I was surprised not to see Raleigh on this list.
Very interesting! Thanks for sharing a chart I would never see on my own.
The craziest thing about VA Beach’s fake downtown is that it’s directly across the street from a giant big box center that sits in a sea of surface lot parking. Imagine the west side of North Hills where the opposite side of Six Forks Rd is Cary’s Crossroads.
Durham/Morrisville/RTP/RDU/Apex/Creedmoor/west Cary lie in a prehistoric lake bottom, remains of a lake that existed from Harrison Avenue to the meadowmont area of CH; and north (Creedmoor) to south (Sanford)), known Geologically as the Triassic Basin. Raleigh, eastern Cary, Chapel Hill, Garner, Hillsborough lie in the typical Piedmont Province (formally mountainous). The Triassic Basin has small hills, very dense silty clay soil (lake bed) and grows shallow rooted trees, like pines. Poor for farming. The soil does not drain well, has swampy areas & is terrible for development with septic tanks; hence when the sewer line arrived in the 1980-90s - BOOM!
Class dismissed.
When driving west on I 40, the basin can be seen from Harrison Ave, east to US 15-501.
I could run a fig plantation here tho. Those things grow like crazy in our shitty soil.
Downtown Cary had its annual Pimento Cheese Festival yesterday, and I’ve never seen the area so busy! Huge lines and running out of cheese and swag was annoying, but it was a great atmosphere and really impressive to see so many different people coming out. The park continues to be fantastic, and their little downtown continues to grow. I also liked the little booth house with a porch swing and a video inside. DTR could use more things like that.
I have a friend/client that lives in the Town Center and I visit him occasionally. I drive to the Westin at Town Center and park my car and until I leave to go back to Raleigh, no car, just chill in that little area there. It is like a North Hills for sure, but you don’t wonder out of the Town Center on foot.
Having just spent a week in Charleston and the recent discussion from Raleigh’s historic neighborhoods, I came across this article about downtown Charleston’s current state which I think presents some hard truths about places that don’t embrace upward growth and rely heavily on an industry like tourism as a major economic driver. It mentions a notable issue many other popular places face - the workforce, particularly in pay, housing, and affordability.
Unlike Charleston, it’s encouraging that many of Raleigh’s restaurants and retail are smaller businesses and continue to be so. Despite rising housing costs, Raleigh’s leadership and residents are indicating a commitment to resilience, sustainable growth, and prosperity.
As much as we complain about the empty storefronts in new developments, Raleigh’s shopfront zoning is probably a godsend to downtown small businesses with the surplus of new space for lease keeping rents lower.
Interesting. So Durham was the largest city in the area for a while in spite of those development challenges. Tobacco money goes a long way!
1950 was the last Census where Durham was larger than Raleigh. By the 1960 Census, Raleigh had a substantial population pop & zoomed past Durham in population.
1950
Durham: 71,311
Raleigh: 65,679
1960
Raleigh: 93,931 (+43.0%)
Durham: 78,302 (+9.8%)
I feel like most of that would have been sprawl and annexing the city limits though right? Reminds me of when Fayetteville’s population went from 120k in 2000 to 200k in 2010.
What do we think of this very outside-the-box idea to help spur tourism to the western part of the state? We could call it the Blue Ridge TT or something like that and it would be the craziest motorcycle race in America by a substantial margin.
So, this prompted me to go back to the data to see what happened at the county level between 1950 and 1960 because those boundaries didn’t change.
Durham:
1950: 101,639
1960: 111,995 (+10.2%)
Wake:
1950: 136,450
1960: 169,082 (+23.9%)
I’m sure that annexation had something to do with it, but it was probably annexation of new development, and probably not annexation of existing development like happens in Omaha, NE & other cities where their population grows more each decade than their county population.