Zoning and Density

Tough Crowd on here for anything outside of downtown.

  1. There are a lot of apartments getting built in North Hills.
  2. There are multiple hotels there.
  3. Its a on a future high frequency bus route.
  4. Ridesharing is a thing.

I completely agree about it being an island cut off from pedestrians, but the larger it gets and better possibility for this to change. As one of the least dense (as in bottom 3, Charlotte is #1) major cities in US, Density anywhere in the city should be welcomed. Ideally it would be downtown, yes. But beggars can’t be choosers, and more dense nodes opens up better public transit options. And who knows, maybe in 20 years we will have some sort of semi-continuous stretch of density connecting these newer areas to downtown. Hopefully with a revamped and highly used greenway to compliment it.

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I think you are overestimating the density of the rest of the US. If we define major city by 480k+ people (conveniently done so that Raleigh just barely makes the cut), of 41 cities, there are ~11 that are less dense than Charlotte, and ~15 less dense than Raleigh (including Charlotte). There are plenty that are more dense, but we aren’t the worst by far.

Rank City State 2019 Population Density (people/km)
1 New York City New York 8,601,186 11,056.4
2 San Fransisco California 897,536 7,388.0
3 Boston Massachusetts 694,784 5,549.0
4 Miami Florida 491,724 5,275.7
5 Chicago Illinois 2,679,044 4,549.9
6 Philadelphia Pennsylvania 1,576,596 4,536.7
7 Washington DC District of Columbia 713,549 4,506.1
8 Seattle Washington 766,893 3,532.0
9 Los Angeles California 4,057,841 3,343.0
10 Baltimore Maryland 594,450 2,835.5
11 Milwaukee Wisconsin 581,949 2,336.4
12 San Jose California 1,033,519 2,248.0
13 Sacremento California 513,330 2,030.0
14 Portland Oregon 667,589 1,931.4
15 Las Vegas Nevada 664,304 1,903.5
16 Denver Colorado 732,144 1,843.9
17 Detroit Michigan 662,172 1,843.1
18 Fresno California 532,703 1,811.1
19 San Diego California 1,453,775 1,728.4
20 Columbus Ohio 890,228 1,572.3
21 Dallas Texas 1,379,735 1,567.0
22 Atlanta Georgia 501,178 1,450.2
23 Houston Texas 2,359,480 1,431.2
24 Mesa Arizona 503,619 1,409.0
25 San Antonio Texas 1,565,929 1,311.6
26 Raleigh North Carolina 485,679 1,292.6
27 Phoenix Arizona 1,711,356 1,276.4
28 Austin Texas 1,001,104 1,204.9
29 Albequerque New Mexico 564,764 1,164.9
30 Charlotte North Carolina 889,019 1,121.1
31 El Paso Texas 696,610 1,045.1
32 For Worth Texas 913,939 1,023.4
33 Colorado Springs Colorado 493,799 978.7
34 Indianapolis Indiana 863,771 922.7
35 Louisville Kentucky 620,800 909.0
36 Tucson Arizona 537,501 875.6
37 Memphis Tennessee 647,506 787.7
38 Kansas City Missouri 501,094 614.4
39 Nashville Tennessee 679,318 551.1
40 Jacksonville Florida 920,984 475.6
41 Oklahoma City Oklahoma 661,614 421.3
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Sorry, it must have been the metro area statistic that I remember seeing with Charlotte, Nashville and Raleigh at the very bottom. Or maybe I’m completely wrong, because I can no longer find the source. :grin:

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Metro vs city limits would skew things significantly it seems to me. Irregardless, it’d we aren’t dense. I hope everyone saw @Francisco picture in Things from Other Cities, as much as we all love tall buildings, we need a humane scale to really build a livable city with density & thus walkability we all desire. Or at least those of us here, lol.

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Leo, I’m not sure where to put this but this articulates things we kind of just know.
Article about the cost of low density development (essentially)

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Definitely about zoning. Thanks for sharing. We’ve got some Chuck Marohn fans on the site, I’m sure. :smile:

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great article. Thank you for sharing! It would be interesting to put a climate change lens on the author’s argument. It makes sense, intuitively, that reusing a well-built building has a lower carbon footprint than tearing down development and building from scratch. I’m sure it like “depends” property-by-property.

The more I read/listen about diminishing resources, the more it sounds like tearing down virtually anything is a bad idea. Apparently, even sand for concrete has a depletion horizon our current development rates will get to. Sand. Green sites developed in a proper urban manner right off the bat seem to be the only way to lengthen these horizons. I’ve been arguing this approach for historic conservation forever now, but this new angle/concern might actually create the economics to force reuse much more often than we see now.

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Greenfield development in a proper urban model is what’s needed to support rail transit viability.
Problem solved.

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Not sure where to put this video, but this one is as good as any!

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Guess who showed up at tonight’s city council meeting to speak against the replacement process for CACs? Watching live on YouTube tonight.

Apologizing in advance. Who is this?

Former city councilman, Stef Mendell

*councilwoman but blech.

In the words of Motley Crue, “Girl, don’t go away mad…Girl, just go away!!!”

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When Stef stopped talking, MAB paused for a microsecond, didn’t respond at all to her, and simply moved onto the next person speaking. It was perfect.

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I read her mind. She was thinking “Stef, you lost. You lost big. Go. Go on girl”.

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I am hoping that this is a good place to add this:

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I was playing around with the Census numbers and the land areas of Raleigh back to 1890, and the story the numbers tell is fascinating.

Year Population Area Density
1890 12,678 1.34 9490
1900 13,643 1.76 7765
1910 19,218 4.03 4773
1920 24,418 6.96 3508
1930 37,379 7.25 5153
1940 46,879 7.25 6463
1950 65,679 10.88 6035
1960 93,931 33.67 2790
1970 122,830 44.93 2734
1980 150,255 55.17 2724
1990 212,092 91.40 2321
2000 276,093 118.71 2326
2010 406,432 143.77 2827

Since 1890, Raleigh has never regained its density from that time. It’s easy to see the impact of WW2 and its post war boom, and it’s easy to see how the auto-oriented development model really changed the game between 1950 an 1960. Raleigh’s density was cut more than in half, and basically sat there for 2 decades. It then dropped again and sat there for another 2 decades. It wasn’t until the last decade or so that Raleigh’s density metric has significantly reversed itself for the first time since 1940! Depending on what we think the population is today (different sources), Raleigh’s density metric has increased by about 1000 ppsm this century alone.

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