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Richmond. No doubt about it. Raleigh is truly more suburban, Sun Belt-ish, and "New South." Richmond is more urban and dense, being very gritty and more historic.
Richmond has a number of rowhouse neighborhoods - most notably the Fan District.
There is nothing in Raleigh that compares to this regarding urban feel. It's the typical southern city, insofar that as soon as you get out of Downtown, you're in detached SFH neighborhoods.
^Which is a reason why I think Raleigh is more southern than Richmond, but the votes in my thread wouldn't agree....
Rowhouses are more a sign of an old urban area than a northern city per se.
In the South, they can be found also in a lot of smaller Virginian cities. Old Town Alexandria is famous for them, but they are found in limited numbers in Norfolk, Fredricksburg, and even Lynchburg. They probably were a bit more common in all of these cities before. They're also common in Charleston, Savannah, and (in a very different style) in New Orleans.
Overall, there are more cities in the south with notable amounts of rowhouses/old townhouses than in New England, where they're almost entirely confined to Boston. Really though, it's a Mid-Atlantic/Upper South style with some outlier cities.
I must join the bandwagon. It's Richmond by a mile. While it does have its share of suburban sprawl like many southern cities, it has a core city of not just one historic district but several, all abutting each other with sidewalks. On my last visit, I was surprised that there were few walkers out on a mild weekend day on Monument Avenue and other center-city thoroughfares. (A runner here and there, a hipster strolling with a cigarette.) Just anecdotal, I guess, but I noticed it. That said, Richmond has the dense core of a real city, and one that is far more extensive than Raleigh's or Durham's.
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