What is Responsible Growth for Chesapeake?
Chesapeake is growing and developing at a rapid pace. Unlike many developing cities, Chesapeake has a valuable resource that many growing cities do not, and that resource is land. We have an obligation to plan and develop that land responsibly. We have a rare opportunity to plan our infrastructure in a smart sensible manner and prevent the many crippling issues that older existing cities experience. Ever try to find your way around Boston? There are no numerically organized street grids to clearly navigate the city. It is quite literally a maze of one way streets, dense traffic, and the occasionally rotary.
According to an article written by Joel Kotkin entitled “Houston Rising – Why the Next Great American Cities Aren’t What You Think” “America’s urban landscape is changing, but in ways not always predicted or much admired by our media, planners, and pundits.”
“There’s a whole industry led by the likes of Harvard’s Ed Glaeser, my occasional sparring partner Richard Florida and developer-funded groups like CEOs for Cities, who advocate for old-style, high-density cities, and insist that they represent the inevitable future.”
But the numbers tell a different story: the most rapid urban growth is occurring outside of the great, dense, highly developed and vastly expensive old American metropolises.” These highly densely populated developments models are outdated and from when the majority of the population did not have vehicles.
Buyers Want Bigger Yards
When buyers were polled in recent survey published by Wakefield Research as to whether they wanted a bigger house or a bigger yard, the answer was a bigger yard. “Larger yard space means extra “breathing room” from neighbors — something that 48 percent of millennials and 53 percent of non-millennials say is the most important exterior feature of a home, beating other outdoor elements such as siding, driveway style, exterior paint color and roofing finish.”
It is simple unnecessary to crowd rural areas of Chesapeake with high density over populated planned unit developments. We need to learn from the cities that are succeeding in their development and changing and developing with what the market wants like Houston and Charlotte.
“Finally, they will not become highly dense, apartment cities — as developers and planners insist they “should.” Instead the aspirational regions are likely to remain dominated by a suburbanized form characterized by car dependency, dispersion of job centers, and single-family homes.”
What Will Bring Jobs?