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What might we expect from the planned rezoning of single-family neighborhoods in our town? More housing, we are told, and a wider range of housing types. These latter are meant to answer a demand for so-called “missing middle” housing – although this designation, as the Mayor and Town Council staff have made quite clear – has no connection to middle-income or affordable housing. The phrase is quite deceptive and also unfortunate, as the strongest need in Chapel Hill is for affordable housing rather than the market-price duplexes and ADUs (accessory dwelling units) likely to be built on newly rezoned lots.
So we can’t expect the rezoning to address affordable housing. We can expect developers and their investors to make a killing and other wealthy stakeholders to cash in. We can anticipate the destruction of precious greenspace and woodland within Chapel Hill and a severe curtailment of residents’ access to nature. The effort to counter sprawl by increasing density requires such destruction, as planners deem it better to conserve nature at the margins of cities than to integrate it meaningfully into the lives of town residents. Although the idea of density is to reduce driving, we will most likely have to drive out to “visit” trees like tourists viewing a monument.
The social fallout of the proposed rezoning is likely to be marked. Being so eager to build a town for future residents, we’re less attentive to the lives of those who are already here. Houses of all kinds are not just utilitarian structures or commodities to be traded. They are homes with powerful personal and social meanings for those who inhabit them. We develop a sense of place and identity through our dwellings; we invest in them not just our economic resources but our spiritual and emotional assets as well. We bond with our homes, whether they are single rooms or palaces, and understand our communities through the rootedness and responsibilities they bring. It’s this sense of place and neighborhood, these feelings of love and connection – the less tangible, less material qualities that put the “complete” into “complete communities” – that get lost in the fierce rush to build ourselves into an imaginary nirvana.
Not only will poorer residents be displaced by the profiteering of the construction industry, but neighborhoods offering rich connections and quality of life – many of these built up over time – will alter as our experience of place is reshaped by the money and power of a privileged few. Can no balance be struck between the past and the future, conservation and change, the natural environment and the built, our basic human needs and the quest for financial gain? Let’s keep searching.
— Pamela Cooper
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