Talk about your humble pie. I’ve long joined the throngs dissing Cary for its Stepford wives design standard ordinances and over-regulation of how development should look. Then I made a field trip to Waverly Place, a shopping center at the intersection of Kildaire Farm and Tryon roads. I realized that at least in this redevelopment […]

Let’s say you live in Phoenix Place, near the intersection of Rogers Road and Purefoy, and you wanted to ride Chapel Hill’s prepaid buses into town. Maybe you don’t have a car or you embrace the walkable community ideal we hear Town Council members and developers talk about. Because bus service along Rogers Road is […]

While on vacation last week, I spent quite a bit of time on mini-golf courses, where I had ample opportunity to observe how parents and grandparents dealt with children who could not putt a ball into a hole if their life depended on it. Time after time, adults would use their own club or their […]

Red flags went up for me when I got the email about a meeting to introduce an initiative called “Neighborhood Character Standards.” Not so much because of its title that evoked right-wing conservative ideology, and not because of anything in the standards themselves. What caught my attention was that the email, in a chipper tone, […]