Retail Villages & Communities
Living within a retail community can be a powerfully active and successful formula. To have retail, restaurant and service businesses, a downtown must have lots of residents. And in order to have residents attracted to live in a downtown community, there must be retail, restaurants and services. So what comes first? In some cases, it is a good idea to build both at the same time.
How much can we fit on 10 acres?
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Fenton Street, Cary NC
Fenton is not a street but a 92-acre mixed-use development in Cary, North Carolina, featuring retail, office, residential, and hotel spaces. The development includes fourteen buildings in its first phase and will ultimately consist of over 2.5 million square feet of mixed-use space, creating a destination for shopping, dining, and living in the Research Triangle region. But if we take small sections of the project, we see a model of mixing retail and residential with office and entertainment.
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Landscaping and smart street design
Church Street is notably wide, featuring 7-foot sidewalks on both sides that offer plenty of room for trees, bicycles, parking, and pedestrians. There is significant potential to transform the neglected, underutilized streets surrounding the N&R site. By investing time and careful planning into their optimal use, we can energize the edges of the N&R property and expand this emerging community space into the neighboring blocks that have long awaited positive development.
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Mixed use lifestyle centers?
On their own, a mixed use lifestyle center might be hard to imagine on the N&R site. We have so many goals for a community gathering center and only so much land. But elements of these retail / entertainment focused villages may give us key elements to weave into our plan.
