🏢 Top Five 26.30
👋Welcome to the Top Five, a weekly newsletter by Jed Byrne that demystifies Raleigh development. If a friend sent you this email, you can subscribe below!
Good morning!
Big Trees, Small Scale Coffee
Last week I spent some time in Southern California visiting Sequoia, Kings Canyon, and Channel Islands National Parks. It was crazy to see what typical 6am traffic on a Wednesday looks like in LA, but great to see big trees and beautiful mountains.
As I looked through photos this morning, I realized how hard it is to show the scale of the redwood trees in a photo. They are HUGE!
The large scale of the redwoods makes the typical pine trees merely look like small trees. The pine trees in the photos above are full grown. The General Grant tree is 268’ tall with a base diameter of 29’.
While we were out there, I also spotted some great small scale retail. At the Ventura Promenade we visited Freedom Coffee. I chatted up the barista to learn that they store the entire operation in a storage unit in a nearby parking deck. Every morning, he rolls the stand out to the promenade. They pay for power and rent the patio space from the adjacent restaurant.
The plug-in power is the only permanent infrastructure. Everything on the cart is electric, and he brings water in via mini-kegs-on-wheels.
The barista said the biggest challenges with an outside coffee setup are 1) wind blowing over his shade structure and 2) needing to constantly adjust the grinding and brewing to account for changing weather.
I’d love to see more of these micro-locations in the Triangle.
International Small Scale
Given my obsession with small scale commercial real estate, I sometimes get photos of interesting projects sent to me. Fellow Top Five reader, Trey Adams, sent in the image below from London.
This is a bed store built under a bridge. I have a lot of questions, first and foremost, who owns the bridge and who is the lease signed with!
Best Regards,
Jed Byrne
P.S. Check out my new book 📚: Start Small Selling - helping A/E/C/ professionals turn expertise into opportunity.
On to the Top Five! ⤵️
1) Atrium Mixed-Use: If you’ve driven by The Atrium office building on Blue Ridge Road recently, you’ve noticed some construction. The landlord is adding 7,500 feet of retail to the front of the building.
2) Raleigh Parking: New parking rates in Raleigh take effect on 8/1. I’m probably one of the few people who actually want to see street parking rates get more expensive (where there is demand). At minimum, having street parking cheaper than garage parking drives people to park on the street rather than in the decks. This fills up our most valuable parking first and exacerbates the visual perception of a “lack of parking” downtown. I’ll have to write more on my thoughts, but one hurdle I haven’t figured out is the complaint that more expensive parking “prices out” our lower wealth neighbors, which is not good. Maybe the “solution” is leaving some street parking to be free (though in reality, I don’t think that will help anyone since those free spots will likely always be full).
3) Shade Map: I had fun playing with this shade map. Zoom out to the whole state for best effect.
4) West End Apartments: Blue Heron plans to break ground soon on The Rosewood apartments on South Saunders. The project includes 260 apartments and 5ksf of retail.
5) Standard Beer + Food at North Hills: The second Standard location is now open at North Hills Innovation District.
6) Steve Stroud: Local real estate legend Steve Stroud passed away at 83.
