I don’t know that I see an “RTP skyline” happening, unless it’s going to consist of a collection of mid-rise buildings no more than 150 ft tall or so. I got to thinking about how it might be nice to see a corridor of mid-rise office towers along I-40, but Scott makes an excellent point about Cary’s zoning laws and of course, the airport, which should be the primary concern for any construction in that area anyway. I’ve yet to see any mention about the office tower going up in Morrisville that’s at the Page Road exit on I-40. It appears to be topped out, but it’s easily the largest project happening outside of North Hills or DT at the moment.

A freeway zooming along Raleigh’s office towers would be nice - question is, where do you put it? Could you justify the cost of it? I do think at some point in the future we will see DT begin to stretch southward, although not soon because I think development will remain focused along the Hillsborough St. corridor which will eventually fill in between Glenwood South and DT. But I believe eyes will eventually turn southward beyond MLK/Western Blvd - starting with areas immediately near the Convention Center, of course. The city needs to look at this area soon to determine the best future use and re-development for it - along Saunders and Wilmington Streets in particular, all the way down to the Beltline. It’s not forgotten that whatever happens with the Dix campus nearby will have some degree of effect on the the south end of downtown as well.

I don’t know who said it earlier in the thread, but it sure would help downtown’s visibility to trim some of the bush along the beltline. Much of that area is part of the NCSU Centennial Campus and I wouldn’t expect anytthing to change there - but at least from Lake Wheeler Road to Rock Quarry, there are plenty of spots where it would be nice to catch more than a split second glimpse of the skyline through the trees as you travel the freeway.

Any density will have to come from private land that is near or almost surrounded by RTP, like Davis Park, the area around the Marriot, the Miami Blvd corridor and Imperial center (which is already pretty dense for a suburban business park).

If you have a few places like that with more density and places to potentially shop and eat, it will help the park as a whole, especially if they ever get some type of daytime transit circulation system going, like the Raleigh trolley or maybe 50 plus years from now a monorail around the park would be cool.

I agree there will never be any sort of actual skyline though.

Right now it may sound crazy to speak of an RTP skyline, but mark my words, someday it will happen. Not in an urban fashion, but rather something along the same lines with South Park (Charlotte). RTP has run out of space - for office park standards - and the next thing will be to go vertical. Again, NOT in an urban fashion, unless they start redeveloping along the major roads in RTP, which is possible in the future. Naturally, I expect Raleigh’s and Durham’s skylines to be far bigger than anything RTP can get

RTP has been planned since the 1950’s. It will be very difficult (expensive) to change a six decade trend. But if we were to change this trend, the first priority would be to get a freeway to downtown Raleigh. Next, city council needs to make the building process easier to developers by allowing more swift delivery of zoning requests. Developers tend to overlook cities that over scrutinize every project thrown their way. Finally, the city needs to offer tax breaks and infrastructure improvements to developers that bring in high density projects to downtown. Some might call this “begging” or a “kickback” but I prefer to call it an “economic development strategy”. That just sounds less dirty.

In the end, Raleigh will have more buildings downtown. More buildings means higher cost of land. Higher cost of land will insure that the next developer will have to build up in order to make a profit. This is how skylines are built!!!

Neither DT in Durham or Raleigh can rival RTP’s concentration of well paying employment which in a way hurts the DT efforts of both cities. In Charlotte besides the bank/office towers under construction there is a mid to high-rise condo boom going on even with some stalled projects. A selling point is with high gas prices folks want to live near work. So if the major hub for jobs is RTP I could see some major living developments in that area. I’d assume that is helping the Briar Creek overall development.