Cary

The town's reputation as a bedroom community for transplants from outside the South has led to humorous backronyms for its name such as "Concentrated Area of Relocated Yankees" or "Containment Area for Relocated Yankees."  Some observers have noted this as Cary's crisis of identity, especially when compared with its neighbors in the Research Triangle. Chapel Hill has a reputation as a bastion of liberal academia, Durham as a blue-collar post-boom industrial city, and Raleigh as the state's center of arts and government, but Cary has yet to come into its own identity other than that of a suburban bedroom community, despite or perhaps because of its meteoric rise in population. One of the major reasons for its large population of residents immigrant to North Carolina is the town's proximity to the Research Triangle Park and the many other localities hosting biotech, pharmaceutical and high tech companies, making it an ideal location for people moving to the Research Triangle area for work.

Cary has many restrictive ordinances. These include the banning of neon signs on the exterior of restaurants and in some cases instructing residents on what they can and cannot plant in their yards. The town also restricts the use of certain colors on buildings and architectural styles, and limits development near drainage channels. The town recently annexed an area containing the home of an eccentric gentleman of some local fame whose yard contained an antique cannon and an abundance of signs and posters expressing his opinions. In a rare compromise, the town council said the man was allowed to keep his yard's ornamentation as long as he did not add to it further.

Compared to many other cities of a similar size, Cary has extensive and restrictive zoning. Cary grew from a small downtown area. It adopted zoning and other ordinances on an ad-hoc basis to control growth and give the city structure. The city has small areas, located throughout, called Planned Development Districts. These districts are not planned so much in the traditional sense of planning, which is layout, but are zoned to restrict the land uses in the district.