This is a sponsored post written by North Carolina Taxpayers for Jobs, an independent expenditure political committee. This post was not produced by The Assembly’s editorial team. You can learn more about The Assembly’s approach to sponsored content here.
In the 1960s and ’70s, Greensboro was North Carolina’s second-largest city, trailing only Charlotte. Raleigh was still a sleepy government town. Durham had yet to ride the biotech wave.
Today, few residents on South Elm Street or at First National Bank Field realize how far things have slipped: Greensboro now ranks third and, by the next U.S. Census in 2030, is likely to fall to fourth, behind Durham.
Meanwhile, suburban sprawl is draining Greensboro’s population, stretching public resources thin and adding traffic without increasing the tax base. Virtually all municipalities surrounding Greensboro are growing at a faster rate than the city itself.
Greensboro’s population slide impacts more than bragging rights. In economic development, size is leverage, and it can mean the difference between a retailer opening a store here or two counties over, between investors seeing momentum or risk.
That’s where Greensboro keeps tripping itself.
This year’s City Council election on Nov. 4 is a referendum on whether Greensboro is ready to streamline approvals and processes to deliver development projects faster.
A range of pro-growth candidates — incumbents and challengers, executives and neighborhood organizers — describe a city that says it wants growth, then makes it hard. These hopefuls aren’t aligned on every issue. But their comments and proposals point to a blueprint for Greensboro’s revival: fix the culture of “no,” professionalize approvals and build on what’s already working.
“It is obvious that we don’t have enough housing stock,” according to former Amazon and IBM executive Carla Franklin, who ran for one of the three at-large seats on the Greensboro City Council. “With new employers coming in, JetZero and others, that’s going to impact housing needs. Current city council members have not responded to that.”
Greensboro has significant work remaining to meet its five-year housing strategy, called the Road to 10,000. The plan seeks to generate 10,000 new residential units — apartments, townhomes and single-family houses — by 2030. But less than 10% are finished, though another 1,000 are under construction.
That’s why the city needs to create a system where developers say “Greensboro is an easy place to do business in so it’s not going to be, ‘I’m going to Mecklenburg County’ or ‘I’m going to Wake County because they process it faster,” said Councilman Hugh Holston, who is running to keep his at-large seat.
“We have to be easier to do business with in Greensboro.”
Greensboro’s growth lags behind other N.C. cities
| 1960 rank | 1960 population | 2024 rank | 2024 population | % growth | |
| Charlotte | 1 | 201,564 | 1 | 943,476 | 368.1% |
| Greensboro | 2 | 119,574 | 3 | 307,381 | 157.1% |
| Winston-Salem | 3 | 111,135 | 5 | 255,769 | 130.2% |
| Raleigh | 4 | 93,931 | 2 | 499,825 | 432.2% |
| Durham | 5 | 78,302 | 4 | 301,870 | 285.5% |
| High Point | 6 | 62,063 | 9 | 118,601 | 91.1% |
| Asheville | 7 | 60,192 | 12 | 94,992 | 57.8% |
| Fayetteville | 8 | 47,106 | 6 | 209,496 | 344.7% |
| Wilmington | 9 | 44,013 | 8 | 123,599 | 180.9% |
| Gastonia | 10 | 37,276 | 13 | 85,535 | 129.5% |
| Concord | 21 | 17,779 | 10 | 110,401 | 520.8% |
| Cary | 94 | 3,356 | 7 | 182,659 | 5,345% |
Source: U.S. Census data, 1960; U.S. Census population estimate 2024
Rankings of five largest N.C. cities in 2030 if population grows at the same rate as 2020-24&
| 1. Charlotte | 1,018,011 |
| 2. Raleigh | 533,813 |
| 3. Durham | 321,190 |
| 4. Greensboro | 315,679 |
| 5. Winston-Salem | 262,163 |
Source: Based on data from N.C. Office of State Budget and Management and author’s calculations
The City That Slowed Down
There are myriad reasons for Greensboro’s population lagging growth. Economics accounts for part of that answer. Charlotte has banking. Raleigh has state government. Durham reinvented itself as a biotech and university town. Greensboro, by contrast, watched its textile and tobacco industries hollow out, then settled into modest growth as a regional service center.
But policy and culture also impacts population growth.
Developers describe Greensboro as one of the most restrictive and slowest-moving cities in the state. Projects that would move quickly in other cities can spend months, sometimes years, in Greensboro’s planning pipeline.
Meanwhile, suburban sprawl is draining Greensboro’s population, stretching public resources thin and adding traffic without increasing the tax base. Virtually all municipalities surrounding Greensboro are growing at a faster rate, in part because of the lack of collaboration between Greensboro city officials and developers.
“We’re pushing families to other municipalities on the edge of Greensboro because [developers] are looking for that model and they can’t get it in Greensboro because there’s no conversation,” said Crystal Black, a long-time community activist running for District 1.
How Greensboro’s growth compares to suburban municipalities
| 1990 | 2024 | % growth | |
| Summerfield | 2,051 | 11,333 | 452.5% |
| Stokesdale | 2,134 | 6,053 | 183% |
| Gibsonville | 3,441 | 9,549 | 177.5% |
| Kernersville | 10,836 | 28,146 | 159.8% |
| Pleasant Garden | 2,228 | 5,098 | 128.8% |
| Oak Ridge (2000)* | 3,988 | 7,820 | 96.1% |
| High Point | 69,496 | 118,601 | 70.7% |
| Greensboro | 183,521 | 303,889 | 65.6% |
| Jamestown | 2,600 | 3,773 | 45.1% |
*Oak Ridge was incorporated in 1998.
Source: U.S. Census data, 1990, 2000 and 2024
The result of these policies and migration patterns? Greensboro lacks the mid-rise housing and mixed use development that has propelled population growth in Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham and Cary.
Legislating Speed
In recent years, state legislators have had some success speeding development. In July 2024, a bill championed by Rep. Jeff Zenger (R-Forsyth) went into effect requiring local governments to issue a permit within 45 days, unless the local government and the applicant agree otherwise. It standardizes permitting across all North Carolina municipalities, giving contractors and developers a better shot at meeting their clients’ timelines.
According to Zenger, developers say permitting is moving a lot quicker since the bill became law. “It is the piece before that, the development piece, where we’re getting bogged down,” he said. “That’s a whole other animal that has to happen before the actual building permit side.”
Zenger and other state lawmakers are looking at ways to standardize among North Carolina’s municipalities the steps — and how long they should take — that come before permitting, including planning and complying with environmental regulations.
“The problem,” he said, “is we’ve got real urgency because of the housing shortage we currently have.”
A Solutions-Oriented Council
For now, however, North Carolina municipalities regulate both the speed of housing development and where it’s situated.
In Greensboro, the result has been an inability or an unwillingness to cut red tape, streamline approvals and embrace innovation to unlock housing supply, attract investment and strengthen the city’s tax base.
Black, the District 1 candidate, said development of the Randleman Road corridor in East Greensboro is a case study in paralysis.
“Developers tell me they hesitate to build there because they can’t see a larger vision,” she said. “The city keeps piecemealing projects instead of adhering to the area plans communities have agreed on.”
Black wants mixed-income housing, real code enforcement, and basics like lighting and sidewalks to make corridors feel investable again. “You can tell what side of town you’re on just by looking at the parking lots,” she said. “A Family Dollar shopping center, as well as any other shopping center, should not be a deteriorating landfill in our communities.”
New policies on infill development would not only create a more attractive environment for developers, it also would stabilize transitioning neighborhoods, she said.
“We can create housing in different ways,” Black said. “There are existing apartment complexes and townhomes that need to be renovated that would offer more viable options. What I’ve found is that people are moving from those spaces because they are deteriorating. You’re not really creating housing on a multiple level. People are just shifting from place to place.”
At-large City Councilwoman Jamilla Pinder, who is running to keep her seat, said the first step is an assessment of the city’s planning and redevelopment policies. That could involve automating some permitting or even eliminating more outdated processes, she said.
“I would continue to push that and look at how we can have that operational efficiency in those areas,” said Pinder. “Tradition is good, but we can’t allow tradition to get in the way of progress.”
That kind of pragmatism — pairing vision with practical steps — is precisely what candidates like former City Manager Denise Roth say Greensboro needs if it wants to stay competitive. While protecting the character of its neighborhoods, the city must also make room for the mid-rise housing and infill development that fuel growth elsewhere.
“We can’t get to where we want to be without density,” said Roth, an at-large candidate for Greensboro City Council and former administrator of the federal General Services Administration. “We have beautiful neighborhoods in Greensboro and we want to protect our longstanding neighborhoods. We also need to invite density, especially infill spaces downtown.”
Roth said city government needs “developments to happen faster. It’s essential that we move the staff to a place of ‘yes.’” She recommends offering incentives, possibly including small cash rewards, to city staff members who come up with creative and effective ways to speed the development pipeline.
Greensboro also needs to be smart about how it grows, she said.
“There’s a wrong way and a right way to do it,” according to Roth. “I live in a cul-de-sac in Lake Jeanette. Bringing multifamily at the end of a cul-de-sac in an intact neighborhood — probably not a good idea. But there are transitioning parts of our neighborhoods that are already facing commercial corridors, that are already attached to commercial activity. That seems (like) a reasonable space.”
Culture, Not Just Clock
With development, speed matters. But mindset can matter more.
“It’s not just the time it takes. It’s whether the staff asks, ‘How can we make this work safely?’” says Franklin, who returned home to Greensboro after years living in New York City.
She advocates for having auditors perform a forensic review of every department — Planning, Parks and Recreation, Permitting. Then city leaders can transform “recurring interpretation conflicts into code fixes,” she said.
Franklin also proposes adding a development expeditor office to the planning and zoning office, like New York City and other cities use, “so we can reduce the number of months that it takes to develop land. The zoning and permitting delays alone can stretch the timeline by roughly 36 to 40 months,” she said.
“That’s significant. That means that it costs more for developers to build homes in Greensboro than it does in other locations.”
New York City, she noted, streamlines approvals and inspections for developers with proven track records of effective and efficient projects. Those are the kind of ideas Greensboro’s City Council should embrace to boost critical housing stock, she said.
“The City Council hasn’t really had the will to make the city manager focus on streamlining the process using benchmarks from around the nation,” according to Franklin. “By increasing the housing density, we’re going to solve a lot of the issues of housing shortages and affordability and will also increase our property tax base. We don’t want to raise taxes on our citizens any more.”
Build Where It’s Working
Much of the changes for which these candidates are advocating is about acceleration, not reinvention.
“We don’t have to start from scratch,” Black says. “We just have to build on what’s already working, adding viable business opportunities to the corridor that will uplift District 1 and its residents.”
That starts with corridors: Gate City Boulevard’s university spine, Battleground’s edges and the downtown “shoulders” behind Forge and Steelhouse. Black points to small-scale rehabs on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive that add bedrooms and baths while protecting ownership.
“You can’t call it ‘gentrification’ when people are rehabbing their own neighborhoods,” Black said. “The standard should be design quality that survives the resident.”
Pinder distills it to life-cycle housing: “The kind I needed in my 20s is not what my mother needs in her 60s,” she said. “A healthy city lets people stay — ADUs, townhomes, mid-rise with universal design, senior options — plus small-business amenities that keep neighborhoods alive between home and work.”
The Future at Stake
Whether that happens depends on whether Greensboro chooses to embrace growth or continues to push it away.
The decisions made by the new City Council will determine far more than the city’s population rank. It will shape Greensboro’s economic competitiveness, its tax base, and the quality of life for generations to come. A city that grows intentionally with well-planned infrastructure and inclusive housing can attract employers, stabilize neighborhoods, and keep young families from moving elsewhere. A city that clings to outdated processes risks falling further behind as peers race ahead.
That choice is political. The Greensboro City Council sets the rules for mid-rise housing and mixed use development. Members decide whether to approve apartments near transit lines, whether to make it easier to build housing, whether to streamline development approvals.
For decades, Greensboro has failed to encourage taller buildings, infill housing and the kind of bold projects that spark population and job growth. The next council will decide whether the city finally says yes: yes to innovation, yes to collaboration, yes to a future that honors Greensboro’s history while preparing it for the opportunities ahead.
What’s at stake is not just growth for growth’s sake, but a chance to redefine what kind of city Greensboro wants to be, one that cautiously manages decline or one that confidently builds its future, one that can retain younger residents.
Correction: A previous version of this sponsored content cited an Assembly news article which had an incorrect data point. The Road to 10,000 is a five-year plan, not a ten-year plan.
