Newcomers flocked to Zoomtowns. Now long-time residents are fighting back.

In the six years since I moved here, my husband and I have come to appreciate Raleigh's charms and conveniences, and we did indeed buy a relatively inexpensive house. But we weren't the only ones to make the shift. Raleigh transformed during the pandemic from a sleepy Southern capital into one of the hottest real-estate markets in the US. An estimated 60 people move every day to Wake County, of which Raleigh is the seat, and the city's downtown population is expected to double within the next five years. The flood of newcomers means that, like many other midsize cities around the US, Raleigh is no longer so cheap or so quiet.

Some Raleighites I've talked to say the sudden changes are a sign of a city losing its way. They notice red-clay gashes in the earth where ranch homes have been demolished in favor of sleek townhomes. In the city's parks, they see an influx of unhoused people. On the city's roads, they find unholy amounts of traffic. They look at five-over-ones on every corner and flapping banners advertising luxury living, and they see gentrification and displacement or the disruption of the American dream of a single-family home and a lawn.

But other residents are eager about the city's changes. They see new tech jobs, diverse cuisine, a growing number of entertainment options, and improved parks. They see a city where you can, if you're brave, get around without a car. Crucially, they see changes that will encourage more homebuilding to accommodate all the new residents flocking to the city and, hopefully, combat sprawl.

Remote workers looking for cheaper rent, transplants looking for more space, or people simply looking for a change of pace have turned midsize cities that were once afterthoughts into booming Zoomtowns. After three years of chaos, these places are finally taking the time to breathe and take stock. Maintaining a city's growth and vitality is certainly preferable to stagnation and decay, but it also brings a host of other issues, especially when that growth and vitality come at the expense of vulnerable residents.

As home values soar, brand-new Teslas clog the highways, and concrete shafts rise from construction sites, I've wondered: What is the future of a city like Raleigh? Is there a way to continue its transformation without destroying the bungalows, old rail depots, and stately trees that made the City of Oaks unique?

"We're still becoming what we will be. We're transitioning from a sleepy capital city into a midsize-to-major city," Jonathan Melton, a member of Raleigh's City Council, told me. Which direction will the city choose? Is there a way to transform without becoming unlivable along the way?

Southern hospitality

Local debates over Raleigh's flood of newcomers — whether they take place at a City Council meeting, in a grungy coffee shop, or at a sleek, new salad chain — usually come down to one big issue: where to put everyone. The city added roughly 60,000 residents between 2019 and 2022, according to Census Bureau data, and the local housing market is struggling to keep up: A study by the real-estate-data firm Zillow found that the city was facing a housing shortage of 17,000 units. This certainly has benefits for some longtime homeowners (the average value of a home in Raleigh has soared by 56% over the past five years, according to Zillow), but it has left renters and new homebuyers struggling to find a place to rest their heads.

Everybody I talked to worries about displacement and maintaining the spirit of the city, but when I asked Raleighites how they would deal with the problem, they generally fell into two camps. The first wants to solve the problem of too little housing by, well, building more housing. Experts would call these people YIMBYs, or "yes in my backyard." The YIMBY idea is that making it easier to build — through policies such as relaxed zoning codes or incentives like tax breaks for developers — will increase the supply of homes, ease the competition over finding a place to live, and thereby lower housing costs for everyone.

Before 2022, Raleigh leaders were all in on this path. The city changed zoning laws in summer 2021 to clear the way for developers to more easily build "missing middle" housing, home types in between towering apartments and single-family homes, such as townhouses, duplexes, and smaller apartment buildings. Melton, who lives in a neighborhood with a mix of apartment buildings, duplexes, and single-family homes, told me this type of denser housing was crucial to helping Raleigh grow.

But Melton and the YIMBYs' vision rankled some Raleigh residents who eventually started to push back on what they considered extreme pro-development policies. These slower-growth advocates would generally be considered NIMBYs, for "not in my backyard." After the most recent local elections in 2022, it was clear that the city had a sizable NIMBY contingent — the council is now more evenly split among gung-ho and cautious lines.

Frank Hielema, who lives in the historic Hayes Barton neighborhood west of downtown, is one of those development skeptics. Hielema is a member of the group Restore Raleigh Zoning, which is dedicated to fighting "runaway growth" and reinstating more-stringent rules around which kinds of buildings can go where. He told me that in the past few years, Raleigh's government "turned over the keys of the city to developers" and allowed a slew of buildings that are ugly, characterless, and inappropriate aesthetically for the city. He pointed to the first development proposed in Hayes-Barton after the new zoning laws passed in 2021. The plan was to build seventeen townhomes on a 2.25-acre plot that once housed two single-family homes. In Hielema's opinion, the development was a sign that the city was abrogating its side of a "treaty" that it had with residents in the formerly single-family neighborhood.

Hielema and his compatriots were also fully aware of the NIMBY stereotypes that dogged their complaints about these new townhomes. "They say that we're a bunch of old, rich white people and we're complaining because they want something more affordable," Margie Case, Hielema's neighbor and a fellow member of Restore Raleigh Zoning, said. But, she pointed out, "these townhomes are $2 million apiece."

One tricky aspect of the NIMBY-YIMBY dichotomy is that the opinions of homeowners in neighborhoods like Hayes Barton, who tend to be white and wealthy, often end up aligning with low-income residents who are people of color worried about the changes encroaching on their city. Kesha Monk, a voice-over artist, lives on the other side of town in the historically Black Biltmore Hills neighborhood. She fears what will happen to Black residents who live in underserved areas east of downtown that, thanks to the city's explosive growth, have suddenly become desirable.

"I know historically what happens to Black neighborhoods when they get caught up in the whole gentrification thing," Monk told me. "There are people who've been in these neighborhoods for generations, and they're having to leave because they can no longer afford the rising property taxes."

She recalled an anecdote from a City Council meeting she'd recently attended, where the councilors were discussing a home that was considered a public nuisance because of an unkempt lawn. She swung by the house and found out that a 90-year-old man lived there. Monk cut the grass for him.

"If they'd fined him and he didn't pay it, then there would be a lien on the property, and it would be an excuse for them to bulldoze the home," she said.

Raleigh isn't the only burgeoning city facing these housing pressures. As more Americans spread out from large coastal metros such as New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, fights over gentrification and development have started to become more commonplace — even in places like rural Vermont. As up-and-coming areas such as Austin, Cleveland, and Scottsdale, Arizona grapple with the cycle of development and displacement, the question remains of which region of the country will be left for America's lower-income residents.

Who is the city for?

Ask your average Raleigh resident about a thorn of living in the city, and one issue will come up repeatedly: traffic. More people, and more building, means more cars. In reporting this story, I heard constantly about how routes that once took 10 minutes now take 30 or more. Say the words "I-40 at rush hour" or "Wade Avenue," and watch your conversation partner shudder.

"Not sitting in traffic was one of the No. 1 reasons I wanted to come back here," Monk, who lived all over the country before settling down in Raleigh, told me. Nowadays, she frequently finds herself in bumper-to-bumper stoppages.

The sudden rise in traffic is a symptom of a larger problem facing Raleigh and many other midsize cities: The infrastructure wasn't ready for the population explosion. Whether it's transportation, sewage, or proximity to schools, basic services that residents expect are under strain. Some smaller cities are using their rapid growth as an opportunity to reenvision what their municipalities could be. But expanding those services takes time and money, while raising existential questions about for whom and what the city is designed.

Take the traffic issue: Adam Terando, the board chair of the policy group WakeUp Wake County, said residents were reliant on five main roads to funnel all traffic — he described them as "sewers for cars" — which are nightmares at almost any time of day. The natural solution, it would seem, is public transportation. The city just broke ground on a rapid transit route down New Bern Avenue, an artery that runs through the eastern side of the city into downtown. The new buses seem like a great idea, but as with all these changes, residents are worried that the route will have unintended consequences. Southeast Raleigh, where the Black workers who built the city once lived, has received national attention for the blitzkrieg gentrification it's faced over the past five years. Some residents there see the new bus as a way to serve new transplants, rather than an investment in keeping longtime residents in the neighborhood.

Terando had a different framing. To him, the takeover of southeast Raleigh is being driven by private investors, and adding a way for residents to get around will neither solve nor exacerbate that issue. "Public investment itself doesn't necessarily mean displacement," he said, adding that the bus route was "more a symptom of what's already happening rather than a catalyst for something new."

Melton also argued that the bus project was a sign of positive public investment and said that the city was using funds earmarked for equitable development around transit corridors to lay high-speed internet cables in the area.

"Whenever you plan for something new or nice, there's always this concern about what kind of pressure that'll put on the residents there," Melton said. "So you have two choices. You can stay the same or grow and change."

'We're not prepared to handle it'

Monk, the voiceover artist, first moved to Raleigh in the 1990s to attend Shaw University, a local historically Black school. There, she fell in love. Monk was from New York, and she adored the kindness and cleanliness of her new home. "You could see the sky in Raleigh," she said.

But this summer, her beloved Shaw University, beset by financial woes, asked the Raleigh City Council for a zoning change that would allow developers to build apartment towers up to 30 stories on campus. Just south of downtown Raleigh, Shaw's land was worth about $200 million in 2019. Proponents believed that rezoning the area for residential and commercial construction would give Shaw a much-needed cash infusion. But in Monk's view, the changes will strip the campus of what made it special and represent an ominous turn for the school and the city she loves.

"This case will go down in history as one of the worst cases of gentrification in this city's history," Monk, who campaigned against the zoning change, said. "It feels like the bad guys are winning."

This is the last piece of the puzzle: the aesthetic and cultural quality of a city. Places such as Raleigh run the risk of becoming just like everywhere else — turning from a town of bungalows and quirky brick storefronts into generic apartment towers and chain stores. Margie Case, the Hayes Barton resident, says that when she travels around the city, she's horrified by the number of old homes knocked down to make way for generic, new construction.

"What sets Raleigh apart is an old charm and beauty," Case said, "individual neighborhoods and their charms."

When it comes to preserving the aesthetic quality and history of a city, as Raleigh residents learned firsthand last year, there's only so much politicians can do. The New York City owners of the historic Seaboard Station, an 80-year-old former train depot nestled north of downtown that's home to a garden center and local shops, filed plans with the city to demolish the station and build towers in its place. People protested and urged the city to save Seaboard Station, but there was one issue: There were no zoning laws to prevent the changes. The developers appeared before the City Council only to ask for an exemption to increase the height of their proposed towers. As it was, the city negotiated, giving the developers an increased height limit if they agreed to preserve the train station by moving it 100 yards to the north. This was framed as a win, but the fact remains that Seaboard Station, as the city knows it, will soon be gone.

"If somebody owns a building, and they did not want to put historical protection on that building, and they want to sell it and they don't ask for rezoning, there's nothing we can do," Melton said.

In some ways, these sorts of changes seem inevitable. As a city becomes desirable, the cost of real estate goes up, driving out the smaller, quirkier businesses and pushing property owners to cash in by selling to developers. There's not much anybody can do to stop this cycle; it's simply a question of how these cities manage this rapid growth.

It's worth noting, too, that most Raleigh residents, even those who oppose the current pace of development, point to some positives. When longtime residents describe what Raleigh used to be, what emerges is a picture of a sleepy, boring town. "When I moved here, all the people were homogeneous. Everybody was wearing a monogrammed sweater and penny loafers and listening to beach music, and in the grocery store, you couldn't buy a bagel," Case, who moved to the city 40 years ago, told me. People praise the new airline connections, the variety of cuisine, the restaurants open past 8 p.m.

The question then becomes one of trade-offs: How much density do we want in exchange for loss of character? How much should the city government relax zoning, its one weapon against developers? How can we build much-needed public transportation without destroying the communities it's intended to serve? Because growth is happening, whether we like it or not.

"Not planning for the growth doesn't mean it doesn't happen," Melton said. "It just means we're not prepared to handle it."

Emily Cataneo is a writer and journalist based in Raleigh, North Carolina.