The walls of the office of a prominent local developer double as a sort of war room where the enemy’s movements are tracked. Color-coded maps delineate the future and who owns it. The maps on the walls are of the new battleground — the counties surrounding Mecklenburg.
Because his lawyer had painstakingly cracked through the multiple layers of shell companies that some local developers and well-to-do Charlotte families hide behind, I got a rare glimpse at who is buying what. It is staggering.
In the neck of Lancaster County, SC, a thin swath of land that neatly abuts Mecklenburg County, developers have bought up 4,700 acres of developable land in the last three years and are jockeying to buy more. That’s enough to house tens of thousands of people, many of whom will use I-485 to get to work. The same thing is going on in every county surrounding Mecklenburg, where developers are swallowing as much land as they can afford to hold. Tens of thousands of acres, owned and waiting for development, purchased on the bet that new business and job creation in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, which has declined by over a quarter in recent years, will still generate enough new jobs to fill all the homes they’re planning to build, which it likely will.
The future was right there in front of my face, hanging on those walls, already bought and paid for. These developers aren’t waiting for new roads to accommodate it all, because they don’t have to. That’s our problem.
But one thing is clear. When it comes to gridlock from hell, we haven’t seen anything yet, not until we see what happens when all the people who will occupy the development slated for this land get into their cars and drive in to Charlotte.
Even with our mass transit plan, Charlotte-Mecklenburg is utterly unprepared for this. Local politicians are so far out of the loop that they’re still debating whether their new policies might push growth over the county line, utterly unaware of the extent to which their current policies have been pushing it over the line for years. They’ve only recently begun to consider doing some road widening in some areas, but aren’t yet committed to actually funding it on a scale that would make a difference. In fact, the common mindset of many of our local leaders is still that if we dedicate a significant amount of money to building more roads or expanding the ones we have, it might encourage all those people who like to drive and they’ll further pollute the air.
They are utterly unprepared for the fact that if the developers are right, tens if not hundreds of thousands of people, far more than we could possibly cram on buses and trains even if they were willing to ride them, will buy outside the county and drive in to work in the coming decades. When they do, they’ll be idling on roads not built to accommodate them, adding even more grime to an air pollution problem that’s already among the worst in the nation.
It’s easy to place all the blame for this on greedy developers until you remember what’s making land in surrounding counties so desirable to them and their customers.
Although no one but me seems to consider it newsworthy, Mecklenburg County now has the highest taxes in the state, according to an annual analysis by the conservative John Locke Foundation. Thanks to the generally mediocre schools, fluctuating school assignments and double-digit hikes in tax bills during recent years, folks are throwing up their hands and moving or locating over the line to avoid it all, and really, you can’t blame them. In the process, businesses and retail are following them and developers are getting rich off the whole thing.
Meanwhile, the county has been raising taxes and making housing unaffordable while the city spends millions subsidizing affordable housing. Classic.
At this point, I don’t think there’s much we can do to change the direction in which we’re headed. Long-term, we basically have two choices now. We can be an unaffordable, high-tax, smoggy, gridlocked, undesirable county with mediocre schools. Or, we can be a largely exclusive, high-tax, semi-grid-locked enclave for the privileged that anchors the development around us and provides sustenance to the suburban from far-flung corners of surrounding counties who drive in to work here.
Which way we go in the end depends primarily on one thing — whether folks who want to work here but no longer want or can afford to live here can reach us by bus, train or automobile. The first step is to acknowledge that they’re coming, and exactly where they’ll be coming or driving in from. All that would require is a study of land purchase records in surrounding counties, which I’m sure we could persuade my developer friend and his lawyer to donate.
If we’re to have one, the time to face the future is now.
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com
This article appears in Nov 5-11, 2003.
