A lot of the smaller towns are already on the map, and that’s why I said that it looks like more than 50% of the population. Smaller cities like Goldsboro, Kinston, Elizabeth City, Roanoke Rapids, Morganton, Hickory, Lexington, Hendersonville, Pinehurst, etc., are all already shown. I am not sure where this other 50% of the population is. I’m just not buying that 50% of it is missing from that map. 50% of NC isn’t living onesy/twosy in the white area. Just the 10 most populated counties account for over 5M people, and 8 of those counties are in the Triangle, Triad, or Charlotte areas.
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Just a quick envelope math of the top 50 cities in the state (Harrisburg at 20,000 being #50) adds up to less than 5 million. NC has a lot of rural population (about a 1/3rd of the population living there alone). Probably not too hard to add to that simply by avoiding cities. Even a county like Wake has over 200,000 people living outside an incorporated community.
That stat needs context. A lot of those 50 cities are clustered around a few major metro areas. Just in Wake County there are at least 8 of the top 50 (counting off the top of my head). Building upon that, there are many tens of thousands who live in unincorporated “Raleigh” as well.
Unless that map maker specifically peeled off the unincorporated folks in NC’s largest counties/metro areas, I still don’t see how it’s only 50% of the population. If they did peel them out, then I can wrap my head around it. And, if that was done, then the narrative of the map is disingenuous.
The three major CSAs in NC: Metrolina/Triangle/Triad represent over 7M North Carolinians. That’s even after removing the SC portion of Metrolina. For additional context, ~half NC’s population just lives in the Charlotte (NC part) and Triangle CSAs combined, and it sure looks like all the dots are there among both of those metro areas.
One last data point. About half of NC’s counties have fewer than 50,000 people. Even if you considered that all of those 50 had the full 50,000, that’s still only 2.5 million people, which is conveniently the approximate population of just Wake + Mecklenburg.
I still haven’t seen any graphic or data that passes the smell test with me. That said, maybe the map maker specifically sandbagged “dots” in the major counties and metros to make it fit a narrative?
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The map clearly show large swaths of Wake County outside the green. It seems likely/probable/obvious that the green aligns with city limits. MSA is also not really a great way to decide if a place is rural/urban/anything. Most of Chatham County is best described as rural, even if its job alignment gets it into the Triangle. Or maybe a more obvious example would be Johnston County. It has about 250,000 people but the green dots seem centered on Clayton, Smithfield, Archer’s Lodge which may only be about 20% of the county population. There’s hundreds of thousands of people in a Triangle county that wouldn’t be covered by those green dots.
If the top 50 towns/cities have a population of about 4.8 million, there is still over 700,000 more needed to get over 50%. And when the largest towns remaining are less than 20,000, there simply isn’t enough big towns left to make the map look more green.
It is what it is, NC is fairly rural among the big states. Georgia and Michigan are the closest to us among top 10 states, and they are hovering around 27% rural (6 points less than we are).
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In Wake County alone, there are nearly 200,000 unincorporated residents. While some of those folks are certainly rural, I’d suspect that far more of them are just unincorporated urban/suburban. This will play out in other counties as well. If the map maker went by municipal limits alone (which is easy to imagine now), then this could explain a lot. There just aren’t 5.5M+ North Carolinians living the rural life. AI tells me that it’s ~2M fewer than that number.
Yes, last census was 3.4 million living in the rural area (second only to Texas). The map is accurate, it just reframes how to view the state. Most people don’t live in a big city even if they live near a big city.
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They can literally be surrounded by or immediately adjacent to a big city. Those folks are living an urban or suburban life, they just aren’t paying the municipal taxes.
That’s not wrong. But the map remains accurate since they aren’t living in the green areas. 50% of the population lives in a fairly narrow area.
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My point is that it’s pushing a narrative that would make one believe that half of NC is rural. That’s disingenuous.
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Theres also a lot of people in semi-rural ex-urban population clusters that barely show up. There’s tons of tract housing around Angiers in north Harnett County (pop. 146,000) but you wouldn’t know it from the map. Ditto with Chatham County (pop.83,000). Apart from those blips around 501 it barely registers.
I’m not sure it’s pushing a narrative as much as showing a quirky stat. Namely that 50% of NC’s population doesn’t live in town limits over a certain size . It is due in part to our large rural population (2nd largest overall, 18th by percentage), but the map doesn’t hide the fact that it is cutting out land within miles of downtown Raleigh. It’s all there in green and white. NC is, if not uniquely so, still rather decentralized with a broad mix of urban, rural, and suburban pockets.
Then it’s really a map about incorporation of a certain size vs non-incorporated areas, including those that essentially function as integral parts of larger metropolitan areas.
OSBM saying we surpassed 500,000 in 2024.
Wake County and the Triangle overall have continued to soar. Crazy how much Charlotte continues to grow as well.
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That’s interesting that the State’s projection is slightly higher than the US Census estimate is. It’s been my experience that the state routinely underestimated our population.
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Very cool. Half a million people is a big milestone for the city.
There is a lot of interesting info in that post. A few things that jumped out to me:
- In absolute numbers, Raleigh, Durham, and Cary are the second, third, and fourth-fastest growing cities in the state.
- Wake Forest and Holly Springs are the two fastest growing by percentage (of NC’s 25 largest).
- I was a little surprised that Charlotte’s percent growth was slightly above Raleigh’s (8% to 7%).
- Charlotte added 70K people from 2020-2024 and is currently at almost 945K people. If that pace holds up, it will pass a million in less than four more years.
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Charlotte still has much more land to develop and redevelop than Raleigh, and what they do have is still less densely populated than Raleigh proper. Charlotte is more than twice the physical size of Raleigh, and Raleigh got to 500K before Charlotte got to 1M.
500K is a big deal for Raleigh because it breaks a line by which many people’s perceptions of a city.
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Charlotte is densifying with lots of the apartment and multifamily growth inside the city limits on former industrial land. Examples in Southend of course, but also along the N Tryon corridor, near NoDa and Villa Heights and around Camp North End. However, Raleigh is a denser city, but we have plenty of room to densify. Plus of course we build upward. New 42 story apartment tower finishing up now, 28 story apartment tower rising and another 25 story apartment tower in Ballantyne finishing up. Plus we are now starting a 45 story mixed use tower office and apartments. Raleigh has other towns and cities surrounding it and to a certain extent Charlotte does but we have lots of land to the west and east inside Mecklenburg County that will be part of Charlotte too.
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Crazy how much more the Raleigh and Charlotte areas are growing compared to the Triad. Surprised to see Winston-Salem ever so slightly closing the gap with Greensboro, which will certainly be surpassed in a couple years by Durham (probably right around the same time that High Point is passed by Concord).
I wonder how much longer Apex can continue to grow at its current rate. So much of its growth has been rapid suburbanization, and it is hemmed in on all sides. Mooresville’s growth rate is also a bit surprising as it is nearly 30 miles north of Charlotte, although it will be in a good spot if the commuter rail ever comes to fruition, as will Kannapolis which is just barely outside of the top 25 (will probably pass Chapel Hill by 2030 and has an Amtrak station). Both of those towns have seen some legit urban development in the past few years.
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I am not disagreeing with anything that you are saying. In fact, you are pointing out exactly how Charlotte is doing what I said. There is more than twice the amount of land (compared to Raleigh) within which Charlotte can grow and densify without even annexing any more land. No doubt that Charlotte will crest 1M soon enough, while Raleigh will likely reach 600K but plateau at that number while the rest of the county’s burbs push higher. We will likely see Cary at 200K, Apex at 100K, and probably Wake Forest, Holly Springs, and Fuquay Varina top 75K. It’s all pretty nuts to imagine.
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Population per sq km of select major urban areas
Los Angeles, CA- 2252
San Francisco-Oakland, CA- 2482
Las Vegas, NV- 2024
Miami, FL- 1902
New York, NY-NJ-CT- 1842
Denver, CO- 1834
San Francisco, CA (incl SJ)- 1755
San Diego, CA- 1746
Sacramento, CA- 1625
Portland, OR-WA- 1544
Phoenix, AZ- 1422
Salt Lake City, UT- 1406
Washington-Baltimore, DC-VA-MD- 1364
Chicago, IL-IN- 1346
San Antonio, TX- 1323
Dallas-Fort Worth, TX- 1315
Houston, TX- 1262
Seattle, WA- 1262
Austin, TX- 1219
Columbus, OH- 1184
Philadelphia, PA-NJ-DE-MD- 1159
Virginia Beach-Norfolk, VA- 1141
Milwaukee, WI- 1068
Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL- 1061
Orlando, FL- 1019
Detroit, MI- 1015
Boston, MA-NH- 1013
Indianapolis, IN- 938
Oklahoma City, OK - 921
Kansas City, MO-KS- 918
San Juan, PR- 908
Jacksonville, FL- 893
Cincinnati, OH-KY- 879
St. Louis, MO-IL- 873
Boston-Providence, MA-NH-RI- 834
Raleigh, NC- 829
Richmond, VA- 822
Memphis, TN-MS-AR- 805
Nashville, TN- 789
Atlanta, GA- 768
Cape Coral-Naples, FL- 761
Cleveland, OH- 732
Pittsburgh, PA- 724
Charlotte, NC-SC- 610
None of the traditionally Southern Urban Areas have anything to brag about, but Charlotte sits at the very bottom of Demographia’s density metric for UAs. I am guessing that, unlike the Census Bureau, Demographia is including Gastonia, Concord, and Rock Hill in its definition of a UA, and that drags them to the bottom.
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