Suburban Spotlight – Wendell

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Continuing the suburban exploration series with Wendell, NC. Before we dive in, make sure to head back and check out my previous spotlights.

Wendell is an emerging suburb located approximately 15 miles East of Raleigh. It has seen a period of rapid growth due to it’s proximity to Downtown Raleigh and relative affordability when compared to other areas in Wake County. While just home to 4,000 in 2000, the Town is now home to around 15,000 and growing daily.

While most of the growth has been what one would consider to be sprawl, Wendell has a few good qualities that set it apart from typical suburbs.

Development Pipeline:

Downtown Wendell: Home to many local shops and restaurants, Historic Downtown Wendell is off the beaten path with it’s Main Street not featuring through traffic. There are finally signs of infill residential taking place downtown which is the single best thing for the Town.

Note: I do not own, control, or have any say over any parcels. This is purely a conceptual idea to illustrate the potential of Downtown as a vibrant, sustainable, mixed-use center.

Wendell Falls: Wendell Falls is a massive 4000 residence community on the Eastern edge of town featuring a mix of single family, townhomes, apartments, retail, and services. While it is greenfield in nature, the grid structure, density, and mixed-use concepts have some new-urbanist components. While far from perfect, it was a great place to call home for three years.

It’s unfortunate that plans for the Collective mixed-use district seem to have been watered down but zoning still allows for up to 2 million square feet of non-commercial use. Marketing material originally illustrated a vibrant mixed use district with full scale grocery and a town-center type village. Now apartments without ground floor retail dominate the site with a far smaller retail portion. Just a harsh reality of building costs now.

Much of the land between the two main areas of Wendell Falls is for sale. Maybe that can one day make up for that loss.

Note: I do not own, control, or have any say over any parcels. This is purely a conceptual idea to illustrate the potential of these parcels as a vibrant, sustainable, mixed-use center.

Focused growth nodes: The Wendell 2030 Blueprint plan featured themes around focusing growth in nodes around connected corridors in the Town.

Greenspace: The town has an abundance of greenspace and preserves. The recent passage of a Parks and Recs bond as well as continued investment from Wake County have Wendell punching way above it’s weight in the parks department.

Golfcarts: The town has a robust golf cart culture with 100s of registered golf carts used for transportation. Anything to get cars off the road is a win! Yes, there’s even golf cart parades.

FURTHER READING

InPhil Designs: InPhil Designs

Wendell Articles (Please note, a lot of these contained outdated references)

All things Raleigh: https://philveasley.com/raleigh/

Phil Veasley is a Professional Engineer working to design safer multimodal infrastructure in cities throughout the US.

My goal is to create cities that are safe and effective for all people to move about outside of cars. To achieve that we have to focus on creating equitable, dense, and vibrant cities full of walkable neighborhoods with a various mix of housing choices, schools, restaurants, and services. We cannot have safe multimodal infrastructure without the density to support it and we cannot have equitable density without safe multimodal infrastructure. Outside of designing safe streets, my passions are sketching ideas for infill neighborhoods, floor plans, urban photography, and exploring our cities on foot or bike. Please check out the menus above for all of my ideas and also check out my YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter accounts.

Opinions and insights are my own and are not representative of my employer or any organization.