Big Boom in Small Towns

[thewhister]

http://www.newsobserver.com/104/story/401259.html

Saw this article in the N&O this morning. Seem like our small towns here in have an advantage of keeping growth sustainable and creating walkable neighborhoods or communities.

I see a lot of growth in Wake Forest and Morrisville when I visit my friends there. It seems like growth continues to be the norm. Cary has exploded from a small town and now is this "Town" of well over 100,000 people. To me Cary is a city but continues to label itself as a "Town"

What is the balance of growing and expanding?

[sax184]

http://www.newsobserver.com/104/story/401259.html

Saw this article in the N&O this morning. Seem like our small towns here in have an advantage of keeping growth sustainable and creating walkable neighborhoods or communities.

I see a lot of growth in Wake Forest and Morrisville when I visit my friends there. It seems like growth continues to be the norm. Cary has exploded from a small town and now is this "Town" of well over 100,000 people. To me Cary is a city but continues to label itself as a "Town"

What is the balance of growing and expanding?

There is nothing sustainable about growth in Morrisville. Growth in Morrisville is mostly hypertrophic, driven exclusively on the belief in a neverending supply of cheap petroleum and the philosophy of the cancer cell- "growth for growth's sake."

Cary is not a city, for it has not chosen that path. It is a suburb of Raleigh with a small amount of traditional town fabric in its center.

Sustainability embraces a triple bottom line of economic health, environmental health, and social justice. Balance can be achieved among these three elements by creating a mix of uses in zoning that provides for a jobs-housing balance approaching 1.0, by using compact development forms to reduce impervious surfaces and encoruage non-motorized travel and less energy intensive transit use, and by zoning for a variety of housing types and sizes to make communities affordable to a wider swath of people at various stages of life and prosperity.

Cul-de-sac subdivisions where all of the homes in the $180,000-$200,000 range are kept on a separate, auto-dependent cul-de-sac from homes in the $225,000-$275,000, surrounded by pods of big-box retail, do not achieve the triple bottom line. Morrisville and Cary are mostly about developing the latter. To the extent that they switch to the former, their growth will become more compact, and more sustainable.

[urbanesq]

There is nothing sustainable about growth in Morrisville. Growth in Morrisville is mostly hypertrophic, driven exclusively on the belief in a neverending supply of cheap petroleum and the philosophy of the cancer cell- "growth for growth's sake."

Cary is not a city, for it has not chosen that path. It is a suburb of Raleigh with a small amount of traditional town fabric in its center.

Sustainability embraces a triple bottom line of economic health, environmental health, and social justice. Balance can be achieved among these three elements by creating a mix of uses in zoning that provides for a jobs-housing balance approaching 1.0, by using compact development forms to reduce impervious surfaces and encoruage non-motorized travel and less energy intensive transit use, and by zoning for a variety of housing types and sizes to make communities affordable to a wider swath of people at various stages of life and prosperity.

Cul-de-sac subdivisions where all of the homes in the $180,000-$200,000 range are kept on a separate, auto-dependent cul-de-sac from homes in the $225,000-$275,000, surrounded by pods of big-box retail, do not achieve the triple bottom line. Morrisville and Cary are mostly about developing the latter. To the extent that they switch to the former, their growth will become more compact, and more sustainable.

very nicely stated.

[thewhister]

There is nothing sustainable about growth in Morrisville. Growth in Morrisville is mostly hypertrophic, driven exclusively on the belief in a neverending supply of cheap petroleum and the philosophy of the cancer cell- "growth for growth's sake."

Cary is not a city, for it has not chosen that path. It is a suburb of Raleigh with a small amount of traditional town fabric in its center.

Sustainability embraces a triple bottom line of economic health, environmental health, and social justice. Balance can be achieved among these three elements by creating a mix of uses in zoning that provides for a jobs-housing balance approaching 1.0, by using compact development forms to reduce impervious surfaces and encoruage non-motorized travel and less energy intensive transit use, and by zoning for a variety of housing types and sizes to make communities affordable to a wider swath of people at various stages of life and prosperity.

Cul-de-sac subdivisions where all of the homes in the $180,000-$200,000 range are kept on a separate, auto-dependent cul-de-sac from homes in the $225,000-$275,000, surrounded by pods of big-box retail, do not achieve the triple bottom line. Morrisville and Cary are mostly about developing the latter. To the extent that they switch to the former, their growth will become more compact, and more sustainable.

Yes. Nicely stated. Now the question is why are the municipalities not applying these principles now? It seems like a neverending cycle that our communities go through and it sounds like it is for the sake of development and the tax revenue generated because of it.