When many southwest Raleigh residents went to the polls in 2024 to cast a “yes” vote for Wake County’s $142 million public libraries bond, they expected that a successful bond referendum would ensure that their community library would remain in their community.
County staff, they say, had made the community that promise in 2022 after the library, housed inside Athens Drive Magnet High School since it opened in 1978, was thrice threatened with closure and saw its operating hours starkly reduced due to safety concerns and the pandemic.
“We supported the bond based on this promise and if we are betrayed, we should never forget it,” Yevonne Brannon, a neighborhood activist and former county commissioner, wrote in an email to neighbors ahead of a community meeting at the Thomas G. Crowder Woodland Center on Saturday morning, which the INDY attended.
Wake County Public Schools (WCPSS) will begin renovations to the high school in 2026, closing the library. The countywide bond allocates a total $67.1 million to build a new replacement for the Athens Drive library as well as community libraries in Rolesville, Apex, Wendell, and southeast Raleigh. Of that $67.1 million, the county has determined that $16.3 million is available for Athens Drive community library replacement.
Now, members of Wake County’s Board of Commissioners, making steady progress in implementing the bond, are weighing two sites for the library’s replacement.
One site, currently home to retired restaurateur Arthur Gordon’s Well Fed Community Garden, is less than a quarter-mile away on Athens Drive, just a four-minute walk from the library’s current location. (The INDY reported earlier this year on a rezoning application Gordon and his wife, Anya, had filed with the City of Raleigh to build affordable housing on the two-parcel property, but the Gordons withdrew their application in July.)
The other site is three miles or a 10-minute drive away and located in another town—Cary—at the intersection of Tryon Road and Yates Mill Pond Road.
WCPSS currently owns the Cary site, which, at more than 12 acres, is much larger and would provide ample space for parking.
The county would have to buy the Well Fed Community Garden site from the Gordons. The site is 2.6 acres and would require a two-story facility. The property is valued at around $840,000 for the combined two parcels.
District 2 Wake County Commissioner Safiyah Jackson attended Saturday’s community meeting. While her district covers Fuquay-Varina, Holly Springs and Garner, Jackson told the 70-some residents in attendance that she was happy to have a conversation with them about the library as she is one of seven commissioners who will have to make a final decision on a site.
County leaders, Jackson told the crowd, have to consider certain criteria in evaluating where to locate the library’s replacement, including what seems to be the county’s principle guiding metric: how many people in the county live within a 10-minute drive of a new library.
But, Jackson emphasized, no decisions will be made based on that single factor, and the county will also consider growth patterns—66 people move to Wake County each day—and the cost of land in “the equation of where we move the library, next door or five minutes away.”
“Your community connections, your walkability, your history, the reach, people that are already in this community … those are considerations as well as the larger amounts of Wake County who are able to drive to a library,” Jackson said.
Residents at the meeting said, overall, the better choice—to keep the library close—is clear. Their community is one of the densest and fastest-growing areas of the city, home to thousands of young families and well-served with walkable roads and sidewalks, bike lanes, and public transit.
“We have good potential for infill, and for land-saving, two-story construction of a library building without suburban sprawl,” said Joe Hartman, who lives near the library and recently turned 80.
Other residents called the 10-minute drive metric “arbitrary” and pointed out that the Cary site, while it technically has more residents within a ten-minute drive, isn’t located along any public transit routes.
Resident Jamie Hammermann, who has been taking her daughter to Athens Drive Community Library since she was eight months old, has conducted extensive research on the demographics and amenities around the two sites, including economic diversity and public transit access. Hammermann’s research shows that a few hundred households, or a fraction of a percentage of the overall county population, live within a 10-minute drive of the Cary site, a “nominal” increase over the number of households served by keeping Athens Drive library in its current part of town.
“Who would actually benefit are some pretty wealthy neighborhoods,” Hammermann said.
Jane Harrison, the Raleigh City Council representative for Raleigh’s District D, which includes Athens Drive High School, supports keeping the library in southwest Raleigh.
She noted how much new affordable housing has been built and is currently planned for the area, including new projects on Kent Road, Lorimer and Garland, Trailwood Drive, and Hope Village on Method Road, which will provide new homes for students aging out of foster care. These are all in addition to existing affordable housing, including the Raleigh Housing Authority’s Kentwood development on Kent Road just south of Western Boulevard.
“It’s not just one or two developments,” Harrison said. “We are in several qualified census tracts right around here, so they’re qualified for Low Income Housing Tax Credit projects. … This is all within this neighborhood. We’re going to continue to see that added density and I just want to make sure we have the infrastructure and amenities to serve our population.”
It’s not clear when the county commissioners will make a decision about the library site. Jackson said although the meeting marked her first conversation with the community, it won’t be the last. She promised to review the community’s feedback and get answers to questions that arose for her during the meeting,
“I will be transparent, however I vote, about how that decision is made,” Jackson said. “We’re not going to be voting in two weeks so there is time.”
But for the residents, it’s a matter of trust.
“Let’s not play any games, nobody’s going to fool this community or any voter that the replacement meant, ‘Now we can have an opportunity to close the Athens Drive Community Library and set up a regional library in Cary,’” said Brannon, the former county commissioner at the end of the meeting. “We voted for the bond. I’ve sat in the seat, I know the pressure, but I can tell you one thing you can’t do to the public. You could not lose their trust.”
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