November 2006

The unchecked growth charted for NW Chapel Hill will not only effectively choke off many of the neighborhoods in the area, but will, in a metastatic line of attack have negative effects on the entire town.

Can schools absorb 1000 new students?
Can roads (especially Weaver Dairy Road) absorb thousands of additional cars?
Can an over stressed environment absorb more impervious surfaces, pollution, and waste?

We cannot continue to just focus on each of these proposals as though they were an entity unto themselves. We must see how each one of them fits into the greater whole of the huge number of residences already here.

This “gateway” entrance into Chapel Hill will be one that greets people with bumper to bumper traffic. Neighborhoods to the west of MLK Jr. Blvd. will be isolated from the option of walkability that this area has the potential to offer.

There must be a moratorium on all plans in the NW Quadrant. There must be a study done on how this area can continue to exist as a viable part of the community if development continues in this haphazard fashion.

I was pleased to read recently that the Town of Hillsborough is working with the county to develop plans for a rural buffer which will limit sprawl and guide development in areas where it's considered desirable.

Town elected officials and staff have been working with their Orange County counterparts and consultants all year to determine how large Hillsborough should grow and how the town and county can work together better along the boundaries. Under the plan, Hillsborough would have a rural buffer, an understanding with the county about what land eventually will be annexed into the town, and a limit on the expansion of water and sewer services.
- newsobserver.com | Hillsborough weighs future

Click for full-size map.

I wasn't planning to blog this, but I just attended the Chapel Hill Downtown Partnership's Annual Meeting and Public Forum and there are a few things continuing to nag at me.

DP chair Tom Tucker started the meeting by discussing their three "clients": UNC, the Town of Chapel Hill, and downtown businesses. These are the same constituencies represented on the DP's board. For all their talking about importance of residential development downtown, no-one is working to include the voices of those who currently live downtown (or would like to). If they did, I think they would hear a very different set of priorities and concerns.

For example, many families who want to live in urban settings also want to be able to walk to work, the grocery store, and the playground. We have to get out of our suburban single-family-home mindset to understand the needs and desires of our potential downtown dwellers.

On Will Raymond's blog post Chapel Hill Downtown Development Initiative: The Debate, there are links to TWENTY ONE separate videos of twenty one different people speaking at a November 20th public hearing on downtown development. To make it real easy to choose which one to watch there are screen shots from the video of the people who spoke with their names captioned at the bottom. (I've copied them below.)