Chapel Hill News Editorial for 10/22/2006

Housing would make for a healthier Carolina North

The university envisions its proposed Carolina North research campus as a beacon of learning and research, a light on a hill that will attract the nation’s smartest and most innovative minds to UNC to do essential, cutting-edge work.

Build this exceptional facility, the theory goes, and they will come.

But the university’s thinking on the subject sometimes seems overly narrowly focused, so trained on the academic and research facilities that it fails to fully appreciate how important other issues, especially quality-of-life issues, will be in drawing good people to this area and making Carolina North a success.

Carolina North won’t exist in a vacuum; it will exist within the wider community, and the many thousands of people who will work there will have to live, shop, play and get around in that community. It’s not enough just to build the best-equipped and most technologically advanced labs and other facilities. In order to make Carolina North as good as it can be, the kind of place where people are going to be eager to work, you have to offer them a good life outside the lab, too.

That means, among other things, that you need an efficient transportation system so that traffic isn’t a nightmare every morning and every evening, and you need to ensure an adequate supply of affordable and convenient places for those thousands of new residents to live.

If Carolina North is going to live up to its potential, the university needs to be as forward-thinking in its approach to those issues as it is in its vision for the research campus itself. Thus far, it’s shown a reluctance to make that commitment.

That was apparent in its early plan to address the central question of transportation by simply building 17,000 parking spaces at Carolina North. That proposal implied a reliance on single-passenger vehicles that was daunting to contemplate; if you think traffic is bad now . . .

The university eventually backed away from that idea, but it took considerable persuading by local town and community leaders, and it remains to be seen what sort of transportation network the university will support.

The latest discussion has to do with the housing question. Town and county representatives on the Leadership Advisory Council last week urged the university to incorporate significantly more housing at Carolina North than plans now call for. The goal, they said, should be that of a largely self-sustaining village — one that would allow many of the people who work there to live and shop there, as well.

That model seems far preferable to a sort of mini-Research Triangle Park one, in which most of the people who work there live miles away and have to commute. Providing ample and affordable housing at Carolina North would go a long way toward alleviating the transportation crunch Carolina North is likely to produce. It also would make for a more vibrant and lively campus. It would be, in other words, a recruiting tool.

The university’s representatives on the LAC didn’t oppose the idea outright, but they didn’t exactly embrace it, either. Building a lot of employee housing at Carolina North, they said, wasn’t something they’d planned to do, but they will consider it.

It may simply be that the university, like a big ship at sea, takes a while to change course. Perhaps, as it did on the 17,000 parking space issue, it will eventually come around to a new position on the housing question.

We hope so. It would be to the benefit not only of the surrounding towns, but also to the university itself to do that.

As Town Council member Jim Ward put it the other day, “It’s not a pill that we are forcing you to swallow; it’s a vitamin for you to have a successful program.”

This entry was written by Mark on Sunday, October 22nd, 2006 and is filed under Community, Issues, News. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.