Skip to content
The Archive of The Carrboro Citizen
Menu
  • Home
  • News
  • Community
  • Schools
  • Business
  • Opinion
  • Obituaries
  • Sports
  • Mill
  • Flora
  • Print Archive
  • About
Menu

BIG CITY: Managing our growth

Posted on July 19, 2012 by Staff

By Kirk Ross

I don’t mean to harp on food trucks, but the other night there was one main reason why I headed west instead of east.

Standing in front of a music club at midnight, sweaty, a little beat from playing a gig and definitely hungry, I wanted something to eat and I wanted another beer. I looked around and although it was a Friday night, there wasn’t a heck of a lot of traffic and there were almost no people in sight. As I’ve mentioned a few times, we’re a little less populated this time of year, but that night the West End was tumbleweed city.

So I headed further west, plunked down $4 for a couple of pupusas and then headed on to a public house, where I proceeded to spend the rest of the $12.50 just earned playing guitar. There followed a splendid rest of the evening, quite convivial. No sales records were set, but Carrboro’s downtown was lit and lively. In pondering the difference of two spots just a few blocks apart, I remembered that it wasn’t all that long ago when things were the other way around.

It would be naive to lay the current success of Carrboro’s downtown on food trucks or any one thing, just as it would be to blame, say, panhandlers for driving away business on the 100 block of Franklin Street. But something happened, and given all the intense interest in both downtowns and all the efforts around them, you can’t say the situation is the result of an accident.

You also can’t say it is always going to be the way it is. Old-timers around these parts used to talk about seeing that old REM band at The Station in Carrboro. In between those shows and the ones by new bands at the new version of The Station, there were some quiet nights beside the tracks.

This column is called Big City for a lot of reasons. There’s some snark in it, of course, because by most standards, we’re not. We’re a collection of small and mid-sized towns that have grown up and out.

For decades here, the overarching story has been how to manage growth and its impact on the land and our civil institutions such as schools, parks and libraries.

Keeping up with growth was the major preoccupation of government, and while there’s always been some attempt to craft public policy to balance commercial and residential growth – more enthusiastic in some eras than others – the market by far has favored housing.

It was under this dynamic that the little towns of 20 years ago pretty much doubled in size, and now each place has its own unique set of Big City challenges.

For all the thought put into how we grow, there’s not been as much thought put into managing what happens afterward. That needs to change. If you look at the major issues of recent years they mostly involve not an incursion on an old farm or pristine lands, but infill and redevelopment. Although there’s still a good deal of rural land in Orange and Chatham that could be gobbled up, development within the urban boundaries is where the action is. That’s certainly the case in the core of the smaller towns like Pittsboro, Hillsborough and Saxapahaw. And if you look down the hill from the intersection of Columbia and Franklin streets and remember what it was like just four or five years ago, you can see that the long-anticipated change is gathering steam.

For the rest of this year, this column will take a look at the specific challenges in the core areas of the various towns within our greater community, especially the not-so-twin downtowns of Chapel Hill and Carrboro. The idea is to try to answer a little more in-depth the questions raised by the contrast of the other night and look at the challenges faced by both places on the verge of another major growth spurt and the changes it will bring.

If you have any thoughts on the subject, please send them on to kross@carrborocitizen.com

Web Archive

© 2025 The Archive of The Carrboro Citizen | Powered by Minimalist Blog WordPress Theme