Kelly Kenoyer: I'm here with Liz Carbone, a local housing advocate and a member of the Cape Fear Housing Coalition. Thank you so much for joining us.
Liz Carbone: Yeah, thank you for having me.
KK: We've often talked in the newsroom about how little undeveloped land there is in the city of Wilmington, and how much of the land that's left is out in the unincorporated county. The county is set to develop a new comprehensive plan over the course of the next year. So what are your thoughts on what that plan could look like for this region?
LC: Yeah, you know, like, first off, shout out to all of the county staff working hard on a comprehensive plan that you know will never please anybody, much less each and every resident of the county. But I know that's a heavy lift, and we certainly appreciate the work that they're doing. I think you know we have to be realistic, but that doesn't mean that we can't be hopeful and innovative too.
The reality is this community needs more housing, and that's going to bring people heartburn. Like, that is true. We need to expand our roadways. We need to figure out these traffic situations. But at the same time, like that doesn't mean that we can just throw the baby out with the bath water and say traffic is bad, and as such, we're going to let 53% of this county's residents suffer in regards to how much they're paying for their housing.
LC: And I think for the comprehensive plan, we've got to find this balance of using the available land that's left in the county to its best and highest use in a way that makes sense for our county's needs and kind of the residents wants. But at the same time, like ,we have to get over this mentality that well, you know, the last good house that was built in Wilmington was the one that was the one that me and my spouse moved into. We've got to figure out a way to find a balance between acknowledging we need more housing and building more housing, and not clear cutting an entire 10-acre swath to build a planned community.
There's got to be something more creative happening and some more thought being put in, whether it's infill development, like you and I talked about a lot, looking at those vacant lots that are already essentially treeless or former industrial or former retail, or what have you building up as a community, we've got to get comfortable with density. And I think that density and tree preservation don't have to be like a binary choice. I would much rather see, you know, a 10-acre lot get a one acre project built four stories up and some green space preserved for the residents, than to see, you know, one and two story buildings and not a tree in sight. And I just don't think that we're at this point where we're being creative enough yet.
KK: I think for me, what I often see is that a lot of those kinds of developments where single family homes they have by right development. It's a lot easier for them to build in these unincorporated areas of the county, whereas those denser developments, where you're putting a lot more units on a smaller chunk of the land that's being developed, they need to go through a rezoning. They need to go through the County Commission. They get fought by the residents, whereas the residents have no choice to fight against some of these suburban style developments with single family homes, and that's something that's almost intractable. I'm not sure exactly how that can be addressed.
LC: Yeah, you know, there's got to be a middle ground that we find between giving the residents of our community no power over what happens in regards to development, and also not letting develop, not letting our residents influence too much: projects that are good and right and in alignment with our land development code or our comprehensive plans. You know, we all have to come along in what we're comfortable with and what we're willing to sacrifice to help our neighbors have a better quality of life and to kind of have our dose of reality about what this city is going to look like if we don't scale up housing wise, in regards to affordability.
But at the same time, you're right, like there's there has to be a space for people who have real and legitimate concerns, particularly about environmental integrity and environmental preservation, to be able to voice those concerns. And you know, we as a nation are one of the only countries in the world that are so committed to this suburban sprawl layout, to the single family home on a plot that's an acre and a half that was developed by-right.
You know, most of the world's advanced and wealthiest and happiest countries are living in cities that have fairly dense housing and significant green space. That's what is working in France and Sweden and Germany. This is not a new recipe for success that we're trying to cook up. There's so many great examples to look toward when we're trying to figure out how to make this city a better place and a more affordable place and a more livable place and a greener place for everybody. And I don't think we're going to get very far if we can't let go of this kind of mutually assured destruction of more housing and environmental preservation.
KK: I've been speaking with Liz Carbone, a local community housing advocate and a member of the Cape Fear Housing Coalition. Thank you so much for being here with me.
LC: Yeah, thank you for having me and happy holidays.
