It’s hard to convey the case I am making on my phone, but we will revisit this tonight.
Speaking of CityNerd, I was wondering what perspective people here would have on this video of his. More specifically what people think of one of his findings being that Raleigh ranks #4 among large US metro areas for having the least income inequality (13:15 in the video). I’m no statistician but his methodology seems sound, you could simplify it down to ranking by the difference between the median and mean household income for a metro area.
The top 5 are:
1: Salt Lake City, UT
2: Riverside-San Bernardino, CA
3: Grand Rapids, MI
4: Raleigh, NC
5: Washington D.C.
He says that he has no theory on why Raleigh does so well in this analysis and I fall in that camp as well. Does anybody have any insight or theories about why we have such a (relatively) low amount of income equality here?
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Where are all the people?
It was a Thursday afternoon/evening. The town also only has a population of about 17k people.
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They’re all on the revitalized Fayetteville Street…
(part 1)
i lived in charlotte in the early 2000s for a few years…i was born and lived in Raleigh for 40 years. to me, raleigh had the best blend of garden-esqe eden-like neighborhoods (not owned the the super wealthy) and at the time urban familiarness. est est was downtown, city market had it moments, we had decent symphony, the brewery, FSM…and nothing ever seemed hard to get to. even university theatre in durham. this is era dependent, I get it. charlotte wasn’t all that great to me despite the height…and I drove all around the city delivering stuff.
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I think if you have lived in NC for any time at all, you are either a Raleigh person or a Charlotte person. I haven’t seen too many people who put those cities on equal footing. I certainly and obviously prefer Raleigh. My daughter attends UNC-Charlotte and having now lived in both Raleigh and Charlotte prefers Raleigh. Just my two cents.
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Main Shopping District in Bad Oldesloe. Taken on a Monday morning. 24k population. Pictures don’t really do it justice, but it was decently busy.
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finally, no shadows .
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Shadows is very serious issue we should all take much more serious guys. Come on. Shadows…
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Sorry if my previous shadows bothered you. 
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As for our low-income inequality, my thought is that our educated workforce is strong across racial categories. NC has two of the largest HBCUs and many smaller ones. We also have one of the strongest state university systems and strong community colleges. Also, Raleigh’s neighborhoods don’t feel as segregated as other places. In my opinion, all of this is a huge advantage over Austin.
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I was at that same spot in Louisburg the past two days doing some surveying work on the county courthouse. Downtown Louisburg honestly isn’t bad, it has that small town charm and the neighborhoods around it seem nice as well.
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I go back to the highways. Look at cities that have highways slicing through them today: adjacent urban neighborhoods (often the highest concentration of black and Hispanic residents as we know) have either been completely eliminated (intentionally neglected for decades then redeveloped, i.e. south end charlotte) or are still struggling and showing no signs of recovery (New Orleans).
The best (and truly most devastating) example is Baltimore’s Highway to Nowhere. I’m so thankful and proud to live in a city that doesn’t have this history and doesn’t have to spend the resources now to undo it. Raleigh’s share of urban renewal damage shouldn’t be ignored, but we didn’t create this particular (and in my opinion grossly underestimated) headwind to equity when every other city did.
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I’m glad that Raleigh resisted a freeway plowing through its center, but I don’t think that we can say that it was for altruistic reasons. From what I’ve heard, it was Oakwood residents who led the charge to prevent the freeway from plowing through/near their historic homes.
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Would we have called them NIMBY? I guess technically it would be given the proposed highway would have been in their back yard. This is one of those examples of why we all have some NIMBY in us given the right circumstances.
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