Perfect can be the enemy of good. at rduwtf.com

Although we agree with Bob Geary’s assessment of the North Hills East financing scam, the fear that Kane might build sprawling crap on the site, just to stick it to the man, has us a little worried and it brings to mind Geary’s fight against Coker Towers. (scroll down to “double density”.) That fight, and not just Geary’s but the opposition in general, seemed to be very much about NIMBYism and little to do with shaping Raleigh development guidelines. Neighborhood activists organized to fight a development that was too dense, would create too much traffic and was not pedestrian friendly. The activists apparently won the battle of the backyards and stopped fighting the war.

Drive down Oberlin and look at the resulting development at Wade Avenue - it is dense but not dense enough to require needed improvements to the surrounding traffic ways. This is one of the least pedestrian friendly areas in Raleigh. The sidewalks on Wade just disappear at points and there are no crosswalks on Wade between Oberlin and Ridge Road. The Cameron Village neighborhood doesn’t even have sidewalks, so of course they didn’t raise a fuss when new townhouses were built on Wade without sidewalks. Oberlin has no room for bicycle traffic and no shaded bus stops. What pedestrian and mass transit amenities will the new development provide? The abandonment of those issues suggest they were never the real issues of contention. It was a NIMBY movement.

We suggest Crosland Development should name the new retail and apartment (photo above) complex at Oberlin and Wade: The Shoppes at Triangle Shirtwaist Co.. Really, that whole development looks like a giant fire-trap. We had no idea you could build something so large out of 2×4’s.

5 Responses to “Perfect can be the enemy of good.”

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1 Fallonia Sep 7th, 2007 at 5:31 pm

I have also been mystified by the stick-builtness of this development. The density on the Wade Corridor has had me wondering what it was that was reduced about this plan.
2 Bob Geary Sep 10th, 2007 at 6:18 pm

Robert (and Fallonia): Hard as it is to believe, or remember, the original Coker Towers project was much, Much, MUCH bigger than what Crosland is doing there now. Just for one thing, it was all going to be built on top of a three-level parking deck, so imagine something about twice as dense as what’s there now (or was it 3X?–depends what you’re counting, atop what some of us were calling “the Wall of Wade.” As the battle raged, and various elements of the original plan were either withdrawn by the developer or shown to be fanciful (e.g., the movie theaters — apparently there wasn’t really a cinema company interested in the site), the proposed Cokers Towers did get smaller, but it would still have been Much, MUCH bigger than Crosland’s project if it had been approved. (It’s a been few years, and I hesitate to trust my memory on the specific square-footage numbers, but Crosland’s deal is about one-third the size of Coker’s original.)

But your main point is, once CT was defeated, we all quit. Not true. The old NCRDR crowd tried every way we could think of to get Crosland to make the kinds of changes to its project that you’re wanting now. The facts are: 1) Crosland wasn’t budging unless and until someone could show them where they weren’t going to get five votes on City Council; and 2) Crosland got all eight votes on City Council, not just five, because the then newly elected Mayor Meeker, Councilor Cowell and the rest were absolutely uninterested in supporting NCRDR in yet another rezoning war. So Crosland didn’t have to budge.

There followed major efforts made to get the Council to adopt its loosely followed, oft-ignored Urban Design Guidelines as code — meaning developers would be required to follow them. No soap. (Code words for ignoring them, then & now: “But they’re only guidelines”.) How about adopting form-based zoning, with scale the major element, and mixed-uses encouraged? No soap there either. How about an infill ordinance to help new stuff fit in amongst the old? Todays’s teardowns and mega-mansion resplacesments are the best evidence that no such infill ordinance has been adopted in the (now)6 years people have been trying to get one. Council a month or two ago voted to study the question. (!)

NCRDR came apart over the isue of what to do about all this — work for improvements around the edges or fight like hell against the power of the five- or six-member Council majority that still exists and still supports developers uber alles. But the members and leaders of NCRDR are still working at it, in various capacities — including me.

By the way, thanks for the citations & the links. I’m a fan …
3 Fallonia Sep 12th, 2007 at 5:01 pm

Thanks for the visit down memory lane, Bob. Maybe we can learn something as we revisit these concerns.
4 JZ Sep 15th, 2007 at 2:20 pm

In this provinical town, do we even have ANY meaningful density? The downtown core is only 6 blocks square and density drops off very quickly after Wilmington Street to the East and Dawson Street to the West. Let’s stop kidding ourselves. Density is good because it a more responsible use of brownfield development. And if you’re in the beltline (a symbolic boundary of city density, in my view, like the Urban Growth Boundary in Portland), the denser the better, period. The neighborhoods around Oberlin were established when that was essentially surburbia. While I do not advocate a Robert Moses-type of urban renewal project that wipes them off the planet, its time we all got comfortable with the notion of high and low densities blending together in balanced, meaningful (i.e. mixed-use) ways.

We’ve seen the nodal development pattern develop in expanding cities over the last quarter century. Younger –and many southern– cities have naturally or unnaturally evolved this way. The tighter you can create a cluster of these around the main core the better. Even better if they relate to public transit corridors.

The Coker Tower Project was within the beltline, while Kane has promoted “density” outside of that (albeit, JUST outside of it). Coker Towers may have been 3x that of what is now being erected, yet it was a responsible “highest-and-best” use of the parcel. Kane dabled with nodal development at North Hills, yet we seem to be more comfortable with our more-suburban-than-suburbia downtown.

This issue will increasingly become about energy resources and mobility than the appropriate scale of things. And all the folks (or maybe their kids) worried about whether it “fits in” or if its “too big” will be caught with their pants down wishing they didn’t have to spend that extra $10 on gas just to run an errand where they could just be walking down the street. (And so what about a ‘wall on Wade’? The condos of Crosland’s Phase One doesn’t create that feeling anyway? C’mon) So now we’re stuck with a half-baked solution because our provincial ITB-ers didn’t want the fair city to get too dense. Ridiculous.
5 Robert E Leebowitz Sep 18th, 2007 at 6:11 pm

I agree with you JZ. The Coker project would have been much larger but much better planned and as the current projects near completion, it’s apparent the Coker project would have been MUCH higher quality. People argued that the development should happen downtown and not around Cameron Village but that was a fight that should have been waged long ago - when Cameron Village was being developed. NewRaleigh.com argues that Cameron Village isn’t really a village and gets very semantic about it but if you include the adjoining neighborhoods it sure seems like a village. It should be developed more. With more office buildings, housing, parking decks and density. I am also a believer in the Peak Oil theory and I think Raleigh should be very progressive in planning for the changes we will encounter as energy becomes prohibitively expensive. If we design our city as though we’re running out of fuel and we’re wrong, we’d still have a very livable city, a better city, as a result. If we ignore the problem we’ll be screwed.

rduwtf.com

Perfect can be the enemy of good.

5 Responses to “Perfect can be the enemy of good.”

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