Boylan Heights, NC State and west Raleigh
West of downtown to NC State: Boylan Heights on its hill above the rail yards, Oberlin Village and Cameron Village, and Hillsborough Street along the front of the university.
Photograph: Rev. Plummer T. Hall House · Nyttend · Public domain · source
Boylan Heights was laid out in 1907 on the Boylan family's land west of downtown as one of Raleigh's first planned suburbs, and it has been a City historic overlay district since 1984. Oberlin was founded after the Civil War as a village of freed people, and the City made it a historic overlay district in 2018. Cameron Village opened in 1949 as a shopping center planned with apartments and houses around it, and its residential streets were listed on the National Register in 2011. Hillsborough Street runs along the north edge of NC State and has a municipal service district of its own. 4 guides are listed below.
The university sets the market in much of this area. Apartments near campus are built and priced for students, leases follow the academic year, and the Hillsborough Street district adds its own levy to fund services along the corridor. The houses are a different market: Boylan Heights and the small historic stock around Cameron Village and Oberlin are a short walk from downtown and campus alike, and the constraint is review over the front of the house rather than the price of the lot. Dorothea Dix Park, the former state hospital grounds the City bought in 2015, lies just south of Boylan Heights, and what is built around it over the next decade is the open question for everything nearby.
4 communities, guide by guide
Boylan Heights
An early planned suburb on the hill west of the rail yards, under historic district review, looking across at downtown with Dix Park just to the south.
- 758
- Residents of the 20 census blocks inside the historic overlay, Census Bureau, 2020 census
- 1984
- Boylan Heights becomes a historic overlay district at the neighborhood's request, City of Raleigh zoning case Z-124-1984
Cameron Village
A postwar shopping center planned with its own garden apartments and small houses, where the retail is being rebuilt taller while the streets behind it are a National Register district.
- 252
- Residents of the six census blocks inside the Register district, Census Bureau, 2020 census
- 1947
- The Cameron Village plan is approved, North Carolina's first planned mixed-use development, NC State Historic Preservation Office, 2011 nomination
Hillsborough Street
The street along the front of NC State, where housing is built and leased around the academic year and the Hillsborough Street district adds a levy of its own.
- 13 cents
- Hillsborough Street Municipal Service District tax per $100 of assessed value, on top of the combined City and county 90.91 cents, Wake County tax rate table, 2026
- 2,742
- Residents of the 26 census blocks centered inside the district, counted before 101 Cox Avenue and 2600 Hillsborough Street were built, Census Bureau, 2020 census
Oberlin
A village founded by freed people after the Civil War, now a City historic district holding its ground between the new towers of Cameron Village and Wade Avenue.
- 1,072
- Residents of the six census blocks whose center falls inside the overlay, 897 of them in one block that also takes in the apartment buildings on Wade Avenue and Oberlin Road, Census Bureau, 2020 census
- 2018
- Oberlin Village becomes a General Historic Overlay District, effective 6 February, City of Raleigh zoning case Z-30-17
Photographs: A house on Boylan Avenue by Warren LeMay, CC0, Wikimedia Commons · Wachovia Building Company Contemporary Ranch House by Nyttend, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons · Holladay Hall at NC State by Warren LeMay, CC0, Wikimedia Commons.
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}