Quote:
Originally Posted by eschaton
I spent some time in Savannah about a year and a half ago. It's beautiful, but I don't think people realize how small the "urban" part of the city really is. The downtown area proper only has about 3,400 residents. If you add in the historic, but slightly newer/less walkable areas surrounding Forsyth Park, there's another 40,000 or so. The walkable area is tightly restricted by the river to the north, and really unfortunate urban renewal decisions (along with large heavily black housing projects) to the east and west. The only place it seems to organically merge with the surrounding fabric is to the south, where it's racially mixed and seems to be gentrifying, forming a straight up "white corridor" directly to the more suburban areas like Chatham Crescent.
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I've never visited Savannah, but this is my impression of Charleston, and why I'm a bit confused about the city's draw.
Charleston has a gorgeous core, but the really attractive stuff covers at most a square mile. It probably has about as much pre-auto fabric as random older Northern cities like Kingston, Portland and Lancaster, but almost no one visits or moves to these places for urban charm, and magazines don't rank these places above Paris as travel destinations. And because you can only preserve the charm by keeping as-is, all the growth is on the fringe, and doesn't look different from the stuff you see in every other booming SE Sunbelt metro.
To me, Charleston is basically another Charlotte-Raleigh type transplant city, but with a cute historic core instead of glassy skyscrapers. They have built quite the reputation, though. People are moving from places with existing neglected historic cores to sprawl, on the pretext that they value historic cores.
And that also has me wondering if you put say, Kingston, in say Alabama, would it be a hot city? If Charleston were say in NJ would it be a backwater?