NC State gets greenlight for buildings up to 28 stories tall on Centennial Campus
The City of Raleigh approved a rezoning this week for N.C. State University’s Centennial Campus that would allow for major redevelopment, including the construction of buildings up to 28 stories tall.
In the past decade, Centennial Campus has become a popular landing spot for companies expanding in Raleigh.
Located just a few minutes from downtown Raleigh, it feels at once like a suburban office park and a college campus. The school’s Hunt Library is located there as well as most of its engineering school. But companies like Bandwidth, Live Oak Bank and Lexis Nexis all maintain offices there as well. Raleigh Founded has a co-working office on the campus, too, and promising startups, like the AI company Pryon call it home.
And before Red Hat moved into its current office tower downtown, the software firm based its operations out of Centennial Campus for many years.
In total, there is already 5 million square feet of public and private buildings on Centennial, and 75 companies and government agencies have offices there.
When Amazon considered Raleigh as a site for its much-hyped HQ2, regional leaders talked up the campus and offered a vision of adding soaring towers to it.
The rezoning, initially submitted last year, means that future is still a possibility, despite Amazon deciding against the Triangle.
The rezoning applies to 975 acres of the more-than-1,000-acre campus with the application dividing up the campus into nine different sections. All seek varying heights for buildings, from three stories to 28. The Spring Hill district, located east of Centennial, is not included in the plans.
Flexible plan for growth
Alicia Knight, N.C. State’s associate vice chancellor for real estate and development, called the rezoning a plan that “provides flexibility for the university’s growth over time,” adding no specific plans for the campus are in place yet.
The actual rezoning application, for instance, has not outlined where any potential new buildings would be located or what their footprints would look like.
“There is no specific development timeline for build-out of the entitlements provided under the rezoning,” she said in an email. “The rezoning provides opportunity for the university to make future decisions about the development of its campus within the broadly defined zoning parameters.”
Knight previously has said more residential options on Centennial Campus could be included in the future.
The university is also committed to preserving large amounts of open space on the campus, which is home to the Lonnie Poole Golf Course.
“The rezoning calls for maintaining approximately 233 acres of open space — approximately 25 percent of the campus,” she said. “This is in addition to the land area of Lonnie Pool Golf Course, which by its nature as an operating golf course is largely open green space and makes up approximately another 25 percent of the campus.”
Mixing industry with academics
But the plans also would leave plenty of space for Centennial’s bread and butter, which is mixing industry with academia.
Knight said the rezoning also lays the groundwork for the creation of the North Oval Innovation District, a potential 32-acre section of the campus that would see more urban-like development.
There’s no timeline for its construction, but the innovation district is “envisioned as a premier destination for university and industry collaboration,” Knight said.
NC State Chancellor Randy Woodson wrote an opinion piece in The News & Observer last year, saying the expansion of the campus will help fulfill the vision of Centennial that was laid out when the land was given to the university in 1984.
“The vision was to create an innovative research campus where private companies could work in collaboration with university researchers and students to solve the challenges facing our society,” Woodson wrote.
The denser development, he added, will allow the campus to keep up with trends and develop a “live-learn-work-play vision for future development in alignment with how the region has evolved.”
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate
This story was originally published May 21, 2021 at 6:00 AM with the headline "NC State gets greenlight for buildings up to 28 stories tall on Centennial Campus."
