It’s a group effort of the entire county, but clearly Raleigh and its western suburbs contributed the most to the growth. That said, eastern Wake has a ton of potential for hundreds of thousands more people.
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I agree, but I just think it should be noted that Wake’s trump card is building denser communities. It passed Mecklenburg because of the 300 or so square miles at the core. The other 500 won’t be a factor for a few more decades yet.
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As much as some folks want to hang sprawl around Raleigh’s neck, and as much as some like say Spraleigh to describe it, it’s already the most densely populated of NC’s large cities. It’s all deflection at this point, and I can only attribute the belittlement of the city to its rise being threatening to other cities in the state and in the region.
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It’s highly doubtful that any action taken by the OMB will result in the Triangle being the largest MSA in the state. That said, with several hundred thousand residents of Charlotte’s MSA being in South Carolina, certainly the Triangle’s numbers can nip at the heels of NC resident numbers within Charlotte’s MSA.
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Interesting knock-on effect if the merger does take place: it may substantially expand the CSA’s outlying boundaries, and maybe the MSA.
The standard to include an outlying county in the CSA is if 15% of its workers commute into an MSA, and as mentioned above the MSA standard is 25%. Imagine if there’s an outlying county where 10% commute to Wake, 5% to Cumberland, and 5% to Durham. Right now, it wouldn’t be included in any of the three CSAs, since none is over 15%. But if Raleigh-Durham MSA is revived, then this county would send 15% into that MSA, and it qualifies to be part of the CSA.
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I can’t think of any counties that are not already in the CSA that might be added based on this effect. Do have any particular counties in mind?
The issue for the Triangle as a whole is similar to the one that Raleigh and Durham have individually. There are just too many competing core cities of other large MSAs surrounding it. With Fayetteville to Raleigh’s south, and Greensboro to Durham’s west, there isn’t much opportunity to “grow” through county absorption into the MSA/CSA like has happened in Charlotte and Nashville over time.
I’m sure there is more up-to-date data somewhere. But here is something from 2015.
Alamance sent 10.6% to Guilford, but 8.8% to Orange, 5.3% to Durham, and 3.1% to Wake. That could be one to watch.
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It’s crazy to me that Alamance sends any commuters to Wake!
I’ve always thought that Alamanve could be in play for Durham, but never considered it in play because of a consolidation with Wake.
Now that makes me wonder about Lee and Harnett. I’m going to peruse that data. Thanks for sharing.
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I was surprised their Guilford connection wasn’t stronger to be honest.
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Lee:
To Durham 1.7%
To Orange 0.8%
To Chatham 3.2%
To Wake 10.2%
Totat: 15.9%
Alamance:
To Durham 5.3%
To Orange 8.8%
To Chatham 0.6%
To Wake 3.1%
To Person 0.2%
Total: 18%
Harnett is the most wild of counties I’ve looked at so far. With just Cumberland, it meets their threshold to be in the Fayetteville MSA with 26.7%. However, they also send 18.0% to Wake, which would otherwise include them in the CSA. They also have an insane amount of counties to which they send their workers for a county of their size. With a combined Triangle MSA, they’d send about 24% to the Triangle, but if Lee were able to be counted, it would be over 32%. The key would be to have Lee in the MSA, but that’s not going to happen.
If Lee and Alamance were included in the Triangle’s CSA, it wold add about 230,000 to the Triangle’s population, and land the CSA in the 2.35M range as of 2020.
Also interesting is that while Wake sends the most workers to another county (Durham), Durham actually sends a larger percentage of its workers to Wake.
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Yeah, I was pondering whether Lee and Harnett would be re-attached to a Raleigh-Durham CSA after being so unceremoniously detached in 2018 and given to Fayetteville. Whether Vance is part of the RDU CSA or MSA might also shift.
I wonder if something like the DMV’s otherwise ill-advised move to Rocky Mount would do something to help attach Nash County to the Raleigh MSA/CSA. Probably would need a ton more cross-commuting, which may actually happen if people working in Raleigh escape to Nash County for cheap housing, though it seems JoCo will fill that role for quite a while.
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Also there is a lot of farmland in eastern Wake County that needs to fill up before Nash has to worry.
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The Census Bureau has…strange Urban-Area definitions for NC (and SC to an extent). It isn’t just Raleigh being separate from Durham–that might actually be one of the less bizarre issues. Examples:
Charlotte’s Urbanized Area (the UAs are used to determine central cities and counties for CBSAs) incudes most of the developed area of Mecklenburg and Union counties, but none of Cabarrus or Gaston. That’s because for whatever reason, Concord gets its own UA, with a long border at the Cab-Meck line, and that implausibly stretches up to include Salisbury. Gastonia likewise has a long border with Charlotte but remains independent, although it stretches most of the way to York, SC. Also, Rock Hill SC is separate, too. And, Charlotte’s UA covers all of Mooresville AND Statesville, but there’s a separate area for Lake Norman. The leap to Statesville is almost as bad as Concord’s leap to Salisbury. None of this makes any sense.
Meanwhile, Greensboro and High Point maintain separate UAs that share a lengthy border. High Point extends into Davidson County, taking in Thomasville. Meanwhile Winston-Salem has a short border with both High Point and Greensboro, and (implausibly again) leaps down to Lexington, in Davidson County. This is what lets Winston-Salem’s MSA take in Davidson as a central county, because Greensboro is the primary UA in the Greensboro-High Point MSA.
Again, none of this makes any sense, and you don’t see silly problems like this in most other areas around the country. Fort Worth and Dallas don’t have separate UAs. But you don’t have to go that far: right in NC, Hickory, Morganton, and Lenoir are all in the same UA. It looks like a gerrymandered Congressional district. Somehow we’re supposed to believe that from an urban development perspective, Lenoir and Morganton are more intimately connected than High Point and Greensboro are. Insanity. Asheville, too, stretches over to Waynesville and south to Hendersonville, so those two counties are automatically included in Asheville’s MSA even though at least in 2015 they both sent less than 25% of their commuters to Buncombe.
But Richmond and Petersburg? One UA.
UAs (and the smaller urban clusters, which are 2500-50k people) will be revised sometime this year and new definitions probably released in 2022 or 2023; new CBSA rules and definitions will be released in spring 2023. Maybe some of this craziness will be corrected then.
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Wow, seems like all NC urban areas were intentionally broken up, not just the Triangle.
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Richmond is the most comparable UA to those in NC. It’s among the cleanest, if not the cleanest UA out there. There’s no straggling urban clusters or adjacent UAs like there are in NC. It gets to expand to its maximum (your point about Petersburg) while much more connected areas in NC are reported separately. It makes no sense to me at all. Like the Triangle gets screwed in the data sets at the MSA level, Charlotte gets screwed along with the Triangle at the UA level. That said, adding these periphery UAs to Charlotte’s is a double edged sword. For one, it would put Charlotte well over 2M in its UA, but it will diminish their overall UA density, which is already slightly less dense than Raleigh’s.
On the other hand, combining Raleigh and Durham will put the Triangle near 1.5M, but the density metric doesn’t suffer. By data, Metrolina is way more sprawled than that Triangle.
Charlotte UA: 1,526,465 (2059.3 ppl/m2)
Raleigh UA: 1,073,795 (2072.2 ppl/m2)
Durham UA: 391,371 (2,152.5 ppl/m2)
Concord UA: 236,626 (1,312.1 ppl/m2)
Gastonia UA:184,902 (1,333.6 ppl/m2)
Rock Hill UA: 116,746 (1,220.7 ppl/m2)
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If Raleigh is 510,000 people, then the Census estimates this past decade have been way off. I am not holding my breath on that number.
I question this too John so I emailed Carly & Erin on this @ RalToday . I told them that I have read that Raleigh’s population was 482,000 . They said that the beginning of 2020 , it was 482,000 & that the end of 2020 , it was 510,000 .
That’s 6% growth in one year. There’s no way that happened.
It looks like the 510k number is coming from CAMPO. Am I reading right that they are saying the City of Raleigh’s area has grown 40% (from ~150 sq.mi. to ~210 sq.mi.) since 2010?
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