We welcome letters to the editor’s desk on any topic. Our ideal length is around 400 words or less, but if they need to be a little longer, that’s fine. We reserve the right to edit or add context when necessary. We ask that submissions come with your name and where you live (no street address necessary, just your neighborhood, town, city, etc.). Criticisms are welcome, but we ask you to try to keep it civil.
Send your letter to BSchachtman@whqr.org — or by mail, if you're old school, to WHQR Public Media 254 N. Front Street, Suite 300, Wilmington, NC 28401.
This edition’s letter, “Growth Through the Eyes of Someone Born Here,” comes from Josh Kirby of Supply. Kirby is the founder of Citizens for Better Brunswick, a volunteer-run 501(c)(3) that seeks to “reclaim the fiscal and ecological integrity of Brunswick County through direct land protection and structural accountability.” You can learn more about its “First Acre” initiative here.
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My family has been here longer than the county's growth rankings.
I remember roads with more trees than rooftops. Creeks you fished, not creeks on a development map you can't go near. Woods behind the house that were just the woods and a place for animals to live. You never wondered how long they'd be there. But unfortunately I had never looked at the zoning map either.
We weren't rich. But we had room. Room to hunt, fish, walk, and hear the wind in the pines. That doesn't show up on a balance sheet, and I've seen it's the first thing to go when nobody's counting it.
I'm not against growth. Business needs business. People need homes. Families move here for the same reasons mine stayed. Welcome them.
But somewhere along the way, we started treating growth as progress no matter what it costs the people already here. Those aren't the same thing.
Nobody voted to lose the woods. It happened one parcel at a time. One more subdivision. One more shopping center. One more road widened. Another 5,000 linear feet of sewer pipe in the ground. Each one looks small enough to approve. Add them up and you're living in a different place, and nobody ever decided that.
People move here for the trees, the water, the wildlife, and a little breathing room. Then we clear the trees, strain the water and sewer, and pave the rest. What are we selling when it's gone?
Brunswick County is one of the fastest-growing counties in the state, and we still don't have a state park where a family can pull in, park, and walk into the woods to go camping. We have rooftops. I started Citizens for Better Brunswick because I went looking for a place like that and couldn't find one.
My great-grandfather gave land for a church. He didn't have much, but he understood that some land is worth more to a community than what it sells for. That idea used to be normal here. We gave land. We kept land. We didn't treat every acre as a lot waiting to be platted or a check waiting to be cashed.
Undeveloped land has value even when nobody's building on it. It cleans water. It holds floodwater. It gives kids somewhere to be. We can welcome new neighbors and still demand real planning, infrastructure that exists before the houses do, and land set aside for good.
I don't expect Brunswick County to look the way it did when I was a kid. I know times change. But there's a difference between a place growing and a place being consumed.
We are raising the next generation of families to call this home. I want them to inherit more than stories about the woods, creeks, and quiet roads that used to be here.
If we wait until it's gone to decide it was worth saving, we've waited too long.
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As a kid, growing up in the pre-internet age, with parents who curtailed our access to “junk TV” and video games, I spent much of my time outside, from the New Jersey dog days of August to the snowpiles of January. Our family’s backyard ran contiguously with that of two other families, giving us a long, slightly sloping rectangle that served as a field for home run derby, football, water balloon and snowball fights. I couldn’t number the hours I spent out there.
Then, eventually, a fence went up around the yard next door. The neighborhood kids were crushed — but a new family had moved in, with a dog. Eventually our family put up a fence too. No more Crocodile Mile, no more freeze tag.
You could say this was my first experience of development, felt as viscerally as any sudden change to a child’s world.
Often, those protesting the seemingly inexorable tide of development are treated like that kind of child — naive and foolish in the face of progress and growth. They are told to put away childish things.
As a journalist, I’ve covered these stories for a decade. I was once told by a planning official that our reporting amounted to a “jihad against development.” I don’t think it was quite that severe, but we certainly tried to give voice to those who didn’t want to see another 40 acres of oaks and pines felled for the next mixed-use development.
Of course, like many people in the Cape Fear region, I have to own some hypocrisy in any criticism I have of development. After all, I’ve moved here, twice, a Yankee carpetbagger with no historical ties to the region. I now live in one of the apartment complexes I covered years ago, when it was in its planning and approval phase. (Life has a curious sense of humor.)
Of late, as I’ve written elsewhere, we’ve seen local officials from both parties be more sensitive to the trade-offs of all that growth. Some have suggested it's too late, especially for Wilmington proper. There’s certainly less land left to save inside the city limits than there is elsewhere in New Hanover County or for our neighbors in Brunswick and Pender counties.
Reasonable people understand we cannot blow the bridges and dig a moat around the Cape Fear region. Property rights exist, retirees like the beach, new businesses attract people.
Some developments have a legal right to proceed, at least under the state’s current property laws; local leaders who vote against a project without a solid legal underpinning are liable to lose in court. Some developers actually take the time to think about how they manage greenspace, and how the homes they're building fit into the area. There’s also a profound need for affordable housing – and that’s, at least in large part, a supply and demand issue. And, speaking of retirees, if we don’t have new generations of people coming here, and the existing population ‘ages out’ — to put it delicately — then what? A population collapse would have devastating impacts on our schools, our hospitality industry, and more.
But, at the same time, there’s a growing sense that, even if you’re in favor of development, we’re facing a situation where we destroy some of the reasons people are moving here in the first place. (To that end, the market might regulate itself, but a lot of people are likely to be unhappy with the process.) I’ll say, I’m glad that it’s no longer seen as childish — or extremist — to question the unchecked, unmanaged growth of the region.
Unlike Kirby, I don’t have deep family roots here. But I can see why, for those who do, it would matter what happens to the land they’ve known long before it was subdivided and parceled, clear-cut and developed.