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Yeah that sounds about right for that area. I was stationed in NC for a bit as well as SC. And winters were pretty mild...nothing like New England where I’m from and certainly nothing like Seattle.
Raleigh is a little cooler than areas on the coast and Sandhills (not sure where you were stationed). This past winter we had over 180 hours (almost 8 straight) days of temps that didn't get above 31 degrees (day or night), with many days getting into the low teens single digits for lows. That was a modern-day record for the Triangle. With that being said, several weeks later it was 80 degrees for a day or two. Then we get Freezing daytime highs in mid-March.
Yeah that sounds about right for that area. I was stationed in NC for a bit as well as SC. And winters were pretty mild...nothing like New England where I’m from and certainly nothing like Seattle.
Seattle has fairly mild winters given how far from the equator it is. Looking at averages, Seattle is only 3 degrees cooler than Raleigh in January for an average high, but actually 5 degrees warmer than Raleigh for an average low. Making Seattle having a higher daily mean in January than Raleigh.
Of course if it's sunlight you crave, Raleigh has more than twice the sunlight hours in January than Seattle. And obviously Raleigh will be having larger swings (more warmer weather in January along with bitterly cold). But we got to give Seattle credit, it's mild!
I would personally pick Raleigh. Largely that is due to the weather, I can't stand the constant damp dog type of feeling in the PNW. But Seattle is far far larger than Raleigh which makes this a bad comparison. So it's obvious that some metrics are going to go one way or another.
Weed and grunge or NY transients and better weather.
Only weed and grunge come to mind when you think of Seattle? The grunge era ended a long time ago and weed isn't as prevalent as you might believe although it is legal. Weed doesn't define the city or state. When I think about Seattle the first thing that comes to mind is tech or green.
Weather and Location I like Raleigh......every other category outside Higher Education more then likely goes to Seattle quite handily alot to like about that city.
Weed and grunge or NY transients and better weather.
The Seattle of today looks nothing like the Seattle of the late 80s and early 90s. Also, weed doesn't seem to be as big of a deal in Seattle as it does in cities like Denver.
In many ways it feels similar to me, having lived here all along. But:
--Tech has exploded. It's routine for a local or SF-based tech to take another building, or multiple buildings, or a bunch of floors in various office towers. Amazon and Microsoft might be the two biggest HQ offices in the world, with something like 28,000,000 sf combined including work underway...I've said this repeatedly and nobody has challenged it.
--Related to that, the city has become fairly expensive. We've kept the edge off due to adding housing and office supply at a good clip at least in terms of rentals. Land is expensive (it's very hard to add it, though we've done so in the past) so SFRs have gotten expensive quickly, and condos are expensive due to defect liability laws.
--Infill has been very significant. Within the city limits of 83.9 sm, we've grown from 486,000 residents in 1986 to something like 730,000 today (recent state estimate for 2018). If you assume that 70% of the growth has been in the 15% of the city where growth is intentionally concentrated (greater Downtown and various commercial/mixed nodes), that's growth averaging 13,572 residents per square mile in those areas along with white collar job growth (and a decline of factory jobs etc.). It also means another 1,300/sm in the 2/3 of the city that allows lower-density housing.
--Tourism growth has been huge. In the late 80s, greater Downtown was somewhere in the 5,000-hotel-room range. (In the close-in CBD market, the inventory roughly doubled to 4,200(?) basically overnight in 1982, which meant we were severely overbuilt for years, resulting in urgency in building our convention center in the late 80s, and no additional hotels for a while.) We built hotels gradually 1995-2010 and in a large boom 2012(?)-2018+, which will take greater Downtown to something like 16,500. Add something like 15,000(?) cruise passengers on peak days just coming through town (maybe 1/4 staying in hotels)...it's a different city. The Central Waterfront, the Seattle Center (including Space Needle), the Pike Place Market, and the retail/convention/hotel core each swarming with tourists in large numbers. Seattle isn't London (obviously!), but the tourist volumes give me a similar feeling in the summer, more so every year.
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The grunge era ended a long time ago and weed isn't as prevalent as you might believe although it is legal. Weed doesn't define the city or state. When I think about Seattle the first thing that comes to mind is tech or green.
The Seattle of today looks nothing like the Seattle of the late 80s and early 90s. Also, weed doesn't seem to be as big of a deal in Seattle as it does in cities like Denver.
