This post is excerpted from the INDY’s morning newsletter, Primer. To read this morning’s edition in full, click here.

There are people who get excited about urban planning, and then there is Joe Minicozzi, the principal at Asheville’s Urban3 LLC and a former executive director of the Asheville Downtown Association. Yesterday afternoon, he was the keynote speaker at the first annual State of Downtown Durham event, hosted by Downtown Durham Inc. Unlike the same State of Downtown Raleigh event earlier on Tuesday—which I didn’t attend but have in years past—this was a more laid-back affair at the Rickhouse, with beer and catering from Dame’s instead of a rubber-chicken lunch inside the convention center. Point: Durham. Anyway, Minicozzi: for about a half-hour, he excitedly pitched the crowd on the value of downtowns, encouraging us to think of things in terms of taxable value per acre; in that sense, the 21c hotel is worth exponentially more, at $92 million an acre (!), than any Walmart in the world. It’s these things—density, height—that urban planners should be focused on, he says, because they add value to the tax rolls and thus to the community itself.

  • Next came Matt Gladdek of DDI to give us the stats: downtown, which is less than a square mile in a city of 107 square miles, has 3.2 million square feet of office space, 18,500 employees, 14,605 people who live in downtown or within a mile of it, and 30,000 people in it every day. Class-A office space in downtown has been at 99 percent occupancy for the last six quarters, and entering 2018, there was no available for lab space downtown, a problem that was rectified when The Chesterfield opened. Eight hundred thousand more square feet of office space will come online soon, Gladdek continued, helped along with the opening of One City Center and a project at 555 Mangum.
  • Twenty people a day are moving to Durham, and there are twenty-five hundred residential units in downtown right now, with another three thousand or so in the works and occupancy between 90 percent and 95 percent. Downtown has eighty-eight restaurants, sixty-two bars, and twenty-seven retail stores. “We don’t have chains,” Gladdek boasted. “We have local entrepreneurs. That’s what makes Durham Durham.”
  • Those are all good numbers, but they definitely gloss over some of the issues downtown is facing, most notably affordability. Check out, for instance, this pricing sheet for units at One City Center, the big downtown skyscraper, which circulated on Twitter yesterday. More than $1,700 for a 632 square-foot apartment, before fees.
  • On the one hand, if the developers can get that kind of money, good for them. On the other hand, damn.
  • Over to Raleigh, where, according to the Downtown Raleigh Association, things are also going swimmingly. From the INDY’s story on the State of Downtown Raleigh report: “Downtown Raleigh’s population has grown 179 percent since 2000 with the addition of over thirty-five hundred residential units. Eighty-five hundred people currently live downtown, and 16,900 within one mile of downtown. Those numbers are only going to increase: downtown Raleigh already doubled its number of housing units since 2000 and is slated to triple that number by 2020. … Since 2016, fifty-one restaurants opened downtown, with twenty-four alone in 2017. … In 2017, food and beverage sales hit $223 million, with 10 percent growth over 2016 and 95 percent growth since 2009. … Since 2014, downtown Raleigh has added forty new stores. Ninety-four percent of the stores downtown are locally owned. Forty-six percent growth in its retail base since 2010, the largest growth in any storefront use for downtown. … The DRA reports, in recent years, have maintained a similar formula: glowing reports of new additions paired with hopeful projections about the future of downtown. The numbers here back that up. It’s undeniable that Raleigh is growing, and growing fast. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to be cheap. The average asking price for a multifamily unit downtown is $1,444. Even working full-time at $15 an hour, you won’t be able to afford that. Last year, average rent downtown grew 9 percent, and there is a significant demand for affordable housing options in and around downtown Raleigh. A lot of the new housing units built downtown are not likely to be affordable.”
  • Other new things: the twenty-two-story FNB Tower on Fayetteville Street will break ground on May 3, and Apex Outfitters will open its second location in the former DECO space downtown.

WHAT IT MEANS: Scrape away the gloss and these reports tell us nothing we don’t already know. Our downtowns are growing and growing quickly. This intensifying urbanization is a good thing—for the environment, for the city, for everyone, really. But the real question is how we manage this growth and what steps we take to ameliorate some of its consequences. This has to do with zoning and affordability, with density and transit. It means growing smartly and not giving into NIMBYism, which, especially on the Raleigh City Council but also in some corners of Durham, seems to be more and more of a problem.