Unless you were in a coma, there was no way you could have missed the joyful news blasted from every corner of the county last week: Residential building permits in the Charlotte “area” were up by 14 percent in 2004, according to data released last week by the US Department of Commerce. It’s a sign the regional economy is booming again after a small slowdown, they said, which everyone agreed was just fabulous.
The problem is that the rest of the story, actually the most important part, never got told. That’s understandable, because frankly it’s a bit of a buzz kill, and we don’t take kindly to buzz kills in our fair city.
After you heard the news for the fifth time, you, like me, may have gotten a distinct feeling that something was missing, like maybe the part about where exactly this growth was taking place, which local media never really delved into.
That’s probably because half the growth in the region is now taking place outside Mecklenburg County, clustered in the five counties around our borders. Just six years ago, 60 percent of the growth was in Mecklenburg, and 40 percent was outside. Today, it’s an even 50-50 split, with surrounding counties poised to overtake us as half the people moving here choose to live somewhere other than Mecklenburg.
It’s pretty staggering if you think about it. Over the past six years, the surrounding counties have added a whopping 64,000 housing units. At their current pace, they’ll add at least another 120,000 units in the next decade. Now add to that the 10,000 to 12,000 extra units we build every year, much of it on the county’s outer rim, and you’ve got some smashing economic news. You’ve also got a recipe for a parking lot from hell. According to the 2000 Census, 146,211 people who live outside Mecklenburg work in the county, a 43 percent increase from the 1990 census. If the building continues, the number of out-of-county commuters will at least double.
But city transportation engineers will tell you they have no plans to widen or noticeably improve the vast majority of our 30 congestion hot spots, which include legendary intersections like Fairview and Providence Roads, Randolph and Sharon Amity, and just about any place you can think of where traffic backs up for miles.
High-congestion hot spots like these form a virtual barrier between the far-flung suburbs, where most of the county population lives, and uptown, where city and county leaders are trying to concentrate most of the jobs. But the politicians aren’t worried. Throw in a few light rail lines, they figure, and we’ll be just like Portland, Oregon.
There’s just one crucial difference. Portland can ignore what’s going on in the vast tracts of land around it because it barred growth in them. Unlike Portland, Mecklenburg and the surrounding counties continue to issue building permits like a bunch of drunken sailors. Before the last coat of paint dries, city and county leaders have turned their noses up at the unenlightened SUV-loving road hogs who bought the homes they permitted. It’s not their problem if these people can’t get out of their subdivisions. If we build more roads, they say, more people will drive on them.
It’s all part of a transportation strategy that isn’t a transportation strategy at all, but a development strategy that says if we do as little as possible to address congestion, people will get fed up with the traffic and move to the transit corridors near uptown.
There’s probably some truth to that, but it’s hardly a solution. Even if every light rail car is crammed to capacity on every trip, even if we quadruple bus service that runs to the suburbs and every bus runs full all the time, it won’t begin to make a dent in our traffic congestion.
And this leads to yet another problem. In order to ignore the traffic issue, our fine public servants also have to ignore the fact that by 2010 — when our EPA-mandated deadline for improving air quality runs out — we will have added another 100,000 housing units in and around Mecklenburg County. It’s reasonable to assume that at some point, the people who occupy these housing units will get into their cars and attempt to commute to work. And when they do, they’ll spend hours idling on the congested roads we refuse to improve.
Our strategy for dealing with this goes something like this: Clamp our hands over ears, squeeze our eyes shut and yell “La! La! La! La! I can’t hear you!”
With almost no protest from local leaders, the Mecklenburg-Union transportation planning group, on which Charlotte wields the largest share of the power, recently killed a proposal to fund a volunteer program aimed at getting businesses to stagger workers’ commuting times on smoggy days. The word on the street was that they feared that if the program were successful, it might become mandatory, which could hurt business.
But hey, did I mention the great news that residential building in the Charlotte “area” grew by 14 percent last year? Maybe they’re right. Maybe that’s all you need to know.
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com.
This article appears in Feb 23 – Mar 1, 2005.
