This is David Schwartz.

As you drive or stroll along Franklin and Rosemary streets and crane your neck to view the upper stories of the high-rise buildings that seem to have been transplanted here from Charlotte or Atlanta, you may wonder, why are we doing this? In part, This change to the character of our downtown stems, in part, from some town leaders’ desire to reproduce in Chapel Hill the kind of commercial revitalization that has occurred in cities such as Durham, Asheville, and Greenville, SC. They look longingly at the investment dollars flowing into redevelopment projects in these other cities and at the vibrant public and commercial spaces that have resulted and ask, why can’t that happen here?

There are several reasons why the particular kind of revitalization that has occurred in these other cities can’t happen in Chapel Hill. Here are three:

      1. Size matters. Greenville, Durham, and Asheville are all the largest urban centers in their respective metropolitan areas. Greenville is the center of economic, cultural, and government activity for a population of over 800,000 people, as Durham is for a population of over 500,000 and Asheville is for a population of over 400,00. All three have been the major industrial, commercial, and cultural centers of their regions for over 100 years and have built over time a large inventory of commercial real estate. Chapel Hill, by contrast, has always been a relatively small town centered on the University with no major industrial or other commercial activity and thus little commercial real estate.
      2. Before you can come back to life, you first have to die. During the 20th century, downtown Asheville, Durham, and Greenville all suffered devastating economic declines. When the factories, department stores, and other businesses shut down or relocated, they left their buildings behind, which made lots of cheap, vacant, centrally located commercial real estate available for adaptive reuse. In Durham, for example, the departure of the tobacco industry produced 3-4 million square feet of vacant commercial space, more than the total amount of commercial office space in all of Chapel Hill. But these economic declines also created widespread unemployment, poverty, and distress in these cities, which for many people in Durham and elsewhere continues to this day. The commercial revitalization they are now experiencing is the light at the end of a decades-long tunnel of hardship their citizens have had to endure. Downtown Chapel Hill thankfully never experienced an economic decline remotely approaching what happened in these other cities. Thus, Chapel Hill never built much commercial real estate to begin with, and what we did build, we’re still using.
      3. A river doesn’t run through it. One of downtown Greenville’s greatest attractions is a 32-acre public park along a cascading river. Chapel Hill has nothing like it; no large public park near downtown or even any sizeable public green space, apart from the university campus.

These are some of the reasons Chapel Hill has not and will not experience the kind of commercial revitalization that has occurred in places like Durham, Asheville, and Greenville. It’s not because we lack vision or motivation, or because our residents are reactionary obstructionists. Rather, the economic and geographic conditions that made possible the revitalization in Asheville, Durham, Greenville, and in other places simply do not exist here.

Can we nonetheless make Chapel Hill’s downtown a more appealing and economically vibrant part of our city? Sure we can, and we should. But our efforts to enhance our downtown should strive to nurture and highlight what is special and distinctive about Chapel Hill rather than adopt the superficial trappings of the kind of major urban center we never were and never will be.