Jim McNally | | May 2, 2008
About 20 years ago, the word “sprawl” was applied to define an urban — and, more aptly, suburban — growth phenomenon that connotes reckless development, congested traffic, environmental unfriendliness and social disconnect.
Curtis Johnson, a research journalist and partner with Minnesota consulting firm The Citistates Group, said sprawl is a system that calls for traveling too far to get what you could get in your own backyard.
“Sprawl is a segregation of uses,” he said. “It separates where you live from where you work or where you shop or where your kids go to school.”
And that separation leads to other problems, not the least of which is too many cars on the road and too few alternatives to driving.
That’s when sprawl became controversial and something of a line in the sand between developers and municipality leaders.
That line could be summed up by what Statesville City Manager Rob Hites said regarding his city’s imminent growth.
“We want them to come,” he said of developers, “but there have to be rules.” And laying down those rules is a good idea, according to Curtis Johnson.
“City leaders are afraid developers will leave them or the city will get sued,” Johnson said. “But what we’ve seen all over the country is that if the city takes charge and does not back down, developers will stay, and everyone usually gets what they want.”
‘New Towns’
By 2020, somewhere between 11,000 to 13,000 people — depending on the economy-based scope of the project — will have settled into their new digs in a place called Larkin, which will be off Interstate 77’s Exit 45.
“When I was in graduate school, we called them ‘new towns,’ ” Hites said of the massive and much ballyhooed project set to break ground this summer.
Hites said the city has done every kind of preplanning in its power to help ease Larkin onto the scene.
City leaders even took the unique step of hiring a transportation planning consultant to find ways to mitigate the impact of the more than 1,000-acre development to be built near Exit 45 off Interstate 77.
“And the city council was very wise to do that,” Hites said. “But no matter what you do, Larkin is going to bring traffic to the area; there’s no way around that. And it will change Statesville — fundamentally — forever.”
Jeff Stutts, the human resources manager at ASMO, said he has already witnessed some startling changes during his time in Iredell County.
“When I lived in Mooresville, everyone looked at Statesville — the county seat — and said ‘Statesville’s got everything,’ ” Stutts said. “Now, everyone says everything goes to Mooresville.”
And Stutts sees something else happening and he doesn’t like it.
“In 15 or 20 years from now we’re all going to be in the same mess,” he said. “From Charlotte all the way down to Statesville and past it; one big mess.”
Stutts said he knows the same thing happened in Atlanta 20 years ago. And since then, Atlanta has become the poster-child for sprawl.
Neal Pierce is a bit of a legend in the somewhat esoteric world of metropolitan-focused journalism.
He and Johnson coined the term ‘citistate’ to describe the autonomy metropolitan regions have adopted in the past two decades.
“We had 5,000 years of civilization in which people wanted to be near the hub of the urban center,” Pierce said. “But for the past several decades, the trend has been to spread out but still somehow be connected.”
The Charlotte region is up to its waist in that trend, according to Pierce and Johnson. And its northernmost border will one day be Iredell’s county line.
By the numbers
In the early days of the Jimmy Carter administration, 99 percent of Iredell County’s 382,000 acres looked pretty much the same way it did during the George Washington administration. Only 1 percent of the county — less than 6 square miles — had been developed, and essentially all of the county’s urban and suburban areas could be found in Statesville, according to a study conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina - Charlotte.
But beginning in the 1990s, the U.S. Census Bureau reports Iredell’s population began to increase at a rate of 3.2 percent per year, almost double that of North Carolina as a whole and significantly higher than seven of the nine counties with which Iredell shares a border. And most of Iredell’s growth has been due to migration to the county.
Of the nearly 39,000 people by which the county’s population is projected to increase during the course of the current decade, more than 31,000 of them — about 80 percent — will have come here from other places.
Looked at another way, in 1900, Iredell County’s population stood at just more than 29,000. It took about 55 years to add another 29,000, according to the bureau. It took 30 more years to add an additional 29,000 and about 13 years to reach the next 29,000. This adds up to the county’s population reaching 116,000 in in early 1998. But it only took eight years to reach the next 29,000 and Iredell’s population crested 145,000 in 2006.
Even if growth rates flatline — and the trend not pointing to that outcome — the next 29,000 people should join the county in next three years. If current projections hold up, Iredell’s population will increase by more than 50,000 people in the next decade.
Comments
I see the town of Mooresville (Main Street) businesses close all the time. It would be nice to see the focus and incentive on new housing and business come to town, rather than the already congested River Road area. The roads are another issue. Even with all the sprawl to the west of Mooresville, Hwy 150 is only 2 lanes after you pass Williamson Road. How can we justify all the new homes and businesses without the roads to accomodate them?
Posted by Diane Osborne on 05.02.2008 at 03:42 pm
Sprawl is agin to the flurry of little critters flying from an opened Padora’s box. There is no way to round them all up, no way to direct their unforseen escape, no way to make things as they once were. Choices needed to have been made in anticipation of the opening.
Acceptance - knowing that population growth, and its attendant woes, is inevitable can work to the advantage of the county’s future. Iredell County leaders should use the knowledge of the inevitable to control not the quantity (an impossibility), but the quality of growth opportunities. Iredell County leaders need to think now of themselves twenty, thirty years from now: “What should we have done when we saw this mess beginning?” The “might have beens” are pitiful crys and need not be heard.
Posted by John Lawrence Smith on 05.02.2008 at 04:57 pm
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