Warehouses give way to apartment towers, bus station in Raleigh’s Warehouse District

Century-old buildings that helped give Raleigh’s Warehouse District its name are coming down, as work begins on two new apartment towers and a local bus depot next to the city’s train station.

Workers are nearly finished demolishing and carting away the longtime home of the Dillon Supply Co. and an adjacent building on West Street. The two-story red brick buildings were among several that businesses built during the heyday of railroads to be near the tracks that converged on the west side of downtown.

In their place will rise Union West, with 560 rental apartments, 600 parking spaces and ground-floor retail in an area that has been transformed in the last decade. The towers — one 17 stories, the other 32 — will be within a block of software company Citrix Systems, the Morgan Street Food Hall, Weaver Street Market and the apartments and 17-story office tower of The Dillon, completed by Kane Realty in 2018.

Developer Hoffman & Associates will build the $300 million towers and bus station on property owned by GoTriangle, the regional bus agency. Union West will have eight bays for GoRaleigh and GoTriangle buses a short walk from Raleigh Union Station, the train station that was built in the shell of a former Dillon Supply steel warehouse. The planned bus depot has long been known as Raleigh Union Station Bus or RUS Bus.

RUS Bus will provide a second downtown focal point for local buses, adjacent to the train station. GoRaleigh Station, where many of the city’s routes begin and end, is more than half a mile away on the east side of downtown. More than $32 million in local, state and federal funding are helping to build the new station.

GoTriangle’s predecessor, the Triangle Transit Authority, bought the 1.76-acre West Street property with help of a federal transportation grant in 2005 in hopes of building a commuter rail station on it. That iteration of commuter rail ultimately failed to win federal funding and was abandoned the following year.

Now the Triangle is again considering whether to build a commuter rail line between Durham and either Garner or Clayton. If Triangle communities get behind the project and it wins federal support, commuter trains would stop at Raleigh Union Station, next door not only to RUS Bus but also hundreds of new apartments, said John Florian, Hoffman’s executive vice president of development.

“It’s a great opportunity to provide some of the residential density that supports public transportation,” Florian said in an interview.

Until recently, Hoffman had planned to include a hotel in Union West, with fewer apartments. But coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand and financing for a hotel are less clear, Florian said.

‘We need downtown housing’

Eliminating the hotel and its guest entrance and drop-off area will make it easier to design the bus station, said GoTriangle president and CEO Charles Lattuca. And increasing the housing is a positive step, said Sig Hutchinson, outgoing head of the Wake County Board of Commissioners who also leads GoTriangle’s board.

“I’m appreciative of the fact that they’re moving to residential,” Hutchinson told GoTriangle board members earlier this fall. “I think one thing we’ve learned is that we need housing downtown.”

As a condition for rezoning the property, the city required that 10% of the apartments be “affordable,” in this case priced for people earning 80% of area median income. Currently a couple earning no more than $68,500 would qualify for the affordable housing.

“They will be dispersed and essentially the same as other units,” Florian said. “So it’ll be, I think, some of the nicest affordable housing in the area, being in a high-rise building.”

Hoffman expects to begin construction by next summer and begin renting the first apartments by the fall of 2025. The RUS Bus station is also scheduled to open in 2025 with the entire project completed by the fall of 2026.

The project should help better integrate Raleigh Union Station with downtown, Florian said. A new pedestrian bridge over a set of railroad tracks will connect the station with Union West and West Street, including an underused plaza along the street at the station’s entrance.

Like both The Dillon and Citrix, Union West will include parts of the old brick warehouse buildings it is replacing. Workers have braced the corner walls at West and Hargett streets and near the train station so they can be incorporated into the new building.

“The inspiration for the design of the project has been the character of the Warehouse District, particularly that street-level experience,” Florian said. “So we really look at the preservation of those walls as kind of being two focal points for that retail streetscape preservation.”