thinks this was ever a progressive state, and it certainly isn't now. But it is a more evenly balanced state than you're portraying. Everyone who kept up with the polls saw what was coming in 2010 and 2012. And while Republicans will try to paint 2012 as a mandate, it's anything but. They control 9 of the 13 congressional seats despite getting fewer votes. They control the state house by a huge majority despite the state-level vote being pretty much 50-50. Their grip on the state government is from gerrymandering, not from a popular mandate. Every state-level office they hold should be extremely vulnerable.

McCrory signed away his second term when he signed the anti-abortion law and broke his campaign promise to the moderates and democrats who jumped the aisle for him in 2012. These people saw him as the urban candidate: as an acceptable alternative to the rural eastern NC dems who had run the state for so long and had fallen out of touch with the progressive dems in the piedmont cities. He shattered that facade in his first year and I don't think he can do anything to recover. What do you guys think about Meeker running in 2016? http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/03/18/3712336_looking-ahead-to-2016-charles.html?rh=1

Durham and Raleigh get along well. They both need each other somewhat. Neither is quite major-city level without the other's help. Unlike Greensboro and Winston-Salem, where the two cities are similar in size and have similar sized downtowns, Raleigh is twice as large as Durham and Durham's downtown definitely feels like an 'auxiliary' downtown for the metro area. Both cities suffered from sprawl, people abandoning their cores, in the 80s and 90s, but Durham additionally suffered from the perception of crime. Where Raleigh always had some business representation in its core, Durham's was very close to completely empty when the Durham Bulls stadium was built. Historically, Durham was actually the larger of the two cities for a long time, and the more industrial of the two. That, combined with the lack of development downtown for many decades, has caused it to have a greater endowment of historic structures. Those are being saved and re-purposed pretty well, and a lot of activity has returned to the city. Progress is slower though; the city doesn't enjoy the same rate of growth as Raleigh.

Government subsidized roads: the free market alternative to government subsidized rail.

N&O comments are about on par with youtube comments if they had an extra chromosome. Urbanism is "Social engineering", "thrust upon people who don't want it". As if suburbanism wasn't thrust upon us? As if it weren't also social engineering?

To be fair, I suspect Forbes lists really amount to which cities' chambers of commerce give the journalists at Forbes the best blowjobs.

I think it looks a bit too squat and featureless for a downtown tower. Kane tends to favor squat designs, likes big floors when he can get them. I actually prefer the Edison office to this because of that. For a suburban office tower it's attractive though. Shame those floors weren't on Charter Square instead.

Worth noting that a lot of democrats in the Triangle voted for McCrory because they wrongly associated him with Charlotte's rail system. Not that I think the dems can retake the general assembly... they'd have to win by a very large margin statewide to overcome the gerrymandering, and they're just not organizing or running the candidates to do that. They're not even fielding candidates in a third of the seats.

Roundabouts aren't pedestrian friendly. They move traffic efficiently for 1 and 2 lane roads. More efficient traffic means less gaps for pedestrians. For that reason I oppose any further roundabouts on Hillsborough to the west. I'd prefer to just see curb improvements like the rest of the street. If all of those circles got built, traffic would be continuous with no gaps on Hillsborough, and that would detract from the pedestrian environment. I think the city needs to take a close look at what's happened with the Pullen roundabout--which is the antithesis of a pedestrian area, especially when the brick walls surrounding it are very harsh and ugly to walk past, sandwiched in a small area between the traffic barrier and the wall.

Yeah streetcars are overkill for Hillsborough. Really what we need is the TTA light rail line connecting downtown, NCSU, the fairgrounds, etc. That's a better place to put that utility instead of a street that's already short on space. Glenwood and Person on the other hand I could totally see it.

If the cars are single-passenger, what benefits does the system really offer? The whole point of 'mass transit' is that it can move a bunch of people. I would think a gondola line from NCSU to Centennial would be a more logical low-cost system.

Looks rather bland. It's infill but it's a detraction with its stale birthday cake look. Anyway, I really want to see the retail footprint of Five Points extended. That's the only kind of project I could get very excited about in the area.

http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/06/17/3943971/raleigh-city-council-oks-seven.html The Council approved the 7-story building proposed where Two Guys currently sits, "The Hillsborough Lofts". What stood out to me was this: Very disappointing to see McFarlane toss her hat in with the NIMBYs. It's very interesting how urbanism is an issue that crosses traditional political lines. We have progressive candidates like Mary-Ann Baldwin approving dense infill projects alongside conservative Maiorano. And then progressive Stephenson up to his usual NIMBY shenanigans, but alongside conservative Odom who couldn't decide which he liked less--voting against a private developer or voting to approve anything dense inside the beltline.

Any information where this is located? I'm not about to get my hopes up for some suburban megaproject, which is what it could easily be from the information you've posted. A 626,000 sq ft tower in downtown would have to be around 36-40 floors.

If it were up to me the university parking lot, the strip mall at 2712, and the Baptist Campus Ministry near the SECU ought to go before any other functioning retail gets replaced. Those create a dead zone along the street that lasts an entire block and separates the activity from the 2500 and 3000 blocks. After that I'd like to see the 2810 and 2900 strips replaced before any other retail is. Those contribute heavily to the visual dissonance of the street, and they create an area where pedestrians have to worry about parking cars on the way to the stuff around Cup A Joe. Needless to say the sidewalks, when they exist, are terrible there. Great news that that Sakura Express building is getting dozed though. Big improvement there.

A comparable situation would be the Piedmont Park in Atlanta, I think.

I don't think the city really knows what it wants to do with the Dix park yet, only that it wants some kind of park. Every plan I've seen looks very rough. I figure the most historically important buildings on the campus could be the park offices/shops/restrooms and so forth, perhaps a small museum. The rest could be cleared for a nature park with trails, gardens, grand lawns and so on. An outdoor pool sort of in the vein of Austin's Barton Springs pool would be awesome, if it were possible somehow. I don't know though. I could see the park taking a few very different directions.

They don't need it for anything. They will use 'state offices' as the excuse and right after the deal clears, they'll sell their parcel to developers. Hence why I don't think they'll accept the current deal, because it wisely prevents that kind of scheming.

I think the state will likely refuse the deal, just as they did the previous one. This would mean that the state could only use its 64 acres for state offices. If they ever decided to sell their section, they couldn't go around the city and sell to developers. Raleigh would have to get first dibs. Knowing this state gov't I expect them to be dickish and opt to bleed Raleigh dry for trying to hang on to the property.

That sounds about as cringeworthy as the idea to rename downtown to 'uptown'.

On that note I noticed an article in the Indy about the city council thinking about ways to improve Raleigh's brand. There are many publications that rank metro areas that say "Raleigh's a pretty good, not-terrible place to live", or Raleigh is an "above average city that does things above averagely", followed by a bunch of empty business jargon and nothing really descriptive enough to form an image of the culture of the place. This article mentioned how a few decades ago, Austin chose "live music capital of the world" as its slogan, dubious as it may have been at the time, but it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. That's an area they really have to be careful about. Whatever they decide on, we're stuck with. How do you sum up the culture of the place? It's not the live music capital of anything, and hasn't been since the Village Subway was closed--something I think the city gov't should strongly consider fixing. Those little obscure quirky things in various neighborhoods around the city are what make it great and those are things that should be held on to and added to whenever possible. The Triangle still punches above its weight for its music scene but much of that activity has shifted to Durham and Chapel Hill. Raleigh has a bad habit of defining itself by things that are nearby but not in the city. It shouldn't have to rely on that. It's not really a tourist destination or a film hub. There is certainly a music scene and an artsy, funky element to the city ITB, and there are a lot of neighborhoods with character, but it's not much different from any other city in its size range. Supposedly this is a food truck capital but that's not much of an asset to advertise. Pointing out the companies that are here or the universities doesn't really say anything about the culture of the place, and those are things people already know. There is an undercurrent of people who have left the place saying it's relatively boring here, which is false unless you need New York or San Francisco levels of stimulation to not be bored--in which case welcome to the entire rest of America. If there's one thing about NC that I think we have over all other states it's that we don't bog the place down with tacky touristey crap. What you get here is authentic, as opposed to a street that was manufactured to be a tourist hub, where prices are gouged and club-crawlers are fleeced of their fun money for a more "authentic" experience... *glares at Nashville*. *steps back* Wow, what was I thinking when I typed this? This became a huge ramble. I don't know really.