Growth & Development
Most voters in Chapel Hill are happy with the rate at which the community is growing.
57% of respondents on our recent poll said that it is growing at 'about the right pace' while 37% think it is growing too fast and only 3% think it is growing too slow.
Interestingly this does not seem to have been an issue that created a big split among voters in the Mayoral contest. 59% of Czajkowski voters said the current rate of growth is fine, as did 54% of Kleinschmidt supporters.
Conservatives were more likely than liberals or moderates to say the community is growing too fast, a finding at odds with the usual assumptions about who supports higher rates of growth.
Most of those polled would like the community to stay roughly at its current size. 41% of respondents said that 25 years from now they would still like the town's population to be between 50-60,000. 25% said they'd like to see modest growth to the 60-70,000 range and 15% said they'd like to see it contract to the 40-50,000 range. 10% would like to see the population expand to 70,000 or more and 9% would like to see it drop even further back to the 30-40,000 range.
In general most politician's campaign materials lack details. Its easy to say we're going to reduce taxes, but much, much harder to identify what to cut, so I'm not going to rule him out based on that. What did make up my mind, however, is his misunderstanding of mixed-use developments:
I recently saw Chapel Hill Mayor Kevin Foy give an interesting speech on the problem that everyone seems to think that Chapel Hill was just perfect right about the time they got there. Kevin is not the first person to have observed this, and he won’t be the last, but I thought it might be interesting to share this item I stumbled across while researching an unrelated topic. R. L. Gray wrote an essay on Chapel Hill in the News & Observer (reprinted in
NC Journal of Law, Vol 1, pp 516-518, 1904):
"Let the man have been tarred with the University stick and he will tell you along with his after-dinner cigar that he has a notion of some day building a house at Chapel Hill – and there remaining to the end of the chapter in the one place where he believes he can obtain a large and perfect peace. There men cling to the town and its surroundings with a memory that is both tenacious and jealous of details.
33 farmers and land owners, living in the Carrboro ETJ, have petitioned Orange County and the town of Carrboro to return jurisdiction for ETJ farms to Orange County.
PETITION TO REMAND DEVELOPMENT JURISDICTION FOR
CARRBORO ETJ LAND TO ORANGE COUNTY CONTROL
To: The Town of Carrboro, North
Carolina
I read the Town Council candidates' responses to the
League of Women Voters' questionnaire in the Chapel Hill News this morning. (A valuable service, but shouldn't the CHN actually publish reporting on the front page?) I noticed that the candidates were unanimous in their support for putting increased density (if it happens) in transit corridors, but not a single one of them named an appropriate area or an example of how this should be done.
It's easy to be reactionary and rail against tall buildings and vague notions of density or against East 54 in particular. Where are the courageous candidates that can hammer out policies, make the hard decisions, and stand up to the inevitable complaints about change? Evolution of this community's landscape is not optional. We must put on our thinking caps and establish some direction for doing this in the best way for our collective future.
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