How Cary Became A "Town" of 180,000 People

Sure, it's easy to split hairs over whether Cary is a "town" or a "city," but it and many other North Carolina places grew exponentially in population because of a law few other states had.

Here’s Cary in 2013 (Photo by James Willamor)

Folks, it’s time for some Cary discourse.

Look, we’re not charging Cary with a crime here (There’s no direct evidence that Cary is home to a “wicked sex cult,” although there are some stickers out there that say otherwise). But! Cary is larger than the largest cities in 12 states, including both Charlestons (West Virginia and South Carolina); Providence, Rhode Island; Billings, Montana; Portland, Maine; Bridgeport, Connecticut; and Wilmington, Delaware. And yet here it is, passing itself off as a town like it’s got one stoplight, too many teenagers in pickup trucks, and a couple’a Dollar Generals (actually, there are two Dollar Generals in Cary. Or is it two Dollars General?). It’s the seventh largest municipality in North Carolina, bigger than the cities of Wilmington and Asheville. Again, how is Cary not a city?

Well technically, it doesn’t matter what you call it. In North Carolina, a municipality can refer to itself however it wants. Siler City, officially, is “The Town of Siler City.” Saluda, population 631, calls itself a city. The largest “village” in North Carolina is Clemmons, which is home to more than 21,000 people. It’s a hot damn mess out there.

Lost in all of this, though, is the fact that Cary was much more town-y in the past. Today, it has 53 times as many people in it as it did in 1960, when the population was a mere 3,356. That was a only a year after the groundbreaking for the Research Triangle Park, and 16 years before SAS was founded. There’s a lot of good reasons for people to move to Cary (Which, yes, I know, a lot of y’all still call it the Containment Area for Relocated Yankees). But for a lot of people, if you can’t come to Cary, Cary will come to you.

North Carolina traditionally was (and in many ways remains) a fairly rural state, compared to the more industrialized north. After World War II, the south started to see rapid growth, and people started to move to North Carolina’s urban areas. But there was a problem: It was hard for those urban areas to get physically bigger to accomodate them. Before 1947, the only way for a city, town, or village to expand its borders was through an act of the state legislature. During that period of growth, tons of local annexation requests became time consuming for lawmakers, who decided to just pass a law that gave local leaders the power to swallow up new land into their towns. There were only two basic rules: The area had to be attached to the current city or town limits, and if 15 percent of the qualified voters in the annexed area objected, they could put the annexation on the ballot for a vote. Lawmakers hoped that this would settle the issue.

It did not.

There were contentious fights over annexation in Charlotte and Greensboro, so in 1957, lawmakers decided to study the issue. That led to a law in 1959 that basically allowed cities to swallow up land nearby without the approval of the people living there. The law made it much easier for existing North Carolina cities to expand and made it harder, by comparison, for wholly new towns to be created on their fringes. “[It’s] based explicity on the notion that people who live [near a] city are there because the city is there and they share the benefits a city creates by being a cultural and economic center,” David Lawrence, an annexation expert at the University of North Carolina, said in an article for the Richmond Fed in 2005. The study commission said, in effect, that cities shouldn’t be held back or hemmed in by small suburbs that might pop up nearby. Nor should a small group of people be able to hold up a move that would allow for the larger growth of an entire metro area. Hence, if a city wanted to get physically bigger, it could, with few questions asked. “There have never been many states that let cities annex like that,” Lawrence said.

Hence, look the growth of the city of Charlotte between its founding and 2015:

That law made North Carolina’s biggest cities grow differently than many of its neighboring states during the postwar boom. For one thing, North Carolina’s big cities don’t have nearly as many independent suburbs as other states. Look at Cleveland, Atlanta, at St. Louis, which are surrounded by any number of small towns that are just outside of city limits. The racial and economic effects of suburbanization are fairly well documented at this point, but this annexation law basically explains something weird that you might see when you look at lists of the largest American cities by population. Charlotte comes in at number 16—it has more people living in it than the cities of San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston (although those cities are far more dense). In Charlotte, places like Ballantyne, Steele Creek, and University City can feel pretty suburban. But they’re all within Charlotte’s city limits.

(It also plays out in other ways, like coordinated city services. Ten years ago, two inches of snow fell on balkanized metro Atlanta and things got apocalyptic. A week later, Charlotte got eight inches of snow, and, well, things were mostly fine by comparison.)

During the postwar annexation free-for-all, Cary expanded too. For the first 78 years of its existence, the entirety of the town covered one square mile. Then, in 1949, it began to annex more land. Today, it covers 60 square miles. It also didn’t have a bunch of other small towns popping up nearby to give it competition. Wake County hasn’t incorporated an entirely new town since Knightdale in 1927. Cary had room to grow, and after the RTP and SAS showed up, a demand to grow.

Just because annexation was easy didn’t mean people didn’t fight it tooth and nail. For one thing, the voluntary annexation process was quicker. Often, people who who got word that a big city might swallow up their land looked for ways to get annexed into a nearby small town before the big city could follow through. In other cases, people did incorporate new towns for the purpose of keeping the big city away. Mint Hill became a town in 1971 to fend off Charlotte. Summerfield and Oak Ridge incorporated themselves in 1996 and 1998, respectively, to hold off Greensboro. In each case, people in those areas voted to incorporate and got lawmakers to give them a charter.

Cary itself backed off of its big annexation plans a decade ago after some homeowners fought a plan to bring them inside town limits. By then, most annexations were voluntary, and in 2011, annexation laws changed under the new Republican legislature, which means voluntary annexation is really the only way that cities can get larger in North Carolina. Today, people who want to have their property annexed really have to want it.

And it turns out, developers really want to be a part of Cary. Most of its borders expanded before the 2011, but they continued expanding afterward as well. In the 2010s, the town was the second fastest growing town in the state via annexation, and annexed more people in than Charlotte, Raleigh, and Durham. Only Apex had them beat. Nearly 70 percent of its population growth in the 2010s came from people or developers asking to be pulled into its town limits. Apex is also a “town,” and with 71,000 people, it’s the second largest one in the state.

Again, in the eyes of North Carolina law, there’s no difference between towns, cities, and villages. But yes, they just sound different. Back in 2018, when it was long past apparent that Cary was more of a city than a town, its town manager asked two branding firms to figure out what it ought to call itself. One of them took a closer look at cities and towns around Arizona as part of its research. Per the Raleigh News & Observer:

North Star's study of the Phoenix area — the city and its many suburbs — found that people viewed towns as more affordable than cities, cleaner, more charming, safer and better to retire to. Cities won out when it came to health care services, educational resources, shopping, dining, transportation services, employment opportunities, housing options, public services, and ethnic and racial diversity.

More broadly, people in the greater Phoenix area found it more preferable to live in a town but to do business in a city.

In the end, leaders decided to continue going with the “Town of Cary.” It may not pass the vibes check for some of you, but you’re still bigger than the biggest city in South Carolina, and nobody can ever take that away from you.