The Raleigh City Council met on October 7, 2025, in afternoon and evening sessions to consider consent agenda items, receive reports, hold public hearings, and vote on several rezoning cases. The evening session focused on four rezoning requests and included extensive public comment and council deliberation.
All right, everybody. Thanks for coming. We have the public hearings tonight. The first is street closing STCO2 2025. Mr. Rao. Good evening, Madam Mayor and Council members. My name is Amanda Jones with Transportation. I have for you today a proposed closure for a portion of Swinburne Street. So the area indicated in red is the closure area, and our applicant is Thomas Kavanagh of Wake Med. He is the Vice President of Facilities and Construction. This area is. You can see the site outlined in a heavy black line in the drawing on the right. So there are some use restrictions here. They have prohibited a handful of uses, an old establishment, pawn shop, other things. They have also limited office square footage to 500,000 gross square feet. They have offered some conditions around building height and stepbacks. So building heights are limited based on a submitted exhibit. I'm going to talk through that in a little bit more detail on a subsequent slide. So they have prohibited, they are prohibiting on site surface parking between any building and the eastern boundary of the site, which is the location of the park. They have said that any site plan will include pedestrian connectivity along the eastern boundary of the site to the park. And they have also specified a minimum 2500 square foot outdoor amenity area meeting the urban plaza standards and city regulations that would be located either along Peace Street andor adjacent to the park. They have also made a condition around affordable housing, making a contribution to the city's affordable housing fund. This is staggered across four payments. The first is tied to the first building permit for the first 200 units. The second payment is tied to the final building inspection for the second for the first 200 units, and then another pair of payments on that same timing at the 500th unit. They are offering tower separation between floors 13 and 20 for a minimum of 50 feet, and then floors uh 21 through 27, separated by a minimum of 75 feet. That's a 50% increase above what's currently required by code. Zoning in the area is mixed. There's industrial mixed use on the site and immediately adjacent, downtown mixed use adjacent, and then uh R10 as well as office mixed use, residential mixed use, neighborhood mixed use, all in the vicinity. This is an aerial view of the site. You can see the future Smoky Hollow Park site on the east side of the site. You can see Seaboard Station on the other side of Capitol Boulevard and the railroad tracks, and then on the uh to the west across West Street and Railroad Tracks, Glenwood, Brooklyn neighborhood. Another more of a 3D view of the site. You can get a feel for the low-scale industrial development that's currently there. A view from Peace Street, a view from West Street. This is looking south, and then a view from West Street at the north end of the site. So I want to go back to that condition around building height. What they have done is set the ceiling for building height rather than the floor because there's significant grade on the site, right? So the north end of the site is limited to 24 stories, not to exceed 240 feet, and then could be taller if the primary street is P Street, and then in the southern portion of the site, limited to 27 stories. Again, that 20-foot differential and a maximum of 360 feet. So the bottom half in blue here is the 27-story, northern half in yellow, 24 stories. And here's roughly, this is not a surveyor's drawing. This is a PowerPoint drawing, but roughly where that falls on the site applied to an aerial photograph. So the big change here is a significant increase in residential units. The office square footage is actually going down, being held steady by the zoning condition. Industrial uses are also going away because of the zoning condition as well as the base district proposed. So this is consistent with the future land use map. The future land use map designates this site as central business district. The DX base district is consistent with that.