Where to live in Greensboro

Where the neighborhoods come from. Greensboro does draw neighborhoods, but not carefully and not where its own map server publishes them. The City Planning Department and GIS Division drew a Neighborhoods layer in 2022 by heads-up digitizing on natural and man-made boundaries, and the map service it points to no longer answers; its companion layer of neighborhood centers says it is based on estimated polygons and should not be considered accurate. The polygons survive as a layer on the City's own ArcGIS Online organization, published for its Neighborhood Traffic Management Program: 335 areas, from four acres to more than a thousand, that do not overlap one another and together hold 155,673 of the city's 300,138 residents inside its current limits, 51.9%. A field marks nine of them verified and the rest not, including every area a guide here uses. So every guide is one area of that map, clipped to the City limits and named as the map names it, and the guides call it the City's estimated map rather than a surveyed or adopted line. None of them is an association's territory. Where a guide shares its name with a City line that has legal force, a local historic district or a redevelopment area, the two lines differ, and the guide gives the overlap. Each guide's population is the 2020 census count of the blocks inside both its line and the City's current limits, which hold 1,103 more residents than the 2020 city did: 1,127 more on land annexed since, less 24 on one block that is now outside the line.

The five areas are ours. The City does not publish a grouping that is a way to choose where to live. Its five City Council districts are electoral, about 60,000 residents each, and redrawn after every census; its comprehensive plan sorts the city into growth tiers and place types rather than neighborhoods; and its neighborhood map has 335 areas. What the City does draw that matches what residents mean by the old city is the GSO2040 plan's Downtown and Urban Central character areas, so Downtown, Fisher Park and College Hill is those two, north of Gate City Boulevard, east of Josephine Boyd Street and west of US 29; East Greensboro is the rest of the city east of Elm Street; South and Southwest is the rest south of Gate City Boulevard or Interstate 40; Irving Park and the North is north of Wendover Avenue between Battleground Avenue and Elm Street; and West and Northwest is everything else. By those rules, in 2020, Downtown, Fisher Park and College Hill held 16,034 residents, Irving Park and the North 34,752, West and Northwest 91,998, East Greensboro 85,508 and South and Southwest 71,846. The campuses do not sit in the core: UNCG's main campus is in West and Northwest, apart from 108 residents inside College Hill's line; NC A&T and Bennett College are in East Greensboro; Guilford College is in the West. Every guide falls wholly in its area except three, and each takes the area that holds most of its residents: Westerwood, 1,116 in the core and 13 in the West; College Hill, 2,175 in the core and 406 in the West, on the Greensboro College and UNCG campus blocks the plan leaves out; and Starmount Forest, 2,818 in the West and 47 in the North. Which neighborhood lands in which area is our judgment.

What is not here. The twenty neighborhoods this list starts with held 43,936 of the city's 300,138 residents in 2020, 14.6%, because the list leans on the best-known older neighborhoods, which are small, and because the City's map covers only half the city. East Greensboro and South and Southwest, 157,354 residents between them, have three guides each, and the next additions belong there: Dudley Heights near A&T, Phillips Avenue and the Cone Mills mill villages in the east, Rolling Roads and Hillsdale Park in the south. Downtown is the first to add in the core: the map's Downtown Community, 2,182 residents, holds City Hall. UNCG's, A&T's and Guilford College's campuses are in no guide. Some familiar names are not on the City's map at all, Aycock and Cumberland among them, and some places with a Greensboro address are not in the city: Sedgefield, Forest Oaks, McLeansville and Browns Summit are unincorporated Guilford County, and Summerfield, Oak Ridge, Pleasant Garden, Jamestown and Whitsett are towns of their own. A Greensboro mailing address does not settle which one a house is in: the County's tax record for the parcel, and its rate code, does.