The N&O predicted these Triangle areas would be ones to watch. How our forecast held up

This is The News & Observer’s third year of identifying places around our rapidly growing region to keep an eye on in the coming year, places where you’ll be able to see progress being made.

Our stories over the past two years have served as guides to key construction projects, targets for development and major change in the region. Check back on Wednesday as we release the 2024 list.

Here’s a look back:

Five places to watch in 2023

▪ Harnett County: The federal government may have added Harnett County to the Fayetteville metropolitan statistical area, but the northern part of the county has rapidly been growing as a bedroom suburb to Raleigh and Wake County.

▪ Research Triangle Park: RTP, a key driver to the Triangle economy, has long been a place where people went during the day to work. That has been changing, with the park now morphing into a “live-work-play” location, including construction starting on the first housing units.

▪ Downtown Cary: Growth in Cary has been a constant for the past few decades but the downtown area took on a whole new face over the course of 2023, with the long-anticipated opening of the Downtown Cary Park.

▪ Raleigh’s Seaboard Station: Construction began on the retail-focused development in 2021, but 2023 saw the completion of the project’s first residential units — the 298-unit Signal apartments — as well as the first residents moving in. More retail is coming, as is a 149-room Hyatt House hotel.

▪ Downtown Chapel Hill: Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina partnered on the new “innovation district,” which opened on East Rosemary Street in 2023. The project, 10 years in the making, includes two buildings with seven stories and 118,000 square feet of space. Among the first tenants is California-based BioLabs, a coworking space for life science startups. BioLabs has leased the whole third floor, some 23,000 square feet, for wet labs and office space for research-based startups.

Five places to watch in 2022

▪ Moncure: A year before VinFast announced it would build a manufacturing plant for electric vehicles near Moncure, the local megasite known as Triangle Innovation Point was already drawing a lot of attention, and the possibility of 20,000 or more new jobs.

▪ Downtown Cary: Cary’s Downtown Park, which opened in 2023, was under construction and prompting businesses to expand or renovate throughout the area.

▪ Dorothea Dix Park: Along Lake Wheeler Road in Raleigh, blocks of older, affordable homes were razed to make room for a new $600 million development that will feature, among other things, two 20-story apartment buildings offering up to 1,200 new rental units.

▪ Research Triangle Park: The first work on the reformation of the research park began construction in 2022 — HUB RTP. The $1.5 billion project, at the corner of Davis Drive and N.C. 54, will add the first office towers, apartments and retail to the park, part of an effort to create a city center in a suburban environment.

▪ N.C. 540/The Triangle Expressway: The new six-lane highway across southern Wake County was nearing completion in 2022 and was already affecting growth patterns in that part of the county. Planners want to promote denser development, particularly around the interchanges. The county’s new long-range land-use plan calls for the creation of “walkable centers,” a more dense mix of homes and businesses near the highway, with sidewalks and greenway trails and a critical mass of people to support mass transit.

This story was originally published January 16, 2024 at 10:57 AM with the headline "The N&O predicted these Triangle areas would be ones to watch. How our forecast held up."

Dave Hendrickson

The News & Observer

919-829-4657

Dave Hendrickson is the N&O’s growth and business editor. In 40+ years of journalism, he has worked for newspapers in Wisconsin, Virginia and North Carolina.