You do dish it out with your posts about Chatham County being paradise and Raleigh being a hopelessly second-tier city. Can’t be surprised when it comes back around.
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I fight for the underdog. Chihuahuas will bite you when provoked.
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You’re in a forum based on a blog that has the purpose of “to create interest and start conversations about Raleigh’s urban center.” Shouldn’t be too surprising that people here might prefer urban centers and dislike suburbs.
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I prefer to live in the suburbs and hang out in urban centers. I see both as having pros and cons. The same with rural areas, the woods, the beach, the mountains, etc. I don’t feel like it needs to be a contest (not implying you were saying that). I think it’s a preference, and it’s nice to live in a state where all of these are options, so people can choose what suits them. But you’re completely right that this forum is going to have an expected urban bias. I’m not gonna come on here and try to convince everyone the merits of living in a cabin in the woods.
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To be fair, you choose to participate in a downtown Raleigh community. What do you expect the prevailing narrative here to be? That would be like me belonging to a Cary group or a Chatham County group while extolling the virtues of downtown Raleigh.
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I did purposely post the rankings with Cary being #2 knowing that it would bring out the Cary / suburb haters. It never fails to disappoint. I am like GucciLittlePig. I prefer living in Cary and also love working downtown Raleigh. I find that I enjoy both.
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Maybe I’ve missed it, but I don’t feel there are too many Cary haters around here. The downtown Cary park always gets a lot of love.
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In that case, this is in the wrong thread. Let me fix it for you.
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Cary is Raleigh’s best suburb easily. Proximity to DTR and RTP is worth something. It has a small but lively town center of its own, and excellent greenways on par with Raleigh’s. So there’s no surprise it’s a desirable place for many. Until the options for urban living in the Triangle reach a certain threshold sprawl will sadly continue to be the way most people have to live and if you’re going to do it, well…
Historically it was the suburb to sneer at but things change. Cary’s a sprawlfest but not all sprawl is made equally, and it’s more characterful and better planned than Morrisville and has waaaaay better proximity to things than Holly Springs, Garner, Wake Forest, Knightdale.
Edit - //// Yeah Apex I see as “Cary 2: Electric Boogaloo” at this point. Apex, like Cary, has some elements of a “rail suburb” and will likely see an uptick in urban form projects the same way North Raleigh is seeing.
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I like Apex’s downtown more, but hopefully the new Cary downtown redevelopment goes through and gives it less of a strip mall vibe.
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People in Cary are already bitching to high heaven that their charming historic downtown is being destroyed. Lol. What??
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I go to H-Mart a lot and hate the streetscape of Cary. The city was never designed to get as big as it is now.
I used to go to First Baptist Church in downtown Cary in the 90s when ‘downtown’ Cary was nothing but the church, Ashworth’s drugs, Johnson Jewelers, and the old library. To see what it has become since just the 2010s has been impressive. I live out in the Apex area now and their downtown Salem street area reminds me of what Academy/Chatham street in Cary used to look like. Most of the growth in Apex currently is more of the sprawling suburbs out in the New Hill/Friendship part of town since that’s where most of the undeveloped land is.
I do think downtown Apex will start to see development in the future. They do call out developing housing options in the ‘downtown’ area in their Master Downtown Plan. I think the construction of the S-Line station in the downtown area will certainly do that as well. However I think Apex is years away from that sort of development. I watched an Apex town council meeting previously and one of the councilors mentioned a lot of that area would need to be rezoned as some sort of TOD area in preparation of the S-Line coming through.
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I’d argue that right now Cary doesn’t have a Salem Street equivalent. The Chatham/Academy intersection is still gaptoothed with surface parking and strip-mall style development, while Downtown Apex is two blocks of consistent historic shop fronts, with the parking tucked away behind and out of sight.
I’m optimistic Cary can do a bigger modern version - their leadership seems committed to placemaking in their downtown.
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I would just like to chime in and support the motion that Cary blows and that list is a joke. How is Savannah not on there?
I would just like to chime in and support the motion that Cary blows and that list is a joke. How is Savannah not on there?
I was going to guess ‘crime’ and ‘unemployment’ rates, the same reason they probably picked many suburbs over their core cities. Yet… Wilmington NC is on there so I have no clue actually. Looking at their description of their metrics, I’m even more confused.
on another note…
TedF: 95% of Raleigh is sprawl. Pretty much everything in the entire Triangle is sprawl. Look at a map of Raleigh for an even bigger laugh.
I am laughing. Laughing. Let me show you what sprawl around a REAL CITY can be:
“Walkable, hip Denver”, featuring some of the worst air quality.
Charlotte’s sprawl is truly impressive. Whenever I get jealous of their skyline or their light rail, I can just look at this and remind myself it could be worse.
I never truly understood how bad a city can be until I visited LA. Absolute shithole. Idk how we fix this, maybe nuke it and start over? I know the Census tells us San Bernadino is another metro but… sometimes the Census is wrong. What do your eyes tell you?
Houston’s metro is the same size as the area you could form by drawing a triangle between Downtown Raleigh, Greensboro, and Charlotte. Look into the face of the beast.
So how does Raleigh stack up to all of this?
To a large extent Raleigh’s metro is saved by the watersheds from the lakes. So I’m going to get swamped from all angles here but understand that NC has a background rural density that is very high compared to any other state, and this affects the way the Census defines metros in a weird way. I am drawing the line where the metro density drops off (to me) to the same level as rural piedmont.
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High rural density indeed. At least as late as the 1980 census, NC was the largest (pop) state w/out a city of a million. All those smallish cities of 25,000, supported by tobo.
Your point about Houston’s sprawl (Ral to Chrlt to G’boro) really brings its size home
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I believe that metro Houston is larger in area than the state of New Jersey.
I lived in Houston for a short time in the 90s. That is one place that I would never consider living in again.
Bye bye bye bye have fun in Huston texas