As towers and apartments are built, Research Triangle Park is ‘going vertical’ in 2022

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, billions of dollars have poured into Research Triangle Park.

The investments, to the tune of more than $4.5 billion, will be transformative for the region, bringing in thousands of jobs as well as new lab space and offices to attract even more employers. Most notably, the country’s largest technology company, Apple, is planning to make RTP home to some 3,000 employees.

The investments will also change how Triangle residents interact with the Park, which for the past 60 years has been a collection of solitary corporate fortresses that people zip by on Interstate 40.

In the near future, apartments, restaurants and shops will sit alongside labs and offices.

The most visible of those projects, HUB RTP, is expected to begin rising out of the ground later this year. The $1.5 billion project, at the corner of Davis Drive and N.C. 54, will add the first office towers, apartments and retail to the Park, part of an effort to create a city center in a suburban environment.

“This year, we’re going vertical,” said Scott Levitan, the CEO of the foundation that manages Research Triangle Park and the backer of HUB RTP. “RTP is starting to modernize.”

For more than a decade, many have worried locally that RTP was becoming a relic, as urban centers surged in popularity. The past two years, though, have shown it still has a lot of life.

Already, the Research Triangle Foundation has opened the Boxyard, a collection of shipping containers home to restaurants, cafes and breweries. And its Frontier campus, one of its earliest efforts at modernizing the park by providing flexible workspace, is now home to more than 100 companies (about a third of all companies in the Park), many of them startups.

“Five years ago, we didn’t have a place for those 100 companies,” Levitan said. “That’s been a phenomenal change.”

But that’s far from the only change coming to the Park.

Just in the past month, a prominent lab developer dropped $100 million on 122 acres in RTP for a potential new life sciences campus and, on land just outside of RTP’s borders, a different developer plans to spend $1 billion to build 1.5 million square feet of lab and retail space.

A surge in biotech investments has been a big driver of the past two years’ investments. The Triangle region, as a whole, has become one of the premier clusters for talent in gene therapy, highlighted by RTP-based AskBio being bought by Bayer in a deal worth up to $4 billion.

Joel Marcus, the executive chairman of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, a large lab builder, said the Triangle is benefiting now because it has been investing in the life sciences for decades.

“You can’t just go to some random city ... and say, ‘We’re going to build a (life science) cluster,’” he said. “That’s really hard to do, and it is about a 25-year effort.”

Companies and investors want to go to places that have track records and talent, he added.

2022 could also be the year that Apple begins to make its presence felt in the Triangle.

Its fellow tech giant, Google, has already begun hiring at its new downtown Durham office, but Apple’s new campus in RTP will take time to build.

In the meantime, Apple can be found in nearby Cary, where it is investing in a temporary space in one of the MetLife office towers off Weston Parkway.

News & Observer readers: Click here for 5 Signs of Change: Part Five.

Durham Herald-Sun readers: Click here for 5 Signs of Change: Part Five.

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 January 23, 2022 at 6:00 AM with the headline "As towers and apartments are built, Research Triangle Park is ‘going vertical’ in 2022."