Last month was a big road month, but somehow we managed to get back by Thanksgiving and spend the holiday in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Metroplex for the first time in a while.
I took a pause on this blog in part because of the aforementioned travel, in part because the General Assembly and Governor agreed on a budget and my “day job” got super busy and in part because I found the big local story of the month, the local elections, so damn baffling that I thought it was better to shut up and listen.
Sorry. I’ll try to do better before Penny Abernathy declares me a news desert.
Being around for a change this time of year has reminded me how lit up the towns can be on the nights when all the returned natives and ex-pats hit the town after the home folks retire. Lots of reunions and catching up adding to the holiday/end-of-semester buzz. That’ll become even more pronounced by the end of this month, when campus empties out.
I like this time of year, but I always have the same uncomfortable conversation with an ex-pat or two, people who grew up here, moved away and would like to move back, but, well, there’s just no way.
The obvious result of this year’s election is that for all of its influence over the governing process, CHALT took a hit at the polls. Credit the candidates and the organizing by NEXT and others for turning out votes, but I’m not so sure that this election is a sign that the age of CHALT is coming to an end. That’s because what’s driven the success of the PAC and its spin-offs isn’t going away.
This election reminded me once again of the differences between Chapel Hill and Carrboro. Maybe it was seeing it more as an outsider than I have for years, but those myriad differences seemed a bit more distilled.
The general rule of the odd-year cycle is low voter turnout. At the same time, the elections in the cycle, municipal and school board, determine the two governmental bodies with the greatest impact on our day to day lives. That gives those local voters who show up a tremendous amount of sway over what happens here in the physical sense, but they also determine the direction of the community and, ultimately, whether there is one or not.
Right now in Southern Orange County there is a very sharp distinction between the two towns, the result of years of different philosophies and priorities. Bluntly put, for decades, Carrboro has been focused on community-building, while Chapel Hill has made protecting neighborhoods paramount.
Sure, there’s community-building a plenty in Chapel Hill and neighborhood protectionism in Carrboro, but the central organizing principles and the long-range focus of decision making in each town has been different for years.
The results are not surprising, both on the ground and in the way people tend to think about the two towns.
When you think of Carrboro something comes to mind, even if it makes some of you squares roll your eyes.
But what goes through your mind when you think of Chapel Hill?
When I ask people that question it usually invokes a memory or a specific place or the giant state institution located within its borders. Yes, the village is/was a lovely dream, and yeah, it’s long gone. But what’s the there here now beyond a collection of neighborhoods surrounding a large research university?
The most obvious on the ground distinction between the towns has been in the downtown core and all you have to do is go look at the empty storefronts at Columbia & Franklin to get that. It’s pretty bleak right now, but that’s not really new.
There’s certainly a structural problem in downtown Chapel Hill, the town has never addressed, but I’ve often wondered if the real reason for the neglect in the central business district all these years is that it isn’t a neighborhood and hasn’t gotten the attention it needs because of that.
So, what happens when “neighborhood” becomes the organizing principle of local government? You get that collection-of-neighborhoods effect and you also get a leadership that comes up through neighborhood organizations and neighborhood initiatives.
If, like me, you can’t shake the sense that Chapel Hill is being run by a homeowners’ association, there’s your reason.
The consequences of that are many, especially when dealing with externalities like other governments’ actions, a burgeoning regional economy and incredible pressure to grow.
Like any other HOA, the reaction of those increasing growth pressures has been a deepening resistance to change. The nascent war on apartments is a good example of how weird it can get, very HOA-like move. Another is that it took almost 37 years to agree on a plan to put affordable housing on the Greene Tract. That is some high-level slow-walking.
Without a doubt, the decades-long effect of fighting growth has made it increasingly more expensive to settle here, and while public policy changes in transportation, affordable housing and land use has been tried to dial that back, the overall trajectory is still the same.
Now, with regional growth ramping up, housing costs are rising fast in Chatham and Alamance, reducing opportunities for lower wage workers at the university and service industry employees to find affordable places to live.
These trends aren’t stopping, they’re picking up speed.
There’s a housing crisis in Southern Orange County, and Chapel Hill and Carrboro are going to have to work in concert with each other and other local governments to increase the options and lower the barriers.
Slowing down the growth may have been important in the past to catching up on school capacity and putting in adequate infrastructure, but it’s long past time for the gates to come up.
Carrboro’s leadership seems to get that in a philosophical way, but it doesn’t have the resources to solve it on its own, nor should it. The university should be involved in the solution, as well, but it has to have a willing local partner and that has not been the case.
As long as Chapel Hill is a place where the effect of its planning is exclusionary by both intent and design to a large portion of the people who work here and to young people who want to build a future here, then we’re going nowhere and very fast.