Measuring Community Character

Jun 27, 2024 | Blog

At their June 18 meeting, Council weighed five negative impacts of Raleigh‘s Missing Middle rules on the Environment, Affordability, Neighborhood Character, Infrastructure, and Community Engagement.

Staff slide of five Missing Middle impacts

Council voted 6 to 1 (Councilor Branch was not in attendance) to pursue rule changes reducing those impacts, including impacts to neighborhood character, with holdout Mayor Baldwin dismissing neighborhood concerns about overscaled infill as ‘subjective.’ IndyWeek quoted Baldwin: “I feel very strongly about the word character and how this is portrayed and I don’t want to be that person who judges other people with character”
 
Fortunately the six Councilors understand that weighing the impacts of growth on community character is not subjective. Instead, character is a key function of planning practice [see APA below] referenced throughout Raleigh’s own Comprehensive Plan [see Comp Plan below]. Staff’s own photo of overscaled apartments towering over an older cottage makes the compelling case for better infill compatibility rules in a way that almost no one could ignore.  

Staff photo illustrating the impact of overscaled infill

APA – American Planning Association – Measuring Community Character

“While there are many potential ways to measure the urban form of a neighborhood or town, a small number of these measurements seem to have a disproportionate effect on how people perceive community character.

These key measures are the heights and widths of buildings, the distances between the fronts of buildings and the edges of streets, the distances between buildings on the same side of the street, the distances between facing buildings, the distances between parallel and intersecting streets, and the variation in those heights, widths, and distances across the community (or a defined subarea of the community).”

COMP PLAN –  Key Policy LU 7.1 “…Zoning and design standards should ensure that the height, mass, and scale of development within nodes respects the integrity and character of surrounding residential areas and does not unreasonably impact them.”

Livable Raleigh Editorial Team

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