Oh god, you should see the sport messages boards. People are calling Charlotte boring as ****. I love it. They can have 3 terrible pro teams, I don’t care. 
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Okay, I mean, this is coming from … [checks notes] … Vegan Pythagorean (“Here to discuss anything vegan and vegetarian in the Triangle area of North Carolina and beyond.”).
BTW, VP is not actually correct that “Raleigh is the largest city in America without a downtown stadium.” It is true that Raleigh is quite unusual being a city of its size and not having a downtown stadium. But that’s largely because Raleigh is also quite unusual for a city of its size in that the federal government didn’t rip out in entire neighborhoods in the urban core so they could run a federal highway through the heart of downtown. And I am really, really, glad that this never happened. It makes us a much, much better and healthier city. But it also makes it hard to build a stadium downtown.
And let’s be honest, Malik can call this project “Downtown South,” but Penmarc is not “downtown.” It’s at Exit 298A just off of I-40, because sports teams really, really like to build their stadiums next to the interstate.
BTW, I realize that not everyone is super into hockey, and that’s cool, but the NHL is wildly more popular than MLS, and Raleigh has an NHL team and Charlotte doesn’t, so we’ve got that going for us, which is nice. (BTW, I don’t think the CBJ editor is right that Raleigh’s NHL team is in any way responsible for Charlotte not having a team, or would be a dealbreaker if Charlotte were otherwise an attractive market for the NHL, which it is currently not.)
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And our NHL team is back to kicking ass! I am still a Panthers fan though. It’s OK to root for a Carolina team that’s literally only 2.5 hours away!
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Today’s TBJ has a article on Steve Malik but I could not read it .
He formed a new LLC called Project Renegade but isn’t ready to disclose what it is. Supposedly he has an announcement coming soon.
DOWNTOWN EAST
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Thanks a lot for this information .
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Raleigh has to be one of the largest cities in the USA without a stadium or arena of any kind in the general downtown vicinity. Hopefully the Canes can play in downtown someday.
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There are some suburbs of giant cities that are actually Raleigh’s rival in population. This includes Mesa, AZ (larger than Raleigh), Long Beach, CA (about the same size as Raleigh), and VA Beach (just a tad less populated than Raleigh). Neither Mesa nor Virginia Beach even have a real downtown. I am pretty confident that the assertion of Raleigh being the largest city to not have a DT sport venue is meant to compare DTs of central cities. Does anyone know a DT of a central city larger than Raleigh without a DT/central sport venue?
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…Austin TX?
UT is downtown and their football stadium probably counts, plus their basketball arena is even closer to the Capitol. It’s just a few blocks NE of the Capitol grounds.
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San Antonio, Oakland, Fort Lauderdale, Philadelphia?
Both Fort Lauderdale and Oakland are smaller than Raleigh. Fort Lauderdale is way smaller actually.
San Antonio might be a really good example of such a city. The Spurs are not downtown. The closest thing that Philly has is Penn’s stadium and it’s pretty close to the core, but across the river from DT.
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Richmond,
Las Vegas (for now)
Richmond is smaller than Raleigh.
Yeah I thought for some reason it was similar in size.
The Coliseum is also downtown Richmond so I’m not sure why it was mentioned.
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Richmond and Raleigh were about the same size in the 1990 Census according to my World Book Encyclopedia set. Raleigh was 75th in the country, Richmond was 76th. Time has seen quite a divergence between the two.
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You guys have to remember that you are talking about city limit populations which mean next to nothing and tell very little when it comes to a cities “actual” size, relevance, and influence. The difference in land area of cities makes it very hard to directly compare their population for ranking their size. More context is needed such as metro numbers, urban area, and GDP.
Richmond and Raleigh are about as close as it gets right now for peer southern cities when looking at the full context.
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Richmond’s MSA takes more than twice the land area of Raleigh’s MSA, and still comes out smaller in population Raleigh. If you add Raleigh’s and Durham’s MSA’s together, you now have “Richmond” similar in land area, but now Raleigh/Durham is more than 700,000 people larger. So, it’s not just in city proper that Raleigh is larger than Richmond.
I was using both city’s past population as the point of comparison, so the city limits argument is kinda moot. Richmond proper has grown 12% over the last 28 years, Raleigh 125%. The two cities are on different trajectories and have been for quite some time.