This Just In – You know the line from Carolina alumni when they return to town after years away. “They’ve ruined the place.”
The particulars don’t matter. It could be a favorite restaurant, a tree that once shaded a picnic spot or just the breezy pace of things on a spring day. Something seems different, hurried … changed.
Let’s be real, we love change except when we don’t. We entertain our kids with stories about running to the kitchen phone when it rang so as not to miss an important call – maybe a doctor, maybe a job offer. Now we complain that there’s no escape from our information superhighway. It follows us everywhere – to the dinner table, the bedroom and the bathroom – 24/7.
That’s our choice, though.
Pro tip for the kids out there: If you don’t choose to stop the phone from ringing (another technological advancement) … you don’t always have to answer it. You know what I’m talking about.
With our love of the Triangle area as a quality place to live comes the price of that popularity: growth. We’re seeing lots and lots of it and the effects are … well … mixed.
Let’s talk about housing for just a moment. An aerial view of the Chatham Park subdivision or the Collins Ridge subdivision in Hillsborough shows housing that maximizes land but displays the obvious profit factor in building housing. They look like Levittown, an iconic New York subdivision built for returning WWII veterans. They are highly concentrated, emphasizing the house’s square footage as opposed to the creation of a community of homes where the yards run together but can be visually distinct and interesting. In fact, it’s likely they have covenants to prevent any such creativity.
The homes at Chatham Park are close enough to each other that a person could likely stand in between two of them and touch both. That kind of concentration is a bit more understandable in suburban New York where there is a concentration of millions of people in a relatively small geographic area. Levittown itself is home to more than 50,000 people on about seven square miles of land. I get that.
There’s an argument that says this is just forward thinking on the part of Chatham County officials who approved it. There are recreational resources nearby – the Haw River and Jordan Lake. One hopes that some of the tons of money exchanging hands here is going to get poured into the Chatham County schools and some planning for mass transit.
In the meantime, when you’re selecting your 2,000 square foot home on a postage stamp lot, be sure you find your next-door neighbors’ dinner menu agreeable, because when they make corned beef & cabbage or fried fish, you’re gonna be breathing it!
For the record, a “postage stamp” is a thing that we used to put on an envelope which we then walked out to the mailbox to be sent elsewhere – maybe to pay a bill or send a birthday card to Aunt Fanny. I used to exchange messages with my grandparents this way and although it would take several days for them to receive my note then several more for them to write back, it was a thing that generated interest and excitement.
All for just a nickel per stamp. Now it’s 66 cents, so Aunt Fanny gets an email. That’s progress!
Jean Bolduc is a freelance writer and the host of the Weekend Watercooler on 97.9 The Hill. She is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.
Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc
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