North Raleigh

This city within a city just keeps growing-offering malls, libraries, shops, nearby highway access and a great place to raise a family. For more than 20 years, Tom Slater and his family have called North Raleigh home. Moving from Georgia, they looked all across the Triangle for the ideal home in a family-friendly neighborhood. They found it in the North Ridge subdivision, an original North Raleigh neighborhood.
 

Today, Slater still is glad that his family settled in the section of Raleigh that has continued to explode with growth and development. "We wanted a progressive community with a lot of nearby amenities," says Slater, an engineer and citywide civic leader. "The area has just continued to grow and get better with time." Growing Fast With new homes, shops and businesses, North Raleigh has boomed into its own thriving and ever expanding city within a city. Hospitals, schools, libraries and parks help compliment the urban setting. 

Today, North Raleigh is bound on the east by Triangle Towne Center, an upscale mall off Capital Boulevard with more shops, homes and offices around it, and Brier Creek, a retail center off U.S. 70. The Beltline is North Raleigh's southern border.  In between the two large retail centers is the Falls Lake watershed, where development restrictions to protect Raleigh's chief water source have limited the growth, but rural areas are attracting new builders and million-dollar homes. While the region already was growing when Slater moved in 1984, it really exploded about a decade ago when the first cars passed along Interstate 540, which arcs from Interstate 40 at Research Triangle Park to Triangle Towne Center. Some of Raleigh's fastest-growing areas are along its path.

The portion of North Raleigh stretching from the Beltline past I-540 will account for 54 percent of the city's population growth by 2030, according to city leaders. About 50,000 homes are projected to be built in the same area. Jessie Taliaferro knows something about all this growth and the challenges it brings. She represents District B, or central North Raleigh, on the Raleigh City Council. "As we grow, we want to keep the quality of life high but the costs to the consumers low," she says. "It is a great area with a lot of family-oriented neighborhoods, and we just have to work hard to keep it that way."

Affluence Lives Here
Two exclusive private country club and golf course communities help make North Raleigh the wealthiest area in the Triangle. Wakefield Plantation and several other upscale North Raleigh subdivisions located off Six Forks Road fall within 27614, the wealthiest ZIP code in the Triangle. That's according to mapping software company ESRI, which in 2005 ranked the ZIP code's richest areas based on a variety of indicators.

In addition to Wakefield Plantation, other upscale residential neighborhoods such as Greywalls, Chatsworth Overlook, Bay Leaf Farm, Devon and Sheffield have helped propel 27614 to one of the best addresses in the Triangle. Brier Creek, another country club and golf course community in North Raleigh, is located in 27617, the second richest ZIP code in the Triangle. Wake County native Henry MacNair recalls when large, expensive houses in North Raleigh were few and far between. Today, one of the partners in Creedmoor Partners, MacNair is helping to reshape the landscape with upscale neighborhoods. "About 25 years ago, I remember driving out to see a home in North Raleigh with 3,000-square-feet and thinking how big it was," he says.

"Today, that is a modest size home compared to what is being built out there now." In February, MacNair and partner Carlton Midyette announced plans to build another golf course community, Hasentree. With 423 home sites, it will be located in the Falls Lake watershed off N.C. 98. MacNair says about half of the homebuyers in his North Raleigh neighborhoods are coming from other parts of the Triangle. Homes costing more than $1 million also are more commonplace in many of his communities.

Shopping Abounds
In the past three years, the North Raleigh junctions of Capital Boulevard and I-540 and U.S. 70 and I-540 have become shopping and traffic hubs. More stores and offices will follow as the thoroughfare expands both east and westward. These junctions are among several areas city planners have pegged for high-density development. 

In northern Wake County, the amount of rentable square feet of retail space increased by 50.5 percent between mid-2000 and mid-2005, according to Karnes Research, which collects Triangle commercial real estate data. Triangle Towne Center, a 1.3-million-square-foot mall, opened in August 2002 at the intersection of Capital Boulevard and I-540 near Old Wake Forest Road. The state's first Saks Fifth Avenue store opened in the mall in 2004. Other mall anchor stores include Dillard's, Hecht's, Hudson Belk and Sears. Brier Creek is a retail mecca off U.S. 70 and I-540 on the line of Wake and Durham counties. BJ's Wholesale Club, Target, Barnes and Noble and Dick's Sporting Goods anchor the center. 

Raleigh's first Wal-Mart Supercenter is located in Alexander Place, a shopping center just north of I-540 and close to Brier Creek. And Target is the anchor of Poyner Place, a shopping center adjacent to Triangle Towne Center.   North Raleigh residents also will get more places to shop in 2006. Developer John Kane is planning a massive addition to his new North Hills development off Six Forks Road. Three years ago, Kane demolished the old North Hills mall, replacing it with boutiques, restaurants and a 14-screen movie theater. REI also has its first Raleigh store in the shopping center.

Farther north, the old Plantation Inn site has been cleared to make way for another large shopping center with tenants such as BJ's Wholesale Club and Circuit City. And a Charlotte developer is planning to develop 72 acres across from Triangle Towne Center and Poyner Place. School Issues While North Raleigh fills with more homes, stores and offices, more challenges are placed upon the Wake County school system.  Wake is opening two new elementary schools in North Raleigh on a year-round schedule to handle the school system's growth. Many students are being moved in the system's reassignment plan to help ease overcrowding at some schools.

Carol Parker represents central North Raleigh on the Wake County Board of Education. She has lived in the area since 1989, witnessing much of the growth first- hand. "As more families move into North Raleigh, we are facing more pressures on the schools on a day-to-day basis," Parker says. "For some neighborhoods, the closest schools do not have any more room and students are having to be sent to other schools. It can be a difficult situation." Facing Challenges For Tom Slater, the long-time North Raleigh resident, these growth issues are just part of a thriving community. As chairman of the North Citizens Advisory Council for 10 years, he has worked to ease the development challenges facing the area.

"We want to make sure we change into the type of community we want to become," he says. "The challenges are the ability to work through all the growth issues to make North Raleigh even a better place to live and work."

Jane Paige is a freelance writer