Closest Peer City to Charlotte? (largest, compared, America, Chicago)
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As someone who has ranked metros for 3 decades, I knew there would be a billion different answers and varying interpretations in this thread of what a "peer" is.
As usually, there's a ton of inaccurate comparisons in terms of city vs. metro. I was under the impression the OP was speaking of city. The city of Charlotte is a good bit larger than Atlanta, but Charlotte's metro is less than half of Atlanta's. Nevertheless, they still have a lot in common and are a big brother/little brother to each other (in a good way). The CITY of Charlotte has around 900k and METRO around 2.7m. These are educated estimates until we get the 2020 census updates.
Charlotte can have population peers (city/metro), economic peers, geographic peers, demographic peers. They don't have to be mirror images or in the same population range to necessarily be peers. They just need to have the right mix/balance in some key areas. Economic growth and influence as a percentage of its population is more impressive to me than sheer size and raw, unadjusted numbers.
I saw where someone had Oakland and Baltimore as peers to Charlotte. Charlotte has very little in common with either of these cities. Not sure where that came from.
The city/metro that I think comes the closest across the board, at the moment would, be Nashville. Both are dynamic, growing, strong economies, still pretty affordable, and appeal to families. If Orlando can diversify its economy a little more, I'd throw them in the mix in a few years.
I really like Charlotte. Great area. I see them chugging along for years to come.
Good, thought-provoking thread, OP! Thanks for sharing.
As someone who has ranked metros for 3 decades, I knew there would be a billion different answers and varying interpretations in this thread of what a "peer" is.
As usually, there's a ton of inaccurate comparisons in terms of city vs. metro. I was under the impression the OP was speaking of city. The city of Charlotte is a good bit larger than Atlanta, but Charlotte's metro is less than half of Atlanta's. Nevertheless, they still have a lot in common and are a big brother/little brother to each other (in a good way). The CITY of Charlotte has around 900k and METRO around 2.7m. These are educated estimates until we get the 2020 census updates.
Charlotte can have population peers (city/metro), economic peers, geographic peers, demographic peers. They don't have to be mirror images or in the same population range to necessarily be peers. They just need to have the right mix/balance in some key areas. Economic growth and influence as a percentage of its population is more impressive to me than sheer size and raw, unadjusted numbers.
I saw where someone had Oakland and Baltimore as peers to Charlotte. Charlotte has very little in common with either of these cities. Not sure where that came from.
The city/metro that I think comes the closest across the board, at the moment would, be Nashville. Both are dynamic, growing, strong economies, still pretty affordable, and appeal to families. If Orlando can diversify its economy a little more, I'd throw them in the mix in a few years.
I really like Charlotte. Great area. I see them chugging along for years to come.
Good, thought-provoking thread, OP! Thanks for sharing.
As someone who has ranked metros for 3 decades, I knew there would be a billion different answers and varying interpretations in this thread of what a "peer" is.
As usually, there's a ton of inaccurate comparisons in terms of city vs. metro. I was under the impression the OP was speaking of city. The city of Charlotte is a good bit larger than Atlanta, but Charlotte's metro is less than half of Atlanta's. Nevertheless, they still have a lot in common and are a big brother/little brother to each other (in a good way). The CITY of Charlotte has around 900k and METRO around 2.7m. These are educated estimates until we get the 2020 census updates.
Charlotte can have population peers (city/metro), economic peers, geographic peers, demographic peers. They don't have to be mirror images or in the same population range to necessarily be peers. They just need to have the right mix/balance in some key areas. Economic growth and influence as a percentage of its population is more impressive to me than sheer size and raw, unadjusted numbers.
I saw where someone had Oakland and Baltimore as peers to Charlotte. Charlotte has very little in common with either of these cities. Not sure where that came from.
The city/metro that I think comes the closest across the board, at the moment would, be Nashville. Both are dynamic, growing, strong economies, still pretty affordable, and appeal to families. If Orlando can diversify its economy a little more, I'd throw them in the mix in a few years.
I really like Charlotte. Great area. I see them chugging along for years to come.
Good, thought-provoking thread, OP! Thanks for sharing.
This is a great comparison, and fair. In 5 more years, Nashville's core downtown in terms of buildings, will be equivalent to Charlotte's.
Charlotte has its huge financial economy and Nashville has its huge music/entertainment economy. Both cities growing well and/or considered "booming." Charlotte is larger but both cities size up pretty well.
As usually, there's a ton of inaccurate comparisons in terms of city vs. metro. I was under the impression the OP was speaking of city. The city of Charlotte is a good bit larger than Atlanta, but Charlotte's metro is less than half of Atlanta's. Nevertheless, they still have a lot in common and are a big brother/little brother to each other (in a good way). The CITY of Charlotte has around 900k and METRO around 2.7m. These are educated estimates until we get the 2020 census updates.
This is a prime example of why it makes so much more sense to base most of these sorts of comparisons on metros instead of cities. While the city of Charlotte contains more land and is more populous than the city of Atlanta, the city of Atlanta is still the richer, more powerful, and more influential city in every conceivable way. It is more developed and has a much larger tax base, more jobs, a more extensive transit system, more universities, more/larger cultural facilities and event venues, a larger and busier airport, more sites of interest with regional and national appeal, etc than the city of Charlotte, and that is because it is the significantly larger metro of the two. Central cities rely on their entire regions for their viability and not just the people who live within their political boundaries. In the same vein, no one could legitimately argue that the cities of Charlotte and San Francisco, or Atlanta and Raleigh, are peers or in the same tier simply due to similar municipal populations of those pairs of cities.
Yes, actual city peers make little sense as it’s very arbitrary. The city of Jacksonville is not comparable to the city of Atlanta because of everything that isn’t covered inside city limits. MSA’s are better, though there are still a couple examples where CSA’s make more sense (Raleigh-Durham).
Charlotte may not look just like some cities that are called peers here, but it would be a mistake to say only Sunbelt cities are peers of Charlotte because of how they were built. NY and London were not built the same but are peers of one another.
The Charlotte/Nashville comparison certainly makes sense in many ways, but there is one key difference that it also happens to share with Orlando: the lack of economic/institutional fixtures that have served as a foundation for the city's current growth and prosperity. Unlike Nashville, Charlotte isn't a state capital and its higher education profile is on the weaker side for a city of its size and stature; same goes for Orlando. Economically, both Charlotte and Orlando had a signature industry (banking and theme parks, respectively) that served as the catalyst for much of the region's growth and development over the past few decades with a bullish prominent businessman steering the ship. I'd say Hugh McColl was to Charlotte what Walt Disney was to Orlando, and I'm not sure if Nashville has any one person that it can say had such a disproportionate impact on the trajectory of the city. Charlotte and Orlando carved out distinct economic niches that gave them advantages over other cities in the region and have used them to further establish themselves and attract other industries. That's quite different from Nashville which basically only needed some TLC in the branding department and then wait for the rest of the country to see what it's always had. Nashville's brand is primarily cultural (but evolving) whereas Charlotte's and Orlando's brands are primarily economic with Orlando's having a more leisurely twist to it.
This is a great comparison, and fair. In 5 more years, Nashville's core downtown in terms of buildings, will be equivalent to Charlotte's.
Charlotte has its huge financial economy and Nashville has its huge music/entertainment economy. Both cities growing well and/or considered "booming." Charlotte is larger but both cities size up pretty well.
Nashville already has so many towers that multiple separate nodes have been created. Central Business District, SoBro, The Gulch, Capital View, Midtown, West End. That's not even including the yet to be developed Nashville Yards, River North, Neuhoff and Germantown Union developments.
The frame you're crafting is that Nashville's economy is music/entertainment and very little of anything else. It's not. If it is then why are there over 20 office towers under construction/development?
If you don't know, then you don't know.
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