Searching for intelligent development

Our primary home is in a small subdivision called Bluewater Cove. We live just across the cul de sac from the swimming pool pictured in the post. The pool and water access for boating are the main reasons that we live on the Carolina coast near Cape Carteret and Emerald Isle.

We have had the privilege of living in a wide variety of places from the isolated shores of Nova Scotia to the suburbs of Washington, DC. We have lived on a farm in a small community in New Brunswick, Canada. For twenty we were on the slopes of a mountain overlooking Roanoke, VA. My wife and I both grew up in Mount Airy, NC otherwise known as Mayberry. We even owned our family home there for a while.

We have had the experience of driving twenty miles to the nearest grocery store. We have also seen our kids be able to come home for lunch from school. Given that wide variety of experiences we have chosen Bluewater Cove in western Carteret County as our latest place to live.

I just penned an article, When the small stores leave. It is about my concerns on the hollowing out of commercial services in the area where our home is in Roanoke, Va. It seems that all the commercial enterprises want to be in the same concentrated areas. The result is that neighborhood services are disappearing. Perhaps this is inevitable.

I still remember walking to the local hardware, drug store, and movies when I lived in Mt. Airy. When I lived in Lewisville, NC, I could walk to school, church, hardware, and grocery store. There was even a small restaurant within walking distance. Much of that has disappeared.

We saw the planned development model when we lived in Columbia, MD and the years that I worked in Reston, VA. While having controlled development might help rationalize some decisions, I am not sure it works very well either. I know in Columbia all car services were pushed to the outskirts of town. In Reston neighborhood grocery stores have disappeared.

On the North Carolina coast we have a long commercial strip probably five miles in length. Most of the homes are on roads that branch off of the commercial strip. Homes still on the strip are gradually being converted to commercial businesses.

Some of the commercial development is starting to centralize and of course there are a number of subdivisions where residential development is also concentrating. It is almost a hub and spoke model of development. The hub is the centralized shopping area and the spokes lead to the residential areas which are often subdivisions.

In spite of the small population in the coastal area, we have better access to many services than we do in a larger town like Roanoke. Today in Roanoke I drove several miles to get a bag of pea gravel. It probably took me nearly an hour before I found what I needed. I could have accomplished the same task in under ten minutes on the Carolina coast.

It is almost counter intuitive that I could get something done more quickly where in theory there are less services. However it turns out there are actually better located services in the smaller area. Roanoke has two Lowe's Home Improvement stores and two Home Depots, all are about 20 minutes from our home. There is no hardware closer to our Roanoke home than ten minutes.

In Cape Carteret on the Carolina coast, we have only one Lowes nearby, but it is only seven minutes from our house. There are two hardware stores under ten minutes and another two at about fifteen minutes. There are other Lowes and a Home Depot within twenty to thirty mintues.

Things are similar when it comes to grocery stores, but if you start looking at medical care, Roanoke has far more resources which are close by.

Our closest hospital in Cape Carteret is about 25 minutes away. In Roanoke we have one under ten minutes away and a second one twenty minutes away.

What is surprising is that aside from medical care, life in a rural area like Cape Carteret stacks up pretty well.

The good news is that Carteret General Hospital has decided to build an imaging center close to us. Hopefully that is the first step in addressing additional medical services for the area.

With a Walmart probably coming to town in 2010, we will have just about all the modern conveniences that we need. My wife would only add that we need a Target.

Maybe intelligent development happens if you plant yourself in the right spot. I hope western Carteret County is it.

It certainly is not hollowing itself out like Roanoke is at the present time.

At what cost development?

We have lived in Roanoke, Va. since 1989. Before that we lived in Columbia, Md. which is one of the more famous planned communities

Halifax, Nova Scotia was our home before Columbia. It was our first stop after we left cattle farm in central New Brunswick where we didn't even have to bother with fences at the back of the property.

Today we split our time between Roanoke and North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks where it seems much of the world including us is interested in living. Development is happening rapidly on the coast, but things like storm water management are rapidly becoming a serious challenge to developers.

The wonderful mix of mountains and scenery along the roads attracted us to Roanoke. I don't think we measured services too hard when coming to Roanoke. We wanted girls' soccer and boys' hockey but any shopping is more than you get on a farm twenty miles from town.

While Roanoke is in no danger of becoming Charlotte, NC which apparently has twenty five high rise cranes at the moment, there is some significant development in Roanoke like the Keagy Road site pictured above.

As usual there is even more significant debate on how to get Roanoke alive and if not thriving, at least growing reasonably.

There certainly is an effort to create trails along the Roanoke River which has seen a significant improvement in water quality. However, with a $70M flood control project by the Army Corps of Engineers well underway, I have to wonder if anyone is paying attention to the root cause of the flooding.

When you start stripping away huge areas of forest in the mountains, like in the picture of the development on Keagy road, someone had better start paying attention to storm water management.

It is a huge issue on the North Carolina coast. In our area of the Southern Outer Banks, it recently took several extra months to build a Walgreen's Drug Store because the store had to figure out how to retain up to eleven inches of rain before releasing water in the storm water drains.

I am pretty sure no one in Roanoke County has considered the storm water impact of the development at and around Keagy Village.

While the development in Roanoke rages over how to attract young professionals, it is pretty clear that if they don't start paying attention to storm water management, the Valley's crown jewel, the Roanoke River, will see more than one Corps of Engineers project as keeping flooding under control will become a hamster wheel.