The universities tell the census bureau their on campus populations. The on campus students do count towards the city’s population. It’s the off campus students who are the issue.
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Did we, though? Middle-income “towers in a park” renewal schemes went over quite well, and remain popular places to live today – even in America, where all the incentives point towards the exact opposite. (In other societies, “sterile” but private high-rise areas are often the absolute choicest addresses.) What “didn’t work out so well” was warehousing poor people without choices in isolated vertical slums, and that had little to do with the design of the place.
Demanding that urban places be perfect (while giving continued suburban sprawl a pass) is a terrific recipe for ever more exclusionary, expensive cities that are increasingly irrelevant as economic activity shifts to the suburbs. That’s exactly the experience of US cities over the past 20+ years: we’ve become zoning-review, design-review, historic-review, affordability-review, environmental-review, stormwater-review, streetscape-review, community-input-review perfectionists about allowing any new buildings. That perfection miiight be possible… but costs a lot of time and money, and then once it’s done it’s (a) out of date and (b) so dang expensive that everyone complains about that. Meanwhile, 90% of new houses are built in sprawl (getting waved past all of the above reviews!)… and oh, the planet’s on fire.
How do I know? I live in a 1960s urban-renewal building in DC, surrounded by new shiny things that had to undergo decades of reviews from dozens of different agencies and as a result ended up, in the words of someone else here, “sterile and a bit boring.”
Cities are living things; they don’t have to be perfect the first time around. Places can and will change after the first draft; the most important thing (and speaking as a perfectionist writer who’s procrastinated on stuff for decades!) is to get the dang words outta your head and onto paper.
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…which is also another argument for “missing middle” housing. It’s built and owned in smaller and less-precious increments, so each piece is easier and more likely to adapt and improve.
But the whole edifice of American planning and zoning is based around defining a single end-state and freezing its evolution there (“this is the plan and here is the zoning map, you may build exactly to this height and never any further”), not iteratively adapting and improving places. It’s very uniform and command-and-control, rather than flexible and evolutionary.
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Luckily this is changing in both theory and practice. It’s all too easy for decision-makers to miss the point of future land use maps (future development patterns) and their relationship to the zoning map (current development entitlement). Ideally the future land use map would be recalibrated every 5 years with monitoring along the way to see that zoning, thoroughfares, parks, and other elements are following that vision.
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I just got this email and selected NC and the map allows you to view all our counties!
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Wow. 73 of NC’s 100 counties had under 100,000 people as of the 2020 Census.
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Has anyone been able to find the 2020 MSA’s or CMSA’s…?
Wish I knew the population inside the future completed 540 belt line compared to Charlotte’s beltine.
https://www.citypopulation.de/en/usa/metro/
https://www.citypopulation.de/en/usa/combmetro/
I’ve posted previously, but here are links to maps to explore. This is frankly one of my favorite sites to peruse.
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You could probably guesstimate it by adding Raleigh+Cary+Apex+Morrisville+Garner
Areas that are outside of the loop in the cities can likely be offset by others within it that aren’t counted in one of those municipalities.
468+175+30+31+59 = 763
Down and dirty, I’d think that 763,000 is as good a guess as any quick method.
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Awesome, thank you!
Any knowledge of when the US Census will update or have available those for 2020?
Apart from the stupidity of the Triangle as 2 split MSAs, it’s always irked me that Charlotte’s CSA is so much bigger for no reason. So some quick math:
Charlotte CSA: 6,590 sq miles
Triangle CSA: 4,497 sq miles
So almost 150% in size. I am rather skeptical
CLT’s got a LOT of inflation…!?
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I also to add insult, they actually shrunk the Triangle CSA took out a few towns and I think a county lol
Those are updated numbers. #germaneffeciency
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One of the things that I like about the site that I linked is that they show density. At the MSA level, Raleigh’s MSA is easily the most densely populated, while the Triangle’s CSA is still a bit more dense than Charlotte’s.
Of course, that site is all in metric and it makes you do the math if you want to know the data based on square miles.
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Elsewhere in NC, Brunswick County belonging to the Myrtle Beach MSA/CSA (and not Wilmington) is a joke. The non-seasonal population of Brunswick is heavily skewed towards Leland/Southport/Oak Island and (I would imagine) commute patterns reflect that as well
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Difficult to calculate precisely, since most tract boundaries don’t yet line up with 540 (it’s too new). But you could approximate it by adding up the municipal populations inside, and subtracting the populations of tracts entirely outside 540; tract-level populations are available.
Sure is. The usual response to “OMG, that planning effort was way too tough & contentious” has been “OK, we’ll put it off even longer, and just keep piling on the stakes.”
But a better response would be to lower the stakes and update more frequently. As I keep reminding myself, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step
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I can see how this could be helpful in terms of stakeholder buy-in. But if you make them frequent enough that the “plans” fluidly change every time there’s some short-term political pressure, what’s the point of having plans in the first place?
I find this interesting: