I’ve been in business in Raleigh for more than 20 years. I’ve watched this city grow up, and I’ve watched downtown grow right with it. For a long time I was genuinely excited about where it was headed. Downtown used to feel alive. Fayetteville Street was busy, Glenwood was packed, and the Warehouse District took off. New restaurants and bars kept opening. There were festivals, concerts and random events pulling people downtown almost every weekend. It felt like the city was getting better every year.
I invested here because of that. I opened businesses, hired people, and kept putting money back into Raleigh because I believed in it. I still do. But the last couple years have been hard to watch.
There’s no single reason downtown is struggling. We made a bunch of decisions, ignored some problems for too long, dragged our feet on others, and slowly lost some of the things that made the place work…