Losing our towns

When we take road trips, I sometimes like to get off the interstate and drive some state and county roads to see the different Americas in our country. There are so many. Over the decades that I’ve done this, I’ve come to appreciate the stability of life in small and midsize towns, despite the vastly different resources people have available.

But in recent years, I’ve noticed a difference. We’re losing our towns.

In years past, the signal that a town lay ahead as we left a rural area was the appearance of gas stations. Then traffic lights, followed by car or farm equipment dealerships. Then functional businesses — a grocery store, furniture store or motels. Finally, the road took us to the central business district with shops, restaurants, offices of insurance agents and lawyers, hair salons and a post office. Then the landscape would repeat in the opposite sequence as we left town.

But recently, the sequence has changed. Small trailer parks herald commerce ahead. Gas stations are no longer first. They are ringed by a swath of big-box stores and chain restaurants. Nearby are apartment buildings built along the four-lane highway. Then come the strip malls with some of the smaller businesses that used to be in town, leaving the town center with empty storefronts whose windows are papered with “For Lease” signs. The few towns that did have a thriving downtown also had a distinct historic district with well-preserved houses of different sizes and architectural styles.

I used to think Chapel Hill was immune to numbers-driven evolution. We are a university town. We have an excellent medical center. So I was taken aback as we completed a recent trip to Florida how similar the entrances to Chapel Hill had become to all of those other depersonalize towns we’d driven through.

Sit in traffic on U.S. 15-501 from New Hope Commons to Blue Hill, and all you see are strip malls and apartment buildings. Drive south along N.C. 86 from I-40? Apartments and strip malls. Come north along 15-501 from the Chatham County Walmart toward campus, and, if the chamber of commerce has its way with the Future Land Use Map, that entrance to town will be more strip malls and apartments. If the light rail moves forward, the N.C. 54 corridor will be paved with strip malls and apartments.

Meanwhile, storefronts downtown sit empty until chain stores and national brand fast-casual eateries sign leases.

We, on Town Council, have the ability to shape development, to think about who and what we need here for the town to thrive. We do not have to say yes to every apartment and strip mall. We can think, set our parameters and recruit the housing types that draw the people who work in the town’s main industries and who would work in the businesses we want to attract.

We can save our town.

— Nancy Oates