MSN Money Talks News reports Raleigh metro is the second fastest growing metro after Austin between 2015 and 2020.
Hilarious stat listed: " Most common origin for recent movers: Durham-Chapel Hill, NC" You could move across the street and be included in this report. lol
I moved from Brier Creek at one point. That almost counts!
Herein lies the only statistic advantage to Raleigh being split from Durham. The Raleigh side of the metro grows much faster than Durham-Chapel Hill, and including them would push down the growth rate and make Raleigh rank lower.
Iâve moved to 9 different houses in Raleigh in my lifetime (5 as an adult). What has that done to the statistics?
Here is long post about statistical areas, which I am not going to attempt to condense. If you donât know much about how metro areas are identified, defined, named, and changed, this might be interesting. If you already know the whole story you can probably skip it. I left out a bunch of political history going back into the mid 20th Century that helps explain why some metro areas continue to exist the way they do and why Micropolitan areas are even a thing, but while interesting (to me) that stuff isnât super relevant to the Triangle. (Roanoke Rapids might like a word.)
First, metropolitan and micropolitan areas (Core-Based Statistical Areas, CBSA) are defined by starting from the shape and population of urban areas (and urban clusters). Urban areas meeting specific criteria can form the basis for a CBSA.
Current urban areas were defined after the 2010 census, based on a definition developed after the 2000 census (with minor modifications).
Once central counties are identified, county commuting patterns are analyzed. Any county where more than 25% of residents with jobs commute to an established Central County of any CBSA (metro or micro), that county is added to the new CBSA.
So we identify central cities, then use commuting data to identify outlying counties. Once the CBSAs are defined, though, the list of which counties are included changes little from decade to decade, so you can pretty quickly get the new metro area populations as soon as new population estimates are released every year (generally in March).
Commuting patterns are published at approximately 5-year intervals as part of the 5-Year American Community Survey. (The ACS is released in 1-year and 5-year chunks, but a new 5-year chunk is released every year, covering different variables each year.) New commuting estimates can result in a wholescale revision of CBSA definitions, but they will always be based on the existing Urban Area definitions.
The last batch of commute data was released in 2017, based on 2011-2015 data. This is where, for example, Asheboro ÎźSA was absorbed into Greensboro MSA, and where Greene County was added back to Greenville MSA after it had dropped from it in 2011 or so. Atlanta adds a new county every time the commute data updates; Lexington lately is absorbing one of its satellite ÎźSAs at each interval. But Raleigh and Durham stay separated because our Urban Areas are separated, and neither Durham nor Wake sends 25% of commuters to the other county.
The next 5-Year ACS with commute data is due to release in 2022, but will probably be delayed until 2023 for a reason Iâll get to. So for the next couple of springs you can get new MSA populations every year, but theyâll based on old definitions. Fortunately, weâll get new definitions soon.
The 2003 Urban Area definition was full of problems that were not apparent until after the 2010 census (or at least not clearly problematic). In a previous post in this chain I rambled about how bad the UAs are for North Carolina, and while I donât expect anyone to remember that I wonât rehash it in detail. Suffice to say, Raleigh and Durham have separate UAs, but they share a long border together. Meanwhile, Gastonia and Concord both have separate UAs from Charlotte, but Charlotteâs UA extends all the way to Salisbury and Mooresville; Hickory, Morganton, and Lenoir are all combined as well, but Greensboro and High Point are separate. So there are problems with the whole UA definition, but defining the UAs is the limit of what the Census Bureau does concerning the MSA/ÎźSA/CSA system.
The actual definition of metro areas has always been left up to the Office of Management and the Budget, a legacy of OMBâs need to organize Americans efficiently for the disbursal of federal funds. This has sometimes led to conflict with the Census Bureauâs mandate to define where and how Americans live and work. The Census Bureau may change how it defines urban areas, but the actual definition and naming of CBSAs remains a job for OMB; it is the OMB that examines the commuting data to assign outlying counties to Central Counties to create CBSAs.
We can debate whether OMB is a more explicitly political agency than the Census Bureau, but the opportunity for Congressional lobbying on the shape of CBSAs is baked into the process. Once the Census finishes the hard work of defining the exact shape of urban areas, they send the list of UAs to OMB. OMB then has the opportunity to send back revisions before official UAs and CBSAs are released by the two agencies. This back and forth is designed so that âlocal communitiesâ can be âconsultedâ on the names and boundaries of potential UAs and CBSAs, at multiple steps in the process.
So, we can thank âcommunity consultationâ for the invisible line dividing Raleighâs UA from Durhamâs, and hence the existence of separate metro areas. The fix for this will thus likely require more community consultation: Raleigh needs to convince Durham to join forces. It almost certainly wonât happen merely on the basis of actual data (unless someone at OMB decides to ignore community input and aggravate a Congressman).
(The same is true for a number of other metro areas: Greenville and Spartanburg, Salt Lake City and Ogden, Washington and Baltimore, LA and Riverside, Trenton and both Philly and New York; sometimes these are rational decisions. Strict adherence to the UA definitions would absolutely lead to a single Urbanized Area running from Bridgeport CT to Fredericksburg VA, for example. After 2010, Delaware somehow allowed the former Wilmington MSA to be absorbed into Philadelphia without complaint, though nothing had changed in terms of density of development between the two. So thereâs hope.
But some problems actually stem from the Census Urban Area definition. The definition starts by examing population density in census tracts, and combines together adjacent tracts with density over a certain threshhold. If enough tracts exist to reach 2500 people, they form an Urban Cluster. If the cluster grows to 50k population, it becomes an Urban Area. Thatâs simple enough, right? Oh, but many urban areas contain big chunks of territory like warehouse districts and suburban business parks that have no population, or at least little density, but which might connect to other urban areas further away. These should be included, right? And of course you have rivers and lakes, airport runways, all kinds of things that can break up an urban area that donât meet the population density criterion but are part of a given urban area and maintain an urban character.
So the definition includes hops, skips, and jumps (literally, those are the terms), whereby two nearby urban areas can be connected across say an airport, a warehouse district, a state park, a river, or similar areas where people just canât live but that exist inside a continuous urban region.
Unfortunately, the way the hops and skips were defined, a lot of urban areas ended up with bizarre tentacles running along highways, leading to things like Charlotte UA connecting all the way around Concord and up to Salisbury.
This is the only reason why Iredell and Rowan counties are part of Charlotte metro. When an Urbanized Area extends into multiple counties, the Census Bureau uses an algorithm to determine, based on the percentage of the population in that county that is within the UA, whether that county gets included as an additional Central County. So for Charlotte, of course Mecklenburg is a Central County, but because Salisbury is part of the Charlotte UA thanks to I-85, Rowan County gets lumped in as a Central County of the Charlotte MSA.
Whatâs especially aggravating about that is that, if the UA was more appropriately defined and Salisbury and Mooresville and Statesville were cut out, then, based on the commuting data, Rowan and Iredell would not be part of Charlotte MSA! Theyâd be separate MSAs, as they were prior to 2013. Sure, theyâd be included in the CSA, but nobody ever looks at those (I mean, Durham and Raleigh are the same CSA and no one cares). Ironically, while Gastonia and Concord have separate UAs, both of those counties meet the 25% commuting requirement to be included in the Charlotte MSA, and so wouldnât ever form their own CBSAs anyway.
And whatâs more, if Iredell wasnât included, then Lincoln County also wouldnât be part of Charlotte MSA; it only gets to 25% commuters by adding Meck and Iredell together (along with Gaston and Cabarrus et al, but Iredell is actually the key county that pushes Lincoln over 25%).
So, if Charlotteâs UA was more rational, then even if Raleigh and Durham remained separate, Charlotte would be a notably smaller MSA, simply having numerous smaller CBSAs included in a grand CSA nobody would ever talk about.
But wait, thereâs more! The Raleigh-Durham CSA happens to include several other outlying MSAs and ÎźSAs, including Henderson (Vance Co) and Oxford (Granville Co). Well, if you merged Raleigh and Durham, the commute numbers for both Vance and Granville would be pushed over the 25% threshold, and those two counties would be included as part of the Raleigh-Durham MSA. Warren County, too, would be included; and whatâs more, weâd steal Burlington MSA away from the Triad.
Bottom line: based on 2020 data, if Raleigh and Durham comprised a single UA and thus a single MSA, the actual metro area population would be 2,125,105. Meanwhile a more rational Charlotte MSA would have a population of only 2.3M without Rowan, Iredell, and Lincoln. MSA growth rates would be 19% for Charlotte and 21% for the Triangle. Just let that one roll around in your head for a little bit (Weâd still be behind Nashville, though, but only by a tiny bit).
Now, all that could change when the new commute data drops, which as I said could be next December but will probably be Dec 2023. The potential delay is because the Census Bureau has rewritten its Urban Area definition. New UAs will be available in mid 2023, and I assume OMB will put off revising CBSAs until the new definition is in place.
The new definitions are designed to cut down on the sort of growth-by-highway glomming of distinct urban areas together, while still allowing an urban area to leap over big rivers and things. The more substantive change is philosophical, though: instead of looking at population density, the new definition uses density of structures and housing units. This supposedly reflects more what an urban area feels like; in trial runs comparing existing UAs to UAs under the new definition, most areas saw limited change in their core, but the tentacles were eliminated.
This means that after 2023 there will likely be a slight increase in CBSAs, such as Salisbury NC; but also a potential decrease in CBSAs where commute data reflects that some outlying smaller areas (like Oxford and Henderson) may be absorbed into bigger areas. And of course, we may lose some micropolitan areas altogether: another change to the urban area definitions will be the elimination of any urban areas with under 10k population. I donât expect any NC micros to disappear (Roanoke Rapidsâ UA was at 24k in 2010, so we can assume that even with 15% population loss theyâll be fine) but more than a few smaller ones (like Union City and Martin, TN) will almost certainly dip below 10k. The fate of these potential lost micros has not been addressed by the Census Bureau.
And this is all assuming we donât get an extraordinary intercensal count in 2025, which remains a possibility.
Anyway, thanks for letting me geek out for a while here. Hope this was interesting to you and, if you actually read it, that you learned something new.
Excellent and thank you!
Does anyone know how the âcommuting patternsâ are derived?
Would these include autoâs, Buses, BRTâs, CR, etcâŚ?
Itâs everything⌠mode of transportation isnât at issue. The question is, which county do you go to work in? And which county do you live in? If a quarter of the people that live in county A go to work in county B, then A is going to be part of Bâs metro.
There is lots of separate data collected on means of transportationâthe census calls it Journey to Work. Itâs fun to see where people drive vs where theyâŚalso drive. It is still America after all.
Thanks for the deep dive! (Times like these, I wonder if some posts on this forum like yours could be turned into blog posts or news explainer articles on their ownâŚ) Itâs especially interesting to see how highway-based tentacles can turn into a perverse incentive for smaller towns to lobby for highway construction at the cost of their own livability.
The part thatâs more directly relevant to the Triangle, though, is:
So Raleigh is going to have to bite the bullet and open the doors for Durham to push for a regional identity in the eyes of the feds, huh? This sounds like a trend, since I noticed the same subtext popping up in the affordable housing and commuter rail threads, too.
From what I remember many moons ago, itâs Durham that âcommunity consultedâ its way to a separate MSA. That ball isnât in Raleighâs court.
Now, I am nearly certain that Durham would agree to a single MSA if they got named first, but that isnât going to happen.
If growth rates for the Raleigh MSA have continued in alignment with what they were in the recent past, then Raleighâs MSA has likely already passed Oklahoma City to become the USAâs 41st largest MSA in the country. Itâs likely 3+ years from now before we pass Milwaukee to become #40.
Weâre going to pass Milwaukee?! Weâre going to pass Milwaukee?!
Weâre gonna make it
Give us any chance weâll take it
Read us any rule weâll break it
Weâre gonna make our dreams come true
Doing it our way
Nothings gonna turn us back now
Straight ahead and on the track now
Weâre gonna make our dreams come true
Doing it our way
There is nothing we wonât try
Never heard the word impossible
This time thereâs no stopping us
Weâre gonna make it
On your mark, get set, and go now
Got a dream and we just know now
Weâre gonna make our dreams come true
And weâll do it our way yes our way
Make all our dreams come true
And weâll do it our way, yes our way
Make all our dreams come true for me and you!
(Millennials and Gen Z, ask your parents or grandparents what the joke is here.)
GenX here and I had to look that one upâŚ
It took me a minute. I kinda recognized the song but I didnât get the Milwaukee reference. Had to Google to make sure.
To take the suspense away from those who may be too young to catch @daviddonovan 's post, it is the lyric to the theme song from Laverne & Shirley: a show set in Milwaukee.
I used to love watching the theme songs of a lot of Nick at nite shows. I remember the theme songs for Gilliganâs Island, Threeâs Company, and Green Acres more than I remember what happened in the shows.
In those days, the theme songs often landed on the charts!
Arenât they all dead now? Actually, no, the old guy whose character died in a fire on Better Call Saul is still alive. I felt old mentioning to Evan that weâre going to see The Offspring play a show, and he had no idea who they were. (I get it, itâs been 20 years since they were famous.) But you guys are bringing out the big guns with shows from before I was even born!
that can be accelerated if we merge Durham-Chapel Hill MSA into to ours. I see a lot of momentum into that dream coming true.
The actors who played Shirley (Cindy Williams) and Lenny (Michael McKean) are still alive. They represent half of the core cast. Both are in their mid 70s.
