By percentage, it’s impressive growth in the east; by absolute numbers it’s more modest.
With the Western Wake Freeway terminating at Apex/Holly Springs, it’s going to be the explosive growth center of Wake for at least the next few years. Wake Forest/Rolesville is probably the second suburban growth center in Wake going forward. The wildhorse IMO is Garner. With more focus on DT South and development in the southern reaches of Raleigh, Garner has a lot of untapped potential.
Fuquay Varina will pass up Garner probably in the next few years.
Fuquay-Varina was estimated ahead of Garner in 2018. Garner had a big surge this past year. Census will be interesting.
Surges for our suburbs are usually associated with one or more large housing developments going online. This is why Garner’s future is so compelling if it responds to downtown south development energy.
Not for the smart consumer but, I would agree that is the general consensus in the population at large.
Garner - as mentioned above - is truly an untapped honey pot.
More evidence Really that Raleigh-Cary needs to be merged back into Durham-Chapel Hill MSAs
So, there’s this account on City-Data that is insisting that Charlotte has 100 square miles of undeveloped land within its current city limits. What Kook-Aid are they drinking?
Also, Charlotte is clearly absorbing into its limits a lot of new suburban edge development that’s driving a significant portion of its population growth. https://ui.uncc.edu/story/charlotte-growing-city-annex-land-mecklenburg-county-nc
This is the model that both Raleigh and Charlotte used to grow in decades past, but it seems to be more persistent in Charlotte while Raleigh’s annexation has slowed to a trickle.
On this Memorial Day in the house, I decided to study the Census data sets. The following is the breakdown of Wake and its municipalities’ growth. I’ve also included the populations and growth of Wake municipalities that spill into adjacent counties. Interestingly enough, there are a few instances of cities crossing counties without any population attributed to it.
Jurisdicition 2010 Pop. 2019 Pop. Growth # Growth %
Wake County 901,052 1,111,761 210,709 23.38%
Angier town (pt.) 114 135 21 18.42%
Apex town 37,727 59,300 21,573 57.18%
Cary town (pt.) 134,377 168,029 33,652 25.04%
Clayton town (pt.) - - -
Durham city (pt.) 18 21 3 16.67%
Fuquay-Varina town 18,021 30,324 12,303 68.27%
Garner town 25,769 31,407 5,638 21.88%
Holly Springs town 24,739 37,812 13,073 52.84%
Knightdale town 11,403 17,843 6,440 56.48%
Morrisville town (pt.) 18,583 28,846 10,263 55.23%
Raleigh city (pt.) 402,975 472,791 69,816 17.33%
Rolesville town 3,778 8,501 4,723 125.01%
Wake Forest town (pt.) 29,283 44,318 15,035 51.34%
Wendell town 5,838 8,577 2,739 46.92%
Zebulon town (pt.) 4,459 5,917 1,458 32.70%
Balance of Wake County 183,968 197,940 13,972 7.59%
Raleigh (pt.) Durham Co. 1,067 1,278 211 19.78%
Cary (pt.) Chatham Co. 1,422 2,253 831 58.44%
Wake Forest (pt.) Franklin 852 1,311 459 53.87%
Zebulon (pt.) Johnston - - -
Morrisville (pt.) Durham Co. - - -
UGH!!! That xls copy/paste certainly didn’t keep its format. Any hints on how to fix it?
What would Raleigh’s population be if you expanded the city limits to the size of Charlotte’s?
All one has to do is start adding up the adjacent municipal areas until you reach 309 m2. The only trouble is that I don’t know if any of those available numbers are up to date, but I’ll try. I’ll get back to you.
Update: If you go by Google (probably not exactly accurate), and add up Raleigh, Cary, Apex, Wake Forest, Holly Springs, Morrisville, Fuquay-Varina, Garner, Knightdale, and Rolesville, you come to ~299 square miles. If you assume that these municipalities incrementally increased their land areas since that data was collected by Google, you can call it even with Charlotte’s 309 square miles. In any case, if you add up those same cities’ 2019 populations, you come to 905,013 people. If the Wake County municipalities have combined added more than 10 square miles, you can yank out Knightdale and its 6.2 square miles and still come up with 887,170.
FWIW, Charlotte’s 2019 number was 885,708.
Another update: A big difference between how Wake and Mecklenburg are populated is how much of Wake is still unincorporated. Wake has 197,940 people not living in a municipality while Mecklenburg has only 53,314 people not living in one. That’s a lot of statistical data that Wake municipalities are leaving on the table.
That’s pretty impressive. I wonder what the entire triangle metro area is going to be like in comparison to the Charlotte/Rock Hill, SC metro once the 2020 census is released
NC Legislature says no… Must leave them on the table, unless they agree to be annexed. Even then, many residences are on 2+ acre lots with on site septic systems - which are expensive to install city sewer & water. Failing septics are a problem.
I would organize it by adding brackets between the data like | this. Cool data!
Google docs embed nicely here so if pop this into a Google sheet and add the share link here, a spreadsheet should appear.
I’ll try tomorrow. I burned my right hand tonight and I’m hunting and pecking right now with my left hand.
Not sure if this is the right place to put this.
SPOILER ALERT!
I had a feeling the Twin Cities were on the top of the list. If it weren’t for the weather, I’d consider moving there.
You can get some great deals in the Twin Cities right now!
I read the other day that Nashville-Davidson metro government might break up. The suburbs are sick of Nashville’s dominance, and the metro gov’t is on the verge of bankruptcy.
I hear there’s some type of protests there or something? 
Oh, that would be very interesting and it would take away Nashville’s municipal statistical prominence. Pass the popcorn.