Actually the most dominant.
Now if we can get Raleigh politicians to hop on the BIG city board, our city can succeed. I also beleive the undercounted metropolitan stats have hurt the way many entertainment investors have viewed this area for the past 20 years…
Joking aside, the same developer responsible for most of Cary now owns the majority of Pittsboro. The pace of the Chatham Park buildout has been insane. Chatham wont beat out Wake but theyll be a contender soon.
Decent partnership between town of Pittsboro and Chatham Park. Actually have a compentant mayor who values downtown. Next 20 years will be interesting.
Yeah they’ve promised connectivity to “historic downtown Pittsboro” but we’ll see. Mosaic is designed as a self-contained community and 64 is a straight shot to Raleigh that avoids the business district entirely.
Not sure how Jordan Lake watershed plays into the possibilities for growth in Chatham, but the county has but 82,000 people right now. While the Chatham Park development will have a huge impact to the county population, I can’t help but wonder if the spill over from both Cary and Apex won’t have an even bigger impact on Chatham’s population east of Jordan?
That whole area is on the verge. The VinFast EV plant is going up in Moncure, just SE of Jordan Lake and there’s a lot of tracts getting bought up in anticipation of massive housing boom. If you own land out there you can make some good money.
Also a lot of the Chatham development is because until very recently Chapel Hill had awful zoning policies that restricted multifamily dwellings and prevented infill. They haven’t constructed anywhere near enough units to keep up with demand and no one can afford to live there. If Chapel Hill was pulling its own weight in terms of housing their “downtown” area would be much denser.
The other regional “X Factor” is Sanford/Lee County. It’s part of the CSA but pretty far removed and still a semi-independent “micropolitan area” – so only somewhat economically integrated with the Triangle. But Route 1 is a fully grade separated freeway so the travel time to RTP is comparable to Pittsboro. If they start courting development more aggressively things could get weird.
64 had to bypass downtown. Too much through traffic. Rather keep the small streets. Already super busy even with the bypass
Sanford still has cheap land prices and a monster sized waste water plant. Perfect combo for relatively affordable housing. So much that Sanford city council is voicing concern that too much lower quality cheaper developments are being developed.
New Toyota plant is an easy commute up 421, Wolfspeed, and obviously VinFast close by. Sanford also attracting numerous pharmaceutical manufacturers. Holly Springs with its new bio companies also easily pull from Sanford.
East and north Chatham land prices are crazy. The topographical maps are also scaring away the entry home builders. Very hilly and rocky terrain. Pittsboro attracts a lot of retirees and a medical professionals that make the easy commute to UNC hospital. I don’t think a lot commute to RTP.
As far as the 2 MSAs are concerned, Chatham County is clearly a tale of two metros. East of Jordan Lake it’s all about RTP & west Cary. West of the lake it’s all about access to Chapel Hill and SW Durham.
Chatham county could reunify the us both MSAs in 2025?
No, that’s not how it works. The outlying county gets assigned to the ONE metro it has the strongest commute flow towards, since a county can only be in a single metro. Hence, say, Harnett and Lee County jumping back and forth between the Raleigh and Fayetteville MSAs.
Combining the two MSAs would be based on this standard, as stated (and restated) above:
That was the case pre-pandemic, BUT now that an additional 20% of each county’s workforce is now working from home, since 2020 the commute flow has been drastically reduced.
Links above for all my population geeks^^^
Don’t really know where to put this but WaPo put out an interactive map detailing census tract data and access to nature. I’m only putting this in this thread since it has the population densities listed for each tract. They actually highlight Raleigh in their graph lower in the article. I believe this article is free for anyone if you create an account with them.
This is a positive spin on being suburban! (Slightly joking, a place could be completely suburban and also deficient in nature if it was all concrete sprawl).
See California. There’s a lot of deficient sprawl. Frankly, there are a lot of deficient suburban areas across the country.
God I love a good investigative map where I get to geek out. Thanks for sharing.
Very cool. Nice to see how Raleigh is called out in the graph. And looking at the local map, only the center of downtown is even in the yellow.
I haven’t had a chance to play with the data, but will note that they’re using trees as a proxy for nature. Which gives some pretty poor results for towns in the West/southwest.
Updated Census estimates from July 2023. Sorry 
, there’s not data for Pittsboro for some reason. The same is true for Youngsville.
Following each population, there’s a percentage growth/shrinkage from Census 2020 to July 2023.
Raleigh: 482,295 +3.1%
Durham: 296,186 +4.4%
Cary: 180,010 +3.0%
Apex: 72,225 +12.5%
Chapel Hill: 62,270 -0.4%
Wake Forest: 54,337 +13.2%
Holly Springs: 46,271 +12.1%
Fuquay-Varina: 43,817 +27.9%
Garner: 35,265 +13.0%
Sanford: 32.064 +6.2%
Morrisville: 31,703 +7.0%
Knightdale: 20,275 +4.1%
Wendell: 14,400 +46.5% (Wendell Falls anyone?)
Smithfield: 12,486 +10.3%
Rolesville: 11,297 +17.1%
Hillsborough: 9,757 +1.1%
Zebulon: 9,401 +36%
Some quick observations:
Raleigh’s added more people but Durham’s percentage growth is higher.
Cary’s growth has really slowed down.
Wake’s burbs are killing it, but I also suppose that their municipal limits are also growing with annexations of new subdivisions.
Holly Springs: 46,271 (+12.1%)
Clayton: 30,216 (+14.8%)
Angier: 7,283 (+36.1%)
Pittsboro: 4,839 (+6.5%)
Youngsville: 2,291 (+11.1%)