Tough Crowd on here for anything outside of downtown.
There are a lot of apartments getting built in North Hills.
There are multiple hotels there.
Its a on a future high frequency bus route.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.