Charlotte’s nice and Raleigh’s nice. They’re very similar cities.
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i can sympathize with many more rural people having to worry about the cities so much…‘this much more extra tax dollars’ so the state can figure out how to work with some city govt about bike lane crossings…it likely doesn’t thrill them too much and I can see why if their roads are in disrepair. broader nc has had a history of some distrust of state govt plans. i can recall hunt giving a speech something to the effect of pitting others against “all the rich people in raleigh”.
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Yeah but what about the people? Tech bros > finance bros. Raleigh: 1, Charlotte: 0
Cities are what subsidize the most rural parts of every state lol
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Such a weird and insecure take…Charlotte grew with the demands of its economic base which mostly required large office spaces in its CBD. Every other city responds to whatever its needs are in a similar manner, in the style of the norms of the time. I don’t see how that is somehow less “organic” than up in Raleigh or especially Durham, which both had pretty stagnant downtowns through most of the 20th century until development interests finally began returning to urban areas for more than just office users. Fwiw, I’d rather have more of the ~100 yr old buildings from Raleigh than several of the towers here, but that’s not what the economic demands of the past century in Charlotte have dictated.
I think you’re the one being weird and insecure here. I have many good things to say about Charlotte and usually try to avoid pissing matches, because I want all NC’s cities to succeed. We are all dependent upon each other to an extent. I have visited the Queen City plenty of times and love what is happening in South End and NoDa.
The reasons for Charlotte’s lack of historical architecture in its core doesn’t matter. The fact is many US cities of a similar size had booming office markets at the same time and managed to retain more of their past than Charlotte did. Many of those cities have proportionately greater cultural exports than Charlotte does for a city its size. Some of Charlotte’s unfortunate planning choices like the 277 loop are things Raleigh also wanted to do but didn’t have the money for. The reasons don’t matter. At the end of the day, you’re going to have to learn to let Raleigh have a win occasionally without making a big defensive post about it. And one win is that the core neighborhoods have better architectural variety and organically without freeway intrusion.
Just take a moment to appreciate this. You can see more rail than asphalt in this view. The walk from Hillsborough Street into Downtown is enjoyable. It feels like a proper entrance to a major city.
The walk into Charlotte from its equivalent urban spoke is… a work in progress.
The success of the Blue Line in completely transforming South End and revitalizing NoDa over the past two decades says you are wrong (or willfully ignorant) about fixing things with government money…
I assume you don’t know very much about me because I’m definitely not a “government is always bad” guy. Not sure where this is coming from.
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I have a new Doctor who moved here from Austin. She and her spouse chose NC and checked out Asheville, Charlotte and Raleigh. They have small children and thought Asheville would be nice, but when they were older. Charlotte gave a great first impression, skyline, sporting venues , lots of cool new places, and they were initially impressed. After visiting Raleigh, they felt that Charlotte had a corporate or banking mentality compared to a more laid back comfortable feel in Raleigh. She mentioned Dix, greenways, tech, medical and educational institutions.
Back in Texas folks would say: “Don’t Dallas our Austin”; or here, “Don’t Charlotte our Raleigh”.
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I’m writing that one down! 
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The reasons for Charlotte’s lack of historical architecture in its core doesn’t matter. The fact is many US cities of a similar size had booming office markets at the same time and managed to retain more of their past than Charlotte did. Many of those cities have proportionately greater cultural exports than Charlotte does for a city its size. Some of Charlotte’s unfortunate planning choices like the 277 loop are things Raleigh also wanted to do but didn’t have the money for. The reasons don’t matter. At the end of the day, you’re going to have to learn to let Raleigh have a win occasionally without making a big defensive post about it. And one win is that the core neighborhoods have better architectural variety and organically without freeway intrusion.
Then name some of them. 100 years ago, Charlotte wasn’t even the largest city in NC, and was dwarfed in the Southeast by Atlanta (200k residents), Birmingham (178k) New Orleans (387k!), Richmond (171k), etc. It was still a ways off from several current peer cities like Jacksonville, Nashville, etc. Austin and Tampa are probably the most comparable, and I would argue that Austin has benefited from many of the same things as Raleigh (being the capital city, having a major university at the edge of downtown, etc) that were never present in Charlotte.
Idk what any of that even has to do with the transit article I posted a week ago. I’m from Raleigh originally and live in the Charlotte area now. I regularly bump into people who don’t know anything about Raleigh but instantly write it off due to the state government being there. Obviously yeah, Raleigh is much much more than just “the NCGA”…but that was a pretty significant reason for its original establishment…
Just take a moment to appreciate this. You can see more rail than asphalt in this view. The walk from Hillsborough Street into Downtown is enjoyable. It feels like a proper entrance to a major city.
The walk into Charlotte from its equivalent urban spoke is… a work in progress.
Well. It is at least a little better if you go one block over to the actual equivalent urban spoke of Tryon St. Most recent streetview kinda sucks though.
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To be fair, the ebb and flow of NC cities’ populations is complicated. Historically in the reconstruction era of the 19th Century & up through 1900, Wilmington was NC’s largest city. In 1910, Charlotte took that mantle but lost it by a few thousand to Winston-Salem in 1920. By the 1930 Census, Charlotte had recaptured the title and has held it ever since.
The Triad had its moment for a few decades in the 20th Century as the manufacturing/economic engine of the state, but let’s not pretend that Charlotte just came out of nowhere late in the game. Save for the 1920 Census, it’s led the state in population since 1910. Even in the 1920 Census, they were just a couple of thousand behind W-S.
On the other hand, Raleigh is completely a Johnny-Come-Lately near the top of the population ladder in the state. As recently as 1950, Raleigh was 5th in the state, and Raleigh didn’t take 2nd until soon after the 1980 Census.
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similar in reno, nv about californians.
I think Charlotte blew up at the worst possible time for historic preservation, on the back of a major economic engine that especially through the mid-20th century didn’t really lend itself to historic preservation. I got sidetracked looking at population stats of comparable southeastern cities from the early 1900s, and the amount of growth compared to basically every similarly-sized city of the time is staggering. I wouldn’t say Charlotte came out of nowhere, but it rapidly jumped several tiers beginning shortly after WW2 and never looked back, while pretty much everywhere else fizzled out. Randomly (to me at least), Mobile was keeping pace with Charlotte up to 1960, and then seemingly fell into a coma that it has never come out of.
Relatively speaking, modern day peer cities like Jacksonville and Nashville were notably larger than Charlotte was back then, which is why I didn’t include them. Birmingham, Memphis, New Orleans, and Richmond were all also much bigger than Charlotte.
One thing that really jumped out at me was that something must have happened in NC in the 1920s, because nearly every major city in NC saw an inexplicably large population boom from 1920 to 1930. This wasn’t seen as widely in surrounding states. Asheville went from 28k to 50k, Charlotte 46k to 82k, Durham 21k to 52k, Greensboro 19k to 53k, Winston-Salem 48k to 75k. Raleigh saw a very healthy jump from 24k to 37k but was nearly surpassed by High Point (of all places) which went from 14k to 36k. Wilmington was the main outlier, as its population shrunk slightly from 33k to 32k. I realize the “Roaring Twenties” likely drove part of that growth, but all of those were absolutely massive increases in population that seemed way out of line with existing growth rates.
The metro growth is literally wild. In 1950, the Charlotte region clocked in at 197k (the Triangle had 483k at the time, and Nashville 584k - I can’t find 1950 figures for the Triad but I suspect it was larger than the Charlotte area was back then). It remained the smallest on the list through 1980…and then rocketed into 4th place by 2000.
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but in the 1920s is about the time that the tobacco and other industries really took off in NC. Winston and Durham 100% saw a surge around that time frame (as did Richmond maybe?) but those are all three major tobacco towns. Other services and industries likely followed the “booming” cities to support all the workers of the manufacturing plants. I’m not sure what was happening in Charlotte around that time period.
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On the other hand, Raleigh is completely a Johnny-Come-Lately near the top of the population ladder in the state. As recently as 1950, Raleigh was 5th in the state, and Raleigh didn’t take 2nd until soon after the 1980 Census.
You’re right, although Raleigh actually had been 2nd a few other times in the state’s history, pre-Triad-boom.
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By looking at the data and city population rankings, it seems to me that Raleigh was just modestly but consistently growing but without a huge economic industry engine like Tobacco or Textiles. It doesn’t seem like the city controlled its own ranking as much as it was subject to what was or wasn’t happening in the other cities in the state. Heck, even Asheville was larger than Raleigh in the 1920, 1930 & 1940 Census. Other than being a state capital and college town, Raleigh didn’t have the sort of backbone industry like the cities in the Triad or Durham. Up until the 4th quarter of the 20th Century, Raleigh was way down the pecking order of US cities.
As for the conversation around metro growth (thanks for the graph @nicholas) I have to wonder if this is measuring a consistent land area. Let me explain. For Atlanta’s metro in particular, it’s gobbled up counties like no tomorrow in the last several decades. Does the metro graph represent a consistent land area or is it subject to the metros’ land areas expanding? I ask because I have a difficult time believing the data that shows Charlotte’s metro beginning in 1950 when it was already the largest city in the state for much of the first half of the 20th Century. Something doesn’t seem correct here.
As for Charlotte’s municipal growth, I’d love to see that trajectory mapped against annexation. I’m not saying that all of that growth isn’t real since the story of both Charlotte and Raleigh was an annex and sprawl model for many decades, but Charlotte definitely annexed a hell of a lot more land while Raleigh shared annexation with many other municipalities in its county.
An extreme example of municipal “growth” through annexation has been Omaha, NE. It’s city population has grown despite its county not growing or even shrinking.
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Yes, tobacco lost much of its taboo coming out of the Great War - in 1914 there was a total prohibition on tobacco use, sale or manufacturing in 17 states. The first scene in the Music Man is the conductor telling everyone to put out their cigarettes, they are coming into Iowa. The war changed the equation dramatically, and by 1924 you get your first cig ad aimed at women - so controversial that Chesterfield pulled the ad. But the next year, Lucky is back with what is considered one of the most effective ad campaigns ever, Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet. So at least for out big tobo towns, growth was in part driven by industrial expansion. People definitely moved to cities for the jobs.
There was also a push - after decent years during the '00 and '10s, farm income grew substantially during the Great War, only to then collapse with a thud, dropping by nearly half by 1920. Average income for farm families was half of what it was for urban workers. America’s ag sector was already in decade long depression when when the stock market crashed in '29. This accelerated the move into the cities.
Finally, the census of 1920 is the first time the country was majority urban.
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I know I’ve beat this drum before, but cross city polulation comparisons arent that meaningful without taking into account radically different approaches to annexation, both between cities and across time periods. For example, Raleigh expanded more aggressively through most of its history than Wilmington. If we could chart population growth while controlling for city area, or plot total population against some baseline level of annexation, that would be much more useful. Otherwise there’s no way to easily determine how much growth is due to actual population influx versus agglomerating pre-existing suburbs.
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I think that for both Charlotte and Raleigh, the growth has been real AND there’s been a lot of annexation. One way to look at it is to use the counties as a control. In the case of Wake, it’s nearing 4X the population of 1980 and the City of Raleigh is already tens of thousands of people more populated than all of Wake County was in 1990.
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Wild thing about that map is seeing how going beyond the 440/40 Beltline seemed to only be a priority before Y2K for the North. It’s like East and South areas weren’t even a blip on the radar till the 2000s. I can walk to 440 in under 10 minutes but my house was not even city limits till the 21st century? 
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But how many of those folks worked/commuted to RTP?? North and west Raleigh had the easiest connections before 540 extended that reach farther north and opened up the eastern part of the county to easier access to the RTP jobs.
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The construction of the first arc of the Beltline being the W ----> N section drove growth on Raleigh’s north side first. In a car dependent development model, no support for moving cars quickly meant no growth.
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