INC NEWS - Letter: effort to "streamline" development process is misdirected (Herald-Sun)

[bragin at nc.rr.com]

"Many times development has been planned years in 
advance. You only notice or hear about it as it reaches the final stages 
prior to construction."

isn't that exactly the problem? Engagement in the development process, years before the bulldozers are even hired, is limited to those who have very specific stakes in the outcome. These are, for the most part, speculators, investors, developers, builders, real estate agents, bankers, and, to a lesser extent, trade workers. Their desired outcomes may or may not be the same as the community at large. Turning a profit under perhaps difficult economic conditions is, and should be, the primary goal of those groups. But building a sustainable community whose quality of life and economic value continues to grow over the next 5 decades or so is the community's goal, and quite frankly it should be the goal of our political leaders as well. 

All you need do is look at the bedroom communities in Phoenix or Las Vegas  over the past year to see what happens when development decisions are allowed to be driven exclusively by short-term profit margins rather than long-term sustainability and liveability concerns. We could end up either way in Durham, depending on some of the decisions that our elected officials take over the next couple of years.

And don't you think that a public policy that encourages farmers to keep their land in production makes a certain amount of sense? With food and fuel prices at all-time highs, minimizing our reliance on food produced 4,000 miles away or more seems like a good idea to me.

Barry Ragin
 
---- RW Pickle <randy at 27beverly.com> wrote: 

=============
Don Moffitt said in his letter to the Herald:

"In places like New Jersey, where developable land is quickly
disappearing, as it is in Durham, the approval process can take several
years."

The development process, in NJ or here, does take several years. From
acquisition to design, it's not an overnight process.  Once it gets to the
Planning Commission, much time has gone by and preliminary work done. Even
for developers, time is money (just the interest on the finances deters
some development). Ultimately, when it gets drawn out longer, it just
costs the end users more. And in most cases, these are homeowners like
many of us.

There is no shortage of developable land here. Just get in your car and
drive north of town and turn off any of the side roads. You'll drive for
miles seeing land just waiting on a future use. Should it be kept as farm
land? Just ask the farmer who owns it. He can no longer make a living
growing much of anything... I suspect many of those who see the farm land
as something of beauty have never bought the tons of fertilizer, the
hundreds of gallons of diesel fuel (every week I set a personal new record
for this... last week it was $4.258/gal), all the equipment necessary to
even begin to grow something on a commercial scale, or paid the taxes on
hundreds of acres. And none of it is getting any cheaper. So what is to be
done with this beautiful piece of land holding the planet together? If you
can't make a living growing something on it, then about all that is left
to do is to develop it into something different. Hence, development
happens. It's like the glass bottle, the plastic cup, yesterdays
newspaper... recycle it into something different. And with land, there
just are not that many options.

Our region of the country is expected to grow by more than a million
people in the next 20 years. If there is not development, where do you
think these people will live, work, and play? Preparation for this influx
of new families has already started and will continue. Slowing anything
down at this point only brings what is going to happen to a crisis level
at some point down the road. And management by crisis is the wrong way to
do much of anything. Planning ahead for the future will always yield
better results. Development is a necessary evil for this region of our
country that has been blessed by good climate, good educational
facilities, and seemingly sheltered from the ills that plague other parts
of it.

Accepting the fact that we have to grow and develop land will lead to a
better planning process. Slowing it down will only postpone a crisis. You
don't have to look far to find one either. Fayetteville will have an
influx of 40,000 families this year alone (due to a shift in the
military). Just think about how hard it is to come up with that many
desirable homes to put all these families. And it's something you won't be
able to do overnight no matter how fast the development process is.
development isn't fast. Many times development has been planned years in
advance. You only notice or hear about it as it reaches the final stages
prior to construction. Only then does it seem like it all happens too
quickly.

RW Pickle



> Letter: Process works fine
> Herald-Sun, 12 May 2008
>
> The effort to "streamline" the development process in
> Durham is well-intentioned and misdirected. Comparing
> the speed of project approval in Durham to that in
> Cary is using the wrong metric. In places like New
> Jersey, where developable land is quickly
> disappearing, as it is in Durham, the approval process
> can take several years. We're a lot faster than that.
>

>


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