There is a pretty significant story on the Rhino Times website about an initiative Skip Alston is pursuing.
The bottom line is that our esteemed local leaders are panicking over the prospect that we are going to have inadequate housing to offer the thousands of people who are ostensibly going to be working at Toyota and JetZero and other places. The projection is that we need 97,000 new housing “units” to meet the demand that will occur five years from now.
What does this mean? Alston wants to make it easier to build housing in the unincorporated parts of the county.
He also wants towns and cities within the county to tweak permitting and planning processes. It is unclear that he can force this upon them; but there is an extraordinary zeal in the political class to increase the density of housing, and change the character of the places where people live and make their homes.
As we saw with the Summerfield fiasco in Raleigh, they are taking the position that we cannot have places that are a refuge from Greensboro’s urban mess.
Texas and Florida offer refuge from the oppressive government policies of the Greensboro City Council and the Guilford County Komisars.
There are other refuges also, Fred, in the region. South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama …
It would be unfortunate if people felt they had to leave the area because of bad local government. But based on the current trajectory, property taxes alone could become prohibitive for many people.