Here’s an email that I just sent to the mayor and council.
Dear Mayor McFarlane & Members of the Raleigh City Council,
Last week, the Census reported that the city of Raleigh grew by 3,774 in the year prior to July 1, 2018. The year prior, the growth was 6,330. Prior to that year, the growth was 9,767. In fact, every year for the last 5 years, the population growth of the city has slowed to what is now a trickle of its former self. I can’t remember a year when the city grew more slowly than in 2018. Can you?
As the anchor city of Wake County, the Raleigh MSA and the entire Triangle area, it’s alarming to me to watch the city yield growth to the sprawling suburbs at the very time that more people and more business is looking inward to core cities. The city’s growth rate is also now under the growth rate of the state as a whole, and it surely doesn’t hold a candle to the growth happening in our greater Wake and Triangle communities. Even Durham city added more people than Raleigh! When has that ever happened in our collective memories?
As a Raleigh property tax payer, I am becoming increasingly concerned that our city’s sprawling development model of the 1960s-2000 is going to come back to haunt us financially. We watched our infrastructure expand and our residential density decrease decade after decade after decade. As this suburban infrastructure continues to age, it’s going to become more costly to maintain until it ultimately needs to be replaced. With a rapidly slowing growth rate, I’m extremely concerned that the funds won’t be there unless we have a massive escalation of our city property tax rates. Imagine how an action like that will impact growth in the future? Let’s face it, the suburban areas alone cannot possibly afford their ongoing infrastructure costs. This is why I implore you to take our rapidly slowing growth seriously. Just graph the growth rate and actual numbers over this decade and watch it collapse in front of your eyes.
Now, I understand that the NCGA has done its best to handcuff the growth of cities in the state by making it impossible to annex involuntarily, but it’s not the only way for the city to grow. We can grow more densely and vertically in our city growth centers, especially in our Downtown Regional Center as identified in the 2030 Comprehensive Plan. Now, I’m not talking going crazy here either. I’m just talking about treating these areas as serious revenue generators for the city’s future. This is especially true of downtown where the most opportunity exists for revenue growth, and where your decisions now can enable that to happen. I’ve been reading that there are several UDO variance requests that will be before the council soon. I implore you to work with each one of them to maximize the revenue and experience potential of those sites. As a homeowner in view of two of these variance requests, I am also supportive of those variances, as they will build neighborhoods that have less reliance on cars. Certainly, more density today will not take all cars off the road, but reducing the amount of car trips in our daily lives beyond our commutes does make a difference. After moving to the center of the city, my miles driven per year were halved.
In the last Census estimate, Raleigh was passed in population by Miami: a city of less than 36 square miles. In fact, Miami added more than twice Raleigh’s growth number in an area that’s 1/4th the size of our city. We can do better. We must do better. We must think about our future and how we will respond to the demands for urban living, working, and playing, while managing our aging infrastructure. Please support the UDO variance requests before you.
