What kind of experience is that? One where you can walk or bike to the office, get a great cup of coffee during the day and a decent beer after work, hang out in a park across from your house and shop nearby. The kind of environment that’s attracting startups to New York City, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. (and pushing real estate values up at the same time). “Whether you feel comfortable or agree with that approach to life, it’s how they make decisions today,” Geolas says.

So Research Triangle Park needed another intervention. A couple years ago, the foundation hired consultants from New York City to put together a new master plan that would insert housing and retail clusters between the office complexes. To make it possible for people to live in the park, they had to change the law so that new residents would pay normal taxes, and fix a zoning ordinance that had codified the low-density layout. Now, they’ve got a developer signed up for the construction, and are planning a public rollout of the plan in early November, complete with a state-wide promotional bus tour.

The vision, alas, remains fuzzy. While name-checking big cities where college grads work and live in the same neighborhoods, Geolas hesitates to even speculate about how many housing units the park will eventually have, or how much it will cost to build out; they still need to do a market study that’ll determine who actually would want to live there and what they want. He also plans to convene an international panel of architects and designers who’ll sketch out an aesthetic for the new neighborhoods so that it “doesn’t look like just another mixed-use development” like you might find in other new urbanist enclaves—something modern, he figures, in line with the park’s techy raison d’etre. Geolas had retained the firm that consulted on Manhattan’s High Line, and wants to infuse a little of that 21st-century magic into what’s now thoroughly stuck in the past.

“Those are the kinds of experiences, the kinds of feelings that we want to provide in the park,” Geolas says. “That really allows you to reflect and say ’wow,’ and ‘aha,’ and ‘I know where I am.’”