Re: the demographic question, no, because I grew up in a nuclear family in Cary and am close to both my parents and my brother (who has two small kids) who live there. This is a society where nuclear families dominate conversation, and as an outsider to that I’m acutely aware of that - just like I’m acutely aware that white people and straight people dominate the conversation (I’m neither).
Which largely explains why my work is building 3BR (and some 2BR) townhouses with tiny yards.
I point out demographics because most Americans have no idea that this demographic transition has happened… and that our planning laws are largely frozen in time from before (via AARP). The entire planning system is built around nuclear families, and reinforces biases towards that.
Yes, this is a “check your privilege” moment.
Ever since Euclid (i.e., for the last century), US planning has focused on strictly segregating “parasite” apartments from detached houses. The population growth since then has either been shunted into ever-larger apartments, increasingly crammed onto an ever-shrinking slice of land allocated for them, or ever more sprawl.
That’s why “missing middle housing” is so important: it’s the majority of housing units in pre-Euclid cities, but a vanishingly tiny slice in post-Euclid cities (such as Raleigh.)
Detached houses are 59% of Wake County’s housing stock vs. 12% in Boston (which has an acute housing crisis, but is the first example I could think of)
50+ unit apartments are 5% of Wake’s housing stock vs. 17% in Boston
“Missing middle” rowhouses/apartments are 36% of Wake’s, 71% in Boston
8000 new units in downtown Raleigh might sound like a lot, but that’s a 1.9% increase in Wake County’s overall housing stock. It’s really not that big a deal, and these are far from the only new units being built. There’s enough room, and there are enough building types, for all kinds of families – the problem is that, until VERY VERY VERY recently, it was pretty much illegal to build anything other than big apartments or sprawl.
To get to a place where Raleigh has a “big city” housing split is going to require hundreds of thousands of new dense housing units, in lots of different shapes and sizes. Don’t overreact to the few thousand you see today; they’re literally the tip of an iceberg.
Raleigh has unimaginable quantities of open space by the standards of any walkable city. (Too much of it is paved over, though!) People walk THROUGH, not TO, green spaces - the ratio of buildings to green in any walkable city is firmly tilted towards the buildings.