By the numbers
The petitioners describe the proposed Town of Gray's Creek as a small community asserting local control. Their own published boundary covers roughly fifty square miles, with an estimated population around twenty thousand. That works out to roughly four hundred people per square mile.
For reference: Hope Mills runs at about 2,600 people per square mile. Spring Lake runs at about 1,700. The North Carolina municipalities the petitioners cite as their template are six to seven times denser than the boundary they are drawing.
At scale, on the same page
Each square below is drawn proportionally to the town's actual area in square miles. The big red one is the proposed Gray's Creek boundary. The small green ones are the towns the petitioners use as their template.
Proposed Gray's Creek
~50 sq mi
Eastover
17.4 sq mi
Hope Mills
6.5 sq mi
Spring Lake
6.5 sq mi
Stedman
1.6
Wade
1.6
Falcon
0.7
Godwin
0.5
How many Hope Mills fit inside the proposed boundary?
Eight. Each green tile below represents one Hope Mills, drawn at the same scale as the proposed Gray's Creek boundary outlined in red.
Red outline: proposed Gray's Creek. Green tiles: Hope Mills, repeated eight times to fill the boundary.
For reference, the official county map
Existing Cumberland County municipalities. Fayetteville (green), Hope Mills (purple), Spring Lake (pink, upper left), Eastover (red), and the small villages Wade, Godwin, Falcon.
| Municipality | Area (sq mi) | Population | Density (per sq mi) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Proposed Gray's Creek | ~50 | ~20,000 | ~400 |
| Hope Mills | 6.5 | ~17,000 | ~2,600 |
| Spring Lake | 6.5 | ~11,000 | ~1,700 |
| Eastover | 17.4 | ~3,600 | ~210 |
| Stedman | 1.6 | ~1,000 | ~620 |
| Wade | 1.6 | ~500 | ~310 |
| Falcon | 0.7 | ~260 | ~370 |
| Godwin | 0.5 | ~120 | ~240 |
| Wilmington (for scale) | 52.6 | ~115,000 | ~2,200 |
| Cary (for scale) | 60.2 | ~180,000 | ~3,000 |
Sources: Census 2020, NC Office of State Budget and Management, petitioners' grayscreeknc.com. Population estimates rounded to nearest hundred or thousand.
What fifty square miles actually means
Fifty square miles is not a small town. It is roughly the geographic footprint of Wilmington, North Carolina, a city with one hundred fifteen thousand residents, a deep-water port, and a full city government with police, fire, sanitation, planning, and utility departments. Wilmington runs that footprint at a density of about 2,200 people per square mile, with a property tax base proportional to that population.
Cary, North Carolina, sits at about sixty square miles. Cary has roughly one hundred eighty thousand residents and one of the highest median household incomes in the state. Cary runs its footprint at about 3,000 people per square mile.
The proposed Town of Gray's Creek would run a comparable footprint at one-eighth the density of Cary. There is no municipality in North Carolina of similar size operating at a density that low without significant fiscal stress, dependence on county services, or a small-town tax rate so high it has hollowed out the original reason for incorporating.
Proposed boundary in pink. The adjacent shaded polygons are existing municipalities, including a slice of Hope Mills (gold, upper right) for direct comparison.
Why density matters operationally
Municipal services scale with linear feet and lane miles, not with people. A small dense town and a large sparse town with the same population pay roughly the same to police the streets, but the sparse town has many more streets to police. The sparse town has more water main to maintain per household, more storm drain to clear per household, more streetlight to replace per household, more pavement to resurface per household.
This is the central finding of decades of municipal-finance research from the UNC School of Government and the NC League of Municipalities: low-density municipalities cost meaningfully more per resident to operate than dense ones, and the gap widens as the service portfolio expands. The successful small towns in North Carolina are successful because they are dense. The struggling ones are sparse.
The petitioners' own budget materials assume an extremely lean service profile, which is the only way the numbers come close to balancing at this density. That is a tell. A municipality that has to cap its services that aggressively in year one to make its budget work has very little room to add anything later. The pitch is local control. The reality, at this density, is local control of a list of services so short it raises the question: what is the town actually for?
What the petitioners say versus what the map shows
The petitioners' materials describe Gray's Creek using the word "community" and compare it to other small North Carolina towns. The petitioners' boundary covers roughly fifty square miles. Both can be true at the same time. The point of this page is to show that the second fact, the one their materials downplay, is the one that determines whether the first fact can sustain a town.
A boundary the size of a city, drawn around a population the size of a suburb, governed by a charter the size of a startup pitch deck, is not a small town. It is a fifty-square-mile experiment, and the people inside the boundary are the ones who will live with the result of the experiment for the next century.
Sources
- Petitioners' published boundary: grayscreeknc.com
- Existing municipal areas and populations: 2020 Decennial Census; NC Office of State Budget and Management 2024 estimates
- Boundary geometry: Cumberland County GIS, NC OneMap
- Density and municipal-finance research: UNC School of Government Local Government Finance Center; NC League of Municipalities annual reports
- City-of-Wilmington and Town-of-Cary reference figures: respective city websites and 2024 NCOSBM estimates