The Wake County Board of Commissioners wants to replace Athens Drive Community Library in southwest Raleigh with a new building across the street on the site of the Well Fed Community Garden, the board agreed at a Monday work session. That’s good news for library patrons and community members who have been advocating for more than a year to keep the replacement local.
Wake County’s $142 million library bond package, passed in 2024, includes money to replace Athens Drive Community Library, which is currently located within Athens Drive Magnet High School. That cohabitation has created security concerns for the school and led to a stark reduction in the library’s hours. With the school slated for renovation beginning this summer, county staff have been searching for other locations to relocate the community library.
Throughout the search, Athens Drive Community Library patrons urged the county to keep their library as close to the current site as possible, citing its walkability, proximity to transit, and accessibility to a dense, growing, racially and economically diverse neighborhood. The area is close to North Carolina State University, the State Farmers Market, and the Beltline.
The community garden site is less than a quarter-mile away from the existing library, just a few minutes’ walk down Athens Drive. Its 2.6-acre size is smaller than is typical for a community branch, meaning the new library building would probably need to be two stories tall.
“It will be difficult and expensive to develop, but it is entirely possible to build a library there,” deputy county manager Ashley Jacobs told the commissioners Monday.
The site is owned by Arthur and Anya Gordon, the retired former owners of Irregardless restaurant. (Last year, the Gordons tried to rezone the community garden parcel for affordable housing, but they later withdrew their application.)
According to Wake County staff, the Gordons are asking $1.8 million for the property, which a county appraisal values at $1.2 million. That $600,000 difference gave the commissioners pause.
“I am uncomfortable with paying more than the appraised value,” commissioner Safiyah Jackson said. “I don’t fully agree with putting more money, public dollars, in the pocket of a private owner.”
Still, Jackson and the other commissioners seemed to prefer to keep the library in its current neighborhood, as advocates have requested, over their other options: a 12-acre property nearly three miles away in Cary owned by the Wake County Public School System, or a stand-alone building on the renovated Athens Drive Magnet High School campus. The Cary option is located in a wealthier, less diverse neighborhood that is less accessible by foot and by public transit than the community garden site. County staff said the Athens Drive High School option would be prohibitively expensive at $33-35 million, requiring the cancellation of other library bond projects.
County staff said they considered over 100 other potential sites for the library, but most were either unavailable, too far from the current site, or too small. They offered the commissioners an option to defer the decision by a year, but nobody wanted to.
“We could lose the opportunities that we currently have on the table,” said commissioner Shinica Thomas. “But the other thing is that we have a finite amount of money, and … we are currently, despite the sunshine outside, a country at war, and gas prices went up 50 cents just last week. In waiting another year, when we talk about construction costs, we talk about tariffs, we talk about materials, that [could] be a large burden for us to assume.”
The commissioners ultimately asked county manager David Ellis to attempt to negotiate the Gordons down to a lower purchase price. Ellis said he would come back to them in about a month with the couple’s answer.
County staff said that once Athens Drive Community Library is relocated to a stand-alone building with normal hours (it is currently open only 35 hours a week, compared to other Wake libraries’ 61), they expect many more people to begin using it.
“We are really under-serving the community with the library being in the school, because it’s not open when the school is open,” Jacobs said.
Hannah Mckenzie, who lives on Athens Drive and is a member of the Friends of Athens Drive Community Library advocacy group, told the INDY last year that the library’s walkability, bikeability, and proximity to a GoRaleigh bus stop are what makes it such a valuable community space. Neighbors have staved off several past attempts to shutter the library.
“We want [the library] to be a safe place for our kids, something they can walk to,” Mckenzie said. “We want the folks in the community who don’t have access to personal vehicles to be able to access the library. That’s what makes this library unique—we’re hitting big swathes of this really diverse population. That’s what we would like to see again. … If they put the library here, we’ll be able to see that vibrancy again.”
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