We're just back here in the Bull City after a last-minute, much needed weekend away in Asheville, a favorite destination for some time away from the Piedmont.
No, we didn't stick around long enough to see Obama at the beautiful art-deco Asheville High School -- though the combination of his presence, a surprise to us, and state Dems for the Vance-Aycock Dinner certainly explained why the Grove Park Inn was booked up Friday night despite a tough economy.
Asheville is always a fun destination for me; not simply because of the beauty of the mountains and the crisp altitude-improved air, but because I love its downtown. There are elements I'd love to see Durham replicate, like the level of pedestrian traffic, significant residential population, and on-the-street activity.
Then too, there are elements I think Durham is off to a better start on -- like the presence of a sizeable base of commercial office space and the integration of big draws like the ballpark and, soon, the performing arts center.
Still, downtown Asheville in so many ways feels like one path, one direction the Bull City could end up taking in the coming years. Yet western N.C. in general has to find its way with development, and development pressures, a challenge given the mass of people migrating to the mountains, and bringing growth problems with it.
Nowhere was this more evident for us than in Madison County, a rural enclave a 20 minute drive north of Asheville. The wife and I drove up there on a whim, only to find an annual arts and cultural festival taking place at Mars Hill College. Smaller than Centerfest or Cary's Lazy Daze, but with activities from $1 goat rides to iron working to homemade apple butter cooking that put such urban events to shame.
We ended up having a tasty Rotary Club lunch out on the hilly campus of Mars Hill College with a very interesting woman who's lived in Madison County all her life. She reminded us very quickly that the drought -- fast becoming a memory here in the recently-rainsoaked Triangle -- is still afflicting WNC.
Three years and going strong, she glumly said. It's an expensive problem in a community that largely lacks municipal water supplies, too. With new, deeper well injections running $10,000 to $12,000, and a large population of elderly and fixed-income individuals, it's not easy to find the cash to make such an investment a reality.
And though she didn't necessarily subscribe to the theory, she pointed out an interesting idea she'd heard buzzing about the community.
It's been three years since drought struck Madison County -- and three years, too, since the Interstate 26 corridor pierced the stone veil of mountains separating Tennessee from North Carolina. Three years since one of the most complex, expensive Interstate passings in the U.S. was completed, via the creation of a wide trench cutting its way through a former mountain barrier.
Could the change in geography triggered a change in precipitation and weather patterns? Certainly not likely -- but the presence of even the kernel of such an idea speaks to the connection that many WNC residents have to their land, their home, their community.
It's a community finding itself under pressure, though. Our local observer -- a frequent traveler of the Old North State -- noted that it was wonderful that banking had taken root in Charlotte, or technology in the Triangle. But out in WNC, like in the eastern part of the states, the jobs just aren't there. Textiles and tobacco are gone, and from the ruralist's perspective, the state is hurting.
And the urban areas contribute to the brain drain. Bright kids from Madison County, or Roanoke Rapids, or Rockingman are typically bright enough to get out of there; to get to places like NC State or UNC, then to get an apartment in Winston-Salem, say, or Pineville, and a job in an office complex or research park or medical center.
Not back to the communities that bear them. We provide education, my Madison Co. observer said, pointing to the surrounding Mars Hill College, and institutions like UNC-Asheville and Western Carolina University and App State. But we really export education, she added. Those minds don't stay in town.
Even in Asheville, which looks so appealing to outsiders, the jobs that get created are largely service sector, not those that pay professional wages that help to grow a community's economic base. Asheville has over 600 physicians, she noted -- a happy confluence of being the only major medical center for the region and the interest of so many retirees in spending their golden years in the mountains.
Besides that, though, you're looking at tourism, jobs that pay a wage hardly enough to live on.
The result? Cheap land, barren of economic value -- and attracting more and more development, with land-owners bundling parcels to build vacation and retirement communities appealing to, well, to those with the means to move into this beautiful corner of the Earth.
Madison County, she sighed, was seeing this change itself. It was becoming a bedroom community for those who could no longer afford AVL, those now consigned to a 20-mile commute each way down the shiny new I-26 to get from their jobs at the Biltmore or the Grove Arcade or the Tunnel Rd. retail strip. And it was attracting new residents, those with independent incomes seeking mountain views, but maybe not so interested in the views of manufactured homes and old farm buildings that preceded their own arrival.
And these new developments weren't being created in a way that protected the watershed, she bitterly added. The county found itself so desperate economically that growth -- any growth, any addition to the tax base -- was a welcome activity.
So bring on the developments, defoliating the hills, dumping run-off into the streams that run to the French Broad! So goes the feeling in the clubby back corners of the decision makers.
All this, to wit, in the midst of a drought -- a drought that has a far different impact on governmental reaction to development in a poor rural community, it seems, than it does in the more-privileged climes of Durham County.
...
Of course, we here at BCR weren't the only ones taking a look at development in WNC this weekend. In the Asheville Citizen-Times this morning, I was intrigued to see the headline "Expert: Suburban Sprawl Must End."
More intrigued, still, to see that that expert was none other than Mitchell Silver, Raleigh's planning director, and one of the architects of the recent "Big Ideas" planning session we've raved over here before.
Silver's comments to a neighborhood congress event in Asheville spoke to many of the same issues that urban pioneers in Durham and elsewhere find salient.
As baby boomers reach retirement age, homebuyers will tend to be older and have fewer children and will want smaller homes in neighborhoods with amenities like parks, sidewalks, stores and restaurants, Silver said.
“We want to reduce driving and make them more pedestrian-friendly, and have the necessary goods and services within walking distance, and have the social places where people can gather,” he said. “People want housing choices....
City planners should discourage suburban sprawl and encourage developers to build more densely packed housing, Silver said. Denser development increases the tax base, encourages use of mass transit and is good for the economy, he said.
“The next generation is looking for density,” he said. “So if you don’t have density, they are going to choose to live in places that offer those housing choices. Sprawl and low density make no economic sense.”
Very common sense of Silver.
Heck, maybe we should have sent our own City Council and Board of County Commissioners out there. Some seem to get this message; others, not quite yet.
Given the advantages the Bull City has economically and structurally over so many of the less-fortunate parts of our state, wouldn't it be nice if all of our elected officials could get the message?
What a coincidence, I was also enjoying AVL this weekend. On NPR a few moments ago the Obama speech was described as being given in Asheville, "a Democratic stronghold". I presume they mean only Buncombe County?
Asheville is plenty crunchy, but there's hardly any black people relative to Durham (a "democratic stronghold" that actually has some diversity, thank goodness). Go a few miles down the parkway and you're in Ron Paul / John Birch country.
Posted by: KeepDurhamDifferent! | October 06, 2008 at 10:27 AM