Dozens of Raleighites wearing red T-shirts turned up at a city council meeting last month to “#SaveRedHatAmphitheater.” Many spoke passionately about the need to keep the performing arts space downtown as the city moves forward with plans to expand the Raleigh Convention Center and close South Street to traffic, while some had reservations about the proposal.
The city council chamber was packed to capacity as people from across Raleigh voiced concerns about the downtown economy, the council’s decision-making, and the future of the capital as a whole.
“If you vote no and allow the amphitheater to get plowed under, Raleigh’s portion of the live music market will go somewhere else, that’s a guarantee,” said David Brower, the executive director of PineCone, a nonprofit that has brought traditional music to Raleigh for 40 years.
“The convention center leaders are pursuing a very aggressive timeline that has not allowed for the important public input that a project of this magnitude deserves,” said Mike Motsinger, a South Street homeowner and president of the Boylan Heights Neighborhood Association.
District B council member Megan Patton, whose district does not include any part of downtown, said she struggled with the decision.
“This has caused me not a few gray hairs, taken a few years off my life,” Patton said. “I’ve received no less than 425 emails … including from members of my own district. People have stopped me in the supermarket who are generally apathetic about city projects, but they’re like, ‘Hey, I need to talk to you about this one.’”
The September 17 vote was the most recent step in the city council’s plan to reshape downtown. While the vote was ultimately successful—the six council members present at the meeting all voted in favor of the plan—criticism of the city council’s community engagement resurfaced as the plan to relocate Red Hat seemingly blindsided nearby residents and homeowners.
Council member Christina Jones, who was excused from the meeting ahead of the vote because of a family emergency, wrote in a message to the INDY that she remains concerned about the South Street closure.
As the election approaches, a major question on voters’ minds is how the next mayor and city council will handle Raleigh’s growth, particularly downtown, which has been in a state of semicrisis since the COVID pandemic.
Bill King, president and CEO of the Downtown Raleigh Alliance (DRA), says more investment is needed, particularly in public art, streets and sidewalks, and public spaces like Nash Square and Market Plaza.
“We’ve gotten a lot out of having a good downtown in Raleigh, [but] we’ve got a new level that we’ve got to get to,” he says. “When you have a sad and tired place, it’s not going to be good for anyone. We don’t want downtown to get to that.”
Pandemic impacts
In 2020, following the pandemic lockdown, 44 storefront businesses in downtown Raleigh shuttered for good. Although downtown has recovered somewhat, businesses today are still dealing with long-term fallout from the pandemic, says King. In the past four years, more businesses have opened (184) than closed (147). While things have gotten better, King says they’re still not where they once were, mainly due to new work patterns.
“We see some slight bumps every day of the week from employees, which is good, but it’s still well off of what it was four or five years ago,” King says.
With more people working from home, foot traffic in downtown Raleigh during the week is slow, King explains. Fewer people work in downtown offices, meaning fewer people visit local businesses for lunch or stick around after work for happy hour. Foot traffic on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays is close to pre-pandemic levels, but Mondays and Fridays remain quiet, he says.
Businesses in Glenwood South and the Warehouse District bounced back quickly, but those around Fayetteville Street and Moore Square have been slower to recover. There are still a noticeable number of empty storefronts in the area—about 28 percent around Fayetteville Street—some that were empty before COVID and some that shuttered because of the pandemic.
A few new restaurants opened earlier this year and have become major success stories, King says, but other longtime businesses are still struggling. Overall, it’s a mixed bag.
As Raleigh grows, the DRA is encouraging landlords downtown to be intentional in the businesses they attract. The idea is that “your ground floor is what will fill your upper floors,” King says. “So you should be willing to be creative and flexible with the ground floor, because the type of businesses that we think are cool and interesting, a lot of times they need help.
“There’s a way for us to [tenant in a thoughtful way] and see it as a bigger, forest-for-the-trees thing of like, ‘Hey, this might not be the highest rent-paying tenant, but boy, do they bring a lot of people here and they bring a lot of value in a different way,’” King says. “And that lets us sell and fill other things like office space and residential units.”
A rise in crime
In the past few years, an increase in incidents of harassment, aggressive behavior, and drug use outside storefronts has harmed downtown businesses, their owners assert.
At a Raleigh committee meeting last fall, business owners rattled off a list of concerning incidents they said have cut down on foot traffic and disincentivized people from visiting downtown. In response, the city and DRA hired private security to patrol downtown. King says it has resulted in lowered crime.
“They’re eyes on the street, they’ll call the police if they can’t de-escalate it themselves,” King says. “It’s given people peace of mind, but they’ve also been able to deter a lot of activity.”
According to the Raleigh Police Department, calls for service have increased in 2024 compared to 2023. But reports of robbery and aggravated assault have decreased in that same span of time, as have officer engagements with drug violations and DWIs. The number of illegal firearms police have seized has gone up dramatically.
Unlike the city-hired private security, DRA’s private security is unarmed. The organization is also implementing a cloud-based camera network to improve visibility downtown, King says.
“It has been effective if you look at the data,” King says. “But also just the feel. I’m down here every day, there is a different feel than there was a year ago.”
King says getting the safety issues under control has helped downtown business owners and visitors feel better, creating momentum “on finally adding some businesses in the Fayetteville Street core,” with several openings scheduled in the next few months.
But some argue that increased security is a short-term measure at best.
Finding long-term solutions to mental health issues, homelessness, and drug use involves looking at the root causes, says mayoral candidate Janet Cowell. Over the years, many residents have pushed the city to put more money into an alternative crisis response unit (like Durham’s HEART program), as well as social services such as housing assistance, drug rehabilitation programs, and mental health treatment.
Mayoral candidate Terrance Ruth is also pushing the city to be more proactive in working to solve issues around crime and homelessness.
“Right now, it feels like we’re being responsive rather than leading on these particular issues,” he says. “The broad base for growth in our city must include infrastructure … to manage not just traffic … but the data, the information that enters the system, so that we can make sure that we’re responding to that ahead of time.”
Questions around traffic and infrastructure
The Red Hat Amphitheater vote raised another big issue important to downtown’s future: traffic and street connections. Some worry that the South Street closure will make the area more dangerous for pedestrians. South Street intersects with the busy South McDowell thoroughfare, which already experiences bumper-to-bumper traffic some days.
Council member Jones said that the city’s Planning Commission made some good points about the downsides of the street closure prior to its 5–4 vote against the plan.
These are familiar concerns when it comes to big development projects but could be markedly more impactful in downtown Raleigh, where connections are key to the local economy. As areas like Glenwood South and Dix Park thrive, building wider sidewalks and streets that allow people to easily walk from those areas into the downtown core could help Fayetteville Street businesses prosper.
In a recent DRA-commissioned study, consultants recommended building a clear connection between downtown Raleigh and Dix Park, King says.
“Dix Park is where a lot of energy is going. It ought to be properly connected to downtown,” he says.
In downtown proper, King notes that McDowell and Dawson Streets also currently serve as barriers to connectivity, since they’re unpleasant and sometimes dangerous to cross.
“A lot of people … they’ll get to McDowell and Dawson, and unless they have a really compelling reason to keep going, they tend to turn around,” King says.
Creating better connections to downtown is a priority for Cowell, who says one of her last acts as the president and CEO of Dix Park Conservancy was to support an application for federal funding to reconnect neighborhoods isolated by “bad urban renewal projects” such as superhighways.
Cowell says the grant would give the city up to $2 million to figure out a way to bridge Western and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevards.
“That would be really helpful not only to connect southern downtown to [Dix] Park, but also for Shaw University, which is bisected by this major intersection that is not pedestrian-friendly for Shaw students,” Cowell says.
“The whole idea of reconnecting downtown to all this growth coming into the south, that could be a win-win for everybody.”
The future of downtown
Looking to the future, many Raleighites seem to want the same things: more public art, more music and theater, and a renewed emphasis on the capital city’s history and culture.
It’s just a matter of how to get there.
For mayoral candidate Ruth, creating a “Raleigh Renaissance” means letting residents and business owners take the lead in rejuvenating downtown.
“People love their city. They don’t want to sit on the sidelines. They actually want to help. They want to be engaged,” Ruth says. Giving residents a space to co-design downtown would “allow for all the PhDs we have here, all the rich stories, all the rich lived experiences, all the universities to birth something with the city rather than the city creating something and hoping that the community will take it.”
Downtown is one of the best places to create more residential and commercial density as the city grows, Ruth says. But city leaders should ensure they’re incorporating feedback from residents and investing in the infrastructure to manage that new growth.
Looking to the future of downtown, Cowell says working with the state government to “activate” the Capitol District at street level, as well as giving educational institutions like Wake Tech, N.C. State University, Campbell University, and William Peace University a larger presence in the downtown area will be key. She cites Greenville, South Carolina, where universities such as Clemson and Furman have presences on the downtown’s main street.
“[William Peace] is downtown, but there’s ways to strengthen those partnerships and have more presence,” Cowell says.
Overall, Cowell says the city has already made a lot of good investments, it’s just a matter of “linking it together.” She imagines a future where people bike downtown after a day at the N.C. Museum of Art, taking advantage of the city’s existing greenway system.
King has similar ideas. He says he’d like to see the downtown area reconnect after the disconnect of the pandemic.
“For a while, Raleigh had a really strong spirit of collaborative, innovative community. It still has all of that … but the pandemic did disconnect us a bit. We all went home for a year,” he says. “We’re trying to … bring people back together, not just through events, but starting to knit back together some of that ecosystem of ‘OK, let’s get our design community back together. Let’s get our innovation community back together. Let’s get our artists together.’”
As the city grows and private money pours into hubs like North Hills, the Village District, and Iron Works, downtown Raleigh faces more competition than ever for visitors, according to King.
Mayoral candidate Ruth agrees.
“Businesses are trying to make sure that they don’t lose their base,” he says. “That they don’t lose the special vibe that you get with going to a major, successful, and thriving downtown core.”
Ultimately, downtown Raleigh is a true public space, King says, “an opportunity for all types of people to come together and interact.”
While it’s a tax revenue generator for greater Raleigh, and there’s a financial incentive to investing in it, “it also is the face of the city,” King adds.
“It’s where visitors come when they come to Raleigh, where you take your family when you’re here. It’s where we all come together.”
This is the third in a four-part series on the Raleigh City Council leading up to the municipal election this fall. Read Part One and Part Two in the series.
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