This is How New Developments Help Chapel Hill

How do new developments improve Chapel Hill?

It’s a simple question. And it has a simple answer: New developments provide vital spaces that strengthen our community: spaces for people to live, to work, and to shop. When we provide a greater variety of spaces that work for a more diverse population, we’re a better, stronger Chapel Hill.

How Do Developments Help Chapel Hill?

The way we live today in 2016 is vastly different in nearly every way from the way we lived in 1956 or 1976 or 1996 or even 2006. It’s a logical conclusion, then, that the physical character and design of our community has to be different, too.

Here’s why more spaces for people to live in, work in, and shop in are good for our community:

New apartments and condos provide much-needed places for people to live. Our housing costs in Chapel Hill are so high in part because we have too many people who want to live here and not enough places for them to live.

Because community leaders of the 1980s and 1990s wanted to avoid commercial development, most of it located just across the county line in Durham. To increase our share of private sector jobs and our sales tax revenue, we need new developments to provide space for new businesses to strengthen our local economy.

Chapel Hill’s comprehensive plans calls for concentrating new development along transit corridors, like in downtown, the Ephesus-Fordham area, along Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd, and Highways 15-501 and 54. This approach to development provides the most benefits to our town and both current and future residents. By focusing in these areas, we reduce our dependence on cars to get around, meaning we can grow and prosper in a way that’s environmentally sustainable and attractive to new residents. And, it’s important to remember, every new development along a transit corridor is a development that doesn’t alter the character of single-family neighborhoods, which existing residents say they value. That’s a win-win for both new and current residents.

The right kind of development—development that doesn’t sprawl out, but instead is built up and is designed to be walkable, bikeable, and accessible by transit—brings all sorts of benefits to Chapel Hill. We should welcome it to our community so that we can thrive and lead our region and state into the future with new housing choices, new transit options, and new job opportunities, for everyone.

— Travis Crayton

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