Chris Doane / the Charlotte Observer

Growıng Paıns CHRIS DOANE / THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER POPULAR GOVERNMENT A Tale of Two Cities and a Farm in Between Richard Whisnant magine a town—call it Millville— the growth on the edge of town has out- where the only large employer re- paced the city’s ability to maintain its Icently closed its plant and laid off quality of life, and they demand smarter the workers. The effects of the layoffs growth management. are rippling throughout the com- Meanwhile, on a farm between Mill- munity in the form of lowered ville and Mallville, the owners see prof- income, increased stress, and its shrinking and land prices rising. If reduced property values. Every- they subdivide and sell, they can afford one fears the future. Job pros- many things they want—good schools pects are limited. The town for their children, perhaps a second faces stagnation. Its leaders and home at the coast. If they continue to its citizens crave growth, which farm as they always have, they see only they see as necessary for a return to harder times ahead. As much as they economic vitality and as motivation for love the land in its present state, devel- the town’s youth to stay and work where opment and the money that it will bring they were born. look like the easiest route to a better life Imagine a second city—call it Mall- for themselves and their children. ville—just an hour’s drive away. At the Millville, Mallville, and the farm in be- edge of Mallville, an interstate inter- tween represent three of the most common change has attracted a sprawling host of viewpoints on growth in North Carolina BSERVER O retailers. Property values in the area are (and elsewhere in the United States) at rising rapidly. Houses and condomin- the turn of the century. The differences EWS AND N iums are springing up around the retail in these viewpoints raise difficult chal- HE / T strip. Jobs are available in new office lenges for policy makers in a state that REENE G buildings rising amid the retail stores. has long sought an elusive geographic EITH K But traffic, noise, polluted stormwater balance in growth and development. The runoff, and air pollution all seem to be historical approach to growth in North rising along with the office towers. Res- Carolina has had two disconnected fa- idents of Mallville miss the forests and cets. Uniform statewide policies were the farmland that used to lie at their mostly concerned with geographic disper- city’s edge. The influx of people is creat- sion of public investments and mitiga- ing new demands for expenditures on ed- tion of environmental impacts. Most local ucation and public safety. Rapid changes decision makers tried to achieve whatever are dooming businesses elsewhere in the growth they could. Are these approaches city, especially in the old urban core. useful in solving the current problems of Many people in Mallville believe that Millville, Mallville, and the farm in between? This article examines growth policies and trends in the state and dis- The author is an Institute of Government cusses some impacts that growth is hav- BSERVER faculty member working primarily in en- O ing on communities in North Carolina. vironmental law. He thanks Ben Hitchings, The purpose of the article is to provide HARLOTTE senior planner, Triangle J Council of C a context for the growth management HE Governments, for contributing data and / T text on recent patterns of growth in North debate now under way in the political RIEN O’B Carolina. Contact the author at richard_ realm and in the pages of this issue of ARY G [email protected]. Popular Government. popular government fall 2000 3 Figure 1. Population Growth, North Carolina Counties, 1990–98 defining cash crop, tobacco, both encour- aged this semiurban, semirural form of development.3 Beginning in the 1970s, the state for- mally attempted to encourage this trend through a policy of “dispersed urbanization.”4 The state policy goals were aligned with the direction that demo- – 6.4–8.4% graphics supposedly indicated was most 8.4–20.0% 20.0–34.8% people’s desire: urban living in a rural Bold outline = counties with metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in them setting.5 Whatever differences this state policy of “balanced growth” made, it did not Source: North Carolina Dep’t of Env’t and Natural Resources, Div. of Envtl. Ed., Geographic Information change the fundamental trend of faster System (GIS) database summarizing U.S. Census Bureau data from various data sets (database in author’s population growth in and around larger possession) (1998). urban areas.6 As early as the 1830 census, it was apparent that the state’s cities How North Carolina Has Grown rise of North Carolina’s own mills and were growing at a faster rate than its factories, the population began to grow rural areas. By the 1930 census, although Population faster but also to spread just outside city the state remained only 25 percent ur- Thomas Wolfe was not the only one who limits. There was a shift from “a rural ban, its cities showed a larger gain in ab- felt about North Carolina that “you can’t farm to a rural non-farm way of life, and solute numbers of people than its rural go home again.” For most of the twenti- on to an urban non-city way of life.”2 areas did. By 1950 the proportion of the eth century, up until the 1970s, North After midcentury, the population of the state’s population that was urban had Carolina experienced net out-migration.1 state was moving, not to the city-level increased to 34 percent; by 1980, to 48 The state’s citizens left its farms and densities typical of large metropolises percent; and by 1990, to 50 percent.7 small towns for the manufacturing cen- elsewhere but to a suburban-level density Projections for the 2000 census and be- ters of the Northeast and the Midwest, that sprawled across the landscape. The yond show this trend continuing. The where the assembly lines of the new dispersion of textile mills throughout the Mallvilles are picking up steam; the industrial order brought relatively high small towns of the Piedmont and the Millvilles are lagging in growth.8 As for wages. As out-migration slowed with the decentralized production of the state’s the farms, North Carolina has been at or near the top of the nation in the decrease Figure 2. Average Annual Population Growth, United States in farm employment for the last twenty years.9 (For a graphic representation of and North Carolina, 1790–1999 the rate of population growth from 3.5 1990 to 1998, see Figure 1.)10 The state as a whole now is growing U.S. 3.0 at a historically fast pace. North Caro- N.C. lina’s population growth from 1990 to 2.5 1999, an increase of 1.02 million people, ranked sixth nationally. Its 15 percent 2.0 annual growth rate during the same period ranked eleventh nationally.11 The state is one of fifteen projected to have PERCENT 1.5 population increases of more than one million people from 1998 to 2025. Of 1.0 these fifteen, only five (Florida, Georgia, New York, Texas, and Washington) are 0.5 projected to have higher growth rates than North Carolina.12 Sometime in the 0.0 1970s, North Carolina’s annual growth rate surpassed the nation’s average an- 1790–18001800–18101810–18201820–18301830–18401840–18501850–18601860–18701870–18801880–18901890–19001900–19101910–19201920–19301930–19401940–19501950–19601960–19701970–19801980–19901990–1999 nual growth rate, and it has stayed ahead of the national average since then Source: Rates to 1970 from C. HORACE HAMILTON, 1 NORTH CAROLINA POPULATION TRENDS: A DEMOGRAPHIC (see Figure 2). North Carolina’s net SOURCEBOOK (Chapel Hill, N.C: Carolina Population Center, 1975). Rates from 1970 to 1999 calculated from domestic in-migration was estimated to U.S. CENSUS BUREAU, STATE POPULATION ESTIMATES AND DEMOGRAPHIC COMPONENTS OF POPULATION CHANGE: APRIL 1, 1990, TO JULY 1, 1999, available at http://www.census.gov/population/estimates/state/st-99-2.txt rank fourth highest in the United States (as of July 13, 2000); and from historical census figures for 1970, 1980, and 1990. between 1998 and 1999.13 4 popular government fall 2000 , NC URHAM , D UN -S ERALD H HE / T OLE C OHN J Economy farm. Only recently, with the rise of statewide are more the metropolises and Despite a favorable climate, good water Charlotte as a banking center, the rise of the private decisions to locate in and supplies, a strategic position between the Research Triangle as a center for around them, than the successes of dis- major markets, and generally abundant research and development, and the rise persed urbanization. Growth is follow- natural resources, North Carolina was of intensive livestock operations in the ing the course predicted by some urban among the poorest states through the east, has the state seen the concentrated economists, who saw in the Piedmont middle of the twentieth century. As late forms of production that elsewhere have Crescent the intermediate-sized cities, as 1959, the per capita income of North been major engines for economic linked by transportation corridors, that Carolinians ranked in the bottom five growth. The state has some prominent could give all the advantages of urban among the fifty states.14 Political rhetoric assets in its higher education institu- business concentration (“agglomera- has been shaped through the years to tions, highway system, and metropoli- tion”) while avoiding the problems of explain, if not to address, this problem tan areas that might have been central to cities larger than a million people.18 of relative poverty.15 A typical form of an economic development policy, but North Carolina is projected to have none labor emerged, in which families operat- state leaders in the twentieth century of the nation’s top thirty metropolitan ed small farms that provided some in- have tried to focus state resources on economies in 2025, as measured by em- come and some food, and also worked areas that lacked these assets.

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