INC NEWS - Letter: effort to "streamline" development process

[Melissa Rooney]

AGain, couldn't agree more. There are PLENTY of homes
available for renovation and resale in the Durham City
area, where Duke, Downtown, Parks, Brighleaf Square
and Tobacco District are a short bike ride away. I
don't understand why the development community is
insistent upon creating a mini-city (with regard to
recreation, shops, etc.) within a community on the
outskirts of Durham, when the city itself awaits...and
these homes in the city, even after renovation, are
usually less expensive than the $300,000 homes being
built in these mixed-use developments. But I guess
there are a lot of people who want to make their fast
money off of the family farmland...

Melissa

--- Mike - Hotmail <mwshiflett at hotmail.com> wrote:

> I'm just as concerned about projects being promoted
> as 'mixed use' located in former
> pastureland/greenfields that would be better planned
> in more urban areas where most (if not all) of the
> infrastructures are in place or more accessible to
> incorporate into rather than extending them out into
> rural areas (read outside the Urban Growth Area).
> 
> mike
> 
> 
>   ----- Original Message ----- 
>   From: Pat Carstensen 
>   To: inc-list at durhaminc.org 
>   Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2008 6:38 PM
>   Subject: Re: INC NEWS - Letter: effort to
> "streamline" development process
> 
> 
>   I believe the official NC population forecast is
> for about 50% more people in Durham County (250,000
> --> nearly 400,000) and about 1M more in the
> 8-county RTP area, in next 20 years or so.  I'm
> inclined to accept these as working assumptions.
> 
>   The long-term transportation plan has an
> approximation of where we will fit them all in (way
> too many of them at the edges of the county, in my
> opinion, if we are going to reduce our dependence on
> imported oil and cut down on greenhouse gases), but
> no-one has taken a crack at figuring out a more sane
> scenario.
> 
>   The comprehensive plan, which was produced with
> broad community input and includes a land-use plan,
> is built to support this kind of growth.  I'm not a
> fan of making it easy to change the land use plan. 
> Especially if it drives our urban form in
> unsustainable directions.  
> 
>   I think this is a particularly dangerous time for
> having dumb-assed growth.  Our market is relatively
> stable so we could have a flood of desperate players
> from across the country slapping together proposals
> to have something happening.  Someone told me that
> when the market went bust in Texas in the 1980's,
> their developers (a kind of carpetbagger???) all
> came here to try to do deals, overbuilding and
> driving up the cost on construction.
> 
>   Regards, pat
> 
>   > Date: Tue, 13 May 2008 12:42:48 -0400
>   > From: bragin at nc.rr.com
>   > To: inc-list at durhaminc.org
>   > Subject: Re: INC NEWS - Letter: effort to
> "streamline" development process
>   > 
>   > Randy is arguing against straw men again.
>   > 
>   > "I beg to differ with the opinion that all
> developers have bottomless pockets. Many developers
> are your neighbors, not some
> national-publicly-traded-stock-selling group trying
> to make investors happy. They do not have all of the
> resources you might think. In fact, it's more
> development on a shoe string than the luxury that
> seems to thought of by some."
>   > 
>   > No one has argued that developers have
> bottomless pockets. Quite the opposite, in fact.
> It's the need that developers have to turn a profit
> on their developments that lead to the kinds of
> practices that most of us wish to avoid. If
> developers had bottomless pockets, then this
> probably wouldn't be an issue. But because the need
> to turn a profit often conflicts with the needs of
> the community (for example, to avoid unnecessarily
> increasing stormwater runoff), there needs to be a
> mechanism in place to balance these conflicts.
>   > 
>   > "Development at any level is just speculation.
> Market forces, population shifts, jobs, all create a
> demand for development."
>   > 
>   > And yet, we have heard stated as a concrete fact
> that "a million new people will be moving into our
> area in the next 20 years." Which is it? Are we
> speculating that a million new people will be moving
> here, or are we certain?
>   > 
>   > "In AZ and LV, it was the need to drive stocks
> in the right direction for
>   > investors. Not something I see a great deal
> happening around here. You
>   > don't see new development being built here for
> that reason because people
>   > are moving here every day."
>   > 
>   > I take it that you don't have any first-hand
> knowledge of what's happening in the suburbs of
> Phoenix and Las Vegas? Most of these houses were
> built to meet demand, and virtually all of them were
> sold. What's happening is that people are walking
> away from them because they can no longer afford
> them. Developers responded to market forces, and
> then the market changed. The climate didn't change.
> And to a large extent, the economy didn't change.
> But gas prices started to increase, and ARMs started
> to reset, and the entire mortgage shell game, which
> hinged upon people who were probably unqualified for
> the mortgages they got, tumbled down when those
> people realized they couldn't afford the homes they
> were living in. While its probably not the key
> factor, certainly the lack of development and zoning
> controls in most of the western states was an
> aggravating factor in the overbuilding that was seen
> in these communities over the past decade. 
>   > 
>   > Here's an interesting article from Salon (you'll
> have to watch a commercial if you're not a member)
> on how some entrepreneurs are dealing with an
> unforeseen problem that arose from all of the
> foreclosures and abandoned houses out west and in
> Florida.
>
http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2008/05/09/mosquito_fish/
>   > 
>   > "Today, LV is just not LV, it's North LV, South
> LV and so on. From 1990-2000 some of these areas
> grew by 145% in population (ie: North LV grew from
> 47,707 to 115,488 in population; in 2006 it had
> grown to 197,576). In the same period of time here
> in Durham (1990-2000), we grew by 36.9% (from
> 136,611 to 187,035). Today, I believe the figure
> that is generally tossed out is a quarter of a
> million."
>   > 
>   > So, adding a million new people over the next 20
> years will more than quadruple our population, which
> is a significantly higher growth rate than that
> experienced by the Las Vegas in the example Randy
> cites. But we agree that Las Vegas' growth was
> unsustainable. Why in the world would we want to
> engage in even higher unsustainable growth here? It'
> s not like we have infinite acreage of undeveloped
> desert ringing our city that we can plop down
> infinite numbers of subdivisions. I think it will be
> interesting to see what Las Vegas' population is 10
> years from now, don't you? Same with ours. Putting a
> million new people in this area is going to make it
> a whole lot less desirable, and who knows what
> effect that will have on future growth rates. It's
> all just speculation, anyway. Right?
>   > 
>   > "But the downside of all this growth (in
> residential units) is that this is the worst kind of
> development to have. Residents demand many services
> but rarely pay for
>   > them in additional taxes. So our entire tax
> system gets more costly for all of us. We need a
> healthy mix of industrial, commercial and then
> residential to keep it all at some sort of
> sustainable level."
>   > 
>   > Quite right. The question is, how does this
> happen? I think it's clear from looking at examples
> of good development and bad development, not only
> around the Triangle, but around the country and
> indeed the rest of the world, that you can't rely on
> "the market" to ensure the "healthy mix" required to
> create sustainable development. The community,
> through both the professional planning staff and the
> elected political leadership, needs to be a part of
> the decision making process. the proposed
> "streamlining" of the development review process
> removes opportunities for community involvement, and
> increases reliance on "the market" to ensure proper
> development. But all the market does is base
> decision making on higher short term profits for
> developers, and not on long term community needs,
> meeting which are almost always more profitable in
> the long term for the community anyway. 
>   > 
>   > Finally, just a quick note on the farm issue. I
> think Randy's confused. On the one hand, he argues
> that farmers have no incentive to keep their land in
> production when they could sell it to developers and
> make more of a profit than if they continued to
> farm. On the other, he argues that farmers are
> already getting too much money to keep their land
> fallow and undeveloped, and turning a profit without
> producing food. I can't refute either of those,
> since they're mutually contradictory. I will note,
> though, that when Randy says "Let markets decide
> what something costs. The downside to this is
> shortages as farmers quit growing a crop because
> it's no longer profitable," he's got a point. But
> the whole purpose of the subsidy and floor pricing
> structure for farm products is to avoid food
> shortages. Because one of the result of food
> shortages is that people starve. And in most
> civilized 
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