Carrboro has a relatively new (and yet deeply experienced) Mayor, a new town manager, and the most progressive town council in recent memory.

This new leadership team has settled into place and Carrboro recently adopted its first ever Comprehensive Plan for the town, declaring that its two overarching principles are making Carrboro a place that advances Racial Justice and takes Climate Action.

Now that the Carrboro Connects plan is adopted, will it move us in the directions described above? Are the strategies proposed to move ahead feasible for a town with budget and staff capacity the size of Carrboro, and will they be designed to leverage our assets, or be more dependent on the goodwill of other partners to be executed?

To answer these questions, we’ve got to start with an accounting of Carrboro’s place in the world, and our challenges and opportunities. Below I present what I see as the lay of the land, what I will refer to going forward as The Fundamentals of Carrboro. Let’s begin.

Fundamental #1: Carrboro is part of the Triangle economy, and except for UNC, it is far from all of the region’s other major job centers.

Traditionally, the Triangle regional economy has centered on employment opportunities in Wake, Durham, and Orange counties. Carrboro sits very close to one of the densest job clusters in the region with UNC and UNC Hospital. Downtown Chapel Hill and Downtown Carrboro could also be considered part of this cluster. But most of the rest of Carrboro is adjacent to low-density suburban Chapel Hill neighborhoods or the Orange County rural buffer. The rural buffer has few to zero job opportunities now and will not likely add them in the future. East Chapel Hill may hold more jobs in the future, but development cycles in Chapel Hill are long and slow. Except for those Carrboro-ers that work at or adjacent to UNC, most Carrboro residents are traveling 10-20 miles each way to work in Durham or RTP, or 30-40 miles to work in Raleigh. Increasing suburban growth across the region and no high capacity transit planned for Carrboro in the next 30 years means that driving to these far-flung jobs will only get more challenging for Carrboro residents.

Unless we figure out how to grow a larger base of jobs here in town, Carrboro residents will have an increasingly difficult time accessing a wide variety of jobs in other communities in the region. If like me, you are a parent who finds Carrboro a good place to raise a child, this situation increases the likelihood that the kids we love to raise here will move away to find work.

Fundamental #2: Our tax base is 86% residential and only 14% commercial.

We have a very high dependence on residential property tax to pay for town operations. If we can’t grow the commercial tax base, the funding for all of Carrboro’s lofty goals will be paid for most heavily through residential property taxes, which…raise the cost of housing.

Fundamental #3: Carrboro is part of, and heavily influenced by, the Chapel Hill real estate market. Both towns have made choices to grow slower than the region, with significant consequences.

Over the past decade, all the other communities surrounding Chapel Hill and Carrboro have grown by at least 20%, while Chapel Hill and Carrboro have grown at less than half the rate of the others. (Durham, while not listed, is also over 20%).

Growing this slowly is A POLICY CHOICE that has been repeatedly made by both the Chapel Hill and Carrboro town councils.

The scarcity of new housing in both communities for a growing population has a predictable result, nearly half of our renters are cost-burdened:

This means that since Carrboro is adjacent to another slow-growing town, Chapel Hill’s scarcity of housing also drives up our prices and rents, and the difficulty of building in either of the two towns sends jobs elsewhere.

What does growing slower and becoming more expensive have to do with Racial Justice? Due to a host of systemic discriminatory phenomena, from redlining to urban renewal to hiring discrimination to real estate appraisals, we have a significant wealth gap in the United States between white and non-white households.

This means that when lower-income residents struggle to afford to live in Carrboro, they are much more likely to be black and brown residents. Our current development patterns have us on a glide path to being an increasingly older, wealthier, and whiter town. This outcome is far from the values Carrboro professes to hold.

What does growing slower have to do with Climate Action?

The Cool Climate Network at UC-Berkeley modeled a bunch of policy actions to see how much they would reduce GHG emissions. The data above is for the City of Sacramento. Look at how much urban infill outperforms. The biggest source of GHGs in the US is transportation, and urban infill can convert driving trips to walking, turning the most polluting trips into zero-emissions exercise. That’s why it makes such an impact.

Fundamental #4: Carrboro does not have the capacity to build affordable housing at scale.

Building new affordable housing units is expensive, and while Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill have the financial and staff capacity to do Low Income Housing Tax Credit projects like Willard Street Apartments in Durham or Greenfield Commons in Chapel Hill, Carrboro presently lacks both the resources and staff to produce and fund new affordable housing at this level.

This doesn’t mean Carrboro shouldn’t pursue affordable housing initiatives; we most certainly should. What it means is that we should be thinking about how to increase Carrboro’s capacity to meet our goals just as we define those goals in our Comprehensive Plan.

This capacity expansion will demand financial resources and technical skill, likely through the hiring of new town employees.

Fundamental #5: We are the people we’ve been waiting for.

If you’ve followed state government or federal government policy recently, it’s fair to say that if our plans rely on outside partners to contribute significant amounts of funding to achieve our goals, then we could be waiting for a long time. To paraphrase Barack Obama, Carrboro’s plans should embrace the idea that “we are the people we’ve been waiting for.”

Our elected leaders should certainly try to build partnerships with other levels of government to advance community goals. The soon-to-break-ground 203 Project, featuring a new library in Carrboro, is a great example of the town and Orange County working together. However, excellent outcomes like this are more often the exception than the rule, and while we should embrace those opportunities when they arise, we should not count on them to achieve our goals.

Fundamental #6: Carrboro has assets to pursue its goals, but the town is not taking full advantage of those assets to reach its goals more quickly – YET.

Carrboro has some powerful things going for it. While far from many jobs in the Triangle region, it is very close to a big job center in UNC, including many well-paying jobs. The University and UNC hospital also aren’t going anywhere, which means that even in recessions, that job base will likely remain present and strong.

Carrboro and Chapel Hill share the Chapel Hill-Carrboro School System, which is one of the highest-regarded and best funded in the state of North Carolina. As a former college admissions counselor, I can tell you that its high schools are well-regarded both in-state and nationally.

We have a downtown that has a strong local business flavor. Our town commons hosts a nationally recognized Farmers Market.

Our fare-free bus system, Chapel Hill Transit, carries a very high number of passengers for a community of this size, and has helped LOWER most traffic counts in town compared to the early 2000s, despite growing population in both communities.

These are just some of the things that make our community a good place to live, and makes the land beneath our buildings quite valuable. But not all buildings are created equal, and on a per-acre basis, our more densely developed buildings provide significantly more tax revenue per acre to pursue our community goals. In 2013, the Chamber hired a consulting firm, Urban 3, to report on the tax productivity per acre in Orange County. The most productive building in Carrboro at that time was the Hampton Inn.

Putting it all together – Carrboro can meet a lot of goals by using our valuable land differently, and more intensely. We can build more housing, and make room for new neighbors, while helping current ones stay in town. We can provide space for new job opportunities, so our residents can shorten their commutes, and their emissions. Doing both will also bring in new tax revenue to help pay for the big goals the town wishes to pursue.

Equally important is that how the town grows is mostly controlled by choices made by the Carrboro Town Council.

The 2022 – 2023 Town Council session presents an ideal time to begin making a transition to a greener and more inclusive future. This coming year on the blog will be dedicated to putting forth strategies to make this happen.