A Personal Preference

View along the Seven Oaks Preserve Trail (courtesy Carolina Threads Trail website)

Wouldn't it be nice to have a Carolina Threads Trail meandering alongside Duharts Creek, a "Lineberger Heritage Pathway" leading as a safe pedestrian and cycling pathway around Franklin Square and Gaston Mall, connected at some point to both a path to Goat Island in Cramerton and to a trail that circles and transverses any future development on the northside of Interstate 85?  A trail with nature stops along the way, curated by friends at Schiele Museum perhaps, showing the nesting spot here, the floodland flora there.  Signs along the trail with a history of the area, and the Lineberger Family, and such.  It would seem a silly far-fetched notion except I've seen good examples of such close-by. Take the Seven Oaks Preserve Trail that the Stowe family helped make happen around their property near the Botanical Garden. 

A portion of South Charlotte's urban greenway trail system

And located a mere thirty minutes away in Charlotte is a great example of an urban greenway, using creek floodplains as a buffer between established neighborhoods and heavy commerce and interstate traffic. The Lower McAlpine Creek, McMullen Creek, and Four Mile Creek Greenway system is 5.8 miles of paved, gravel, and boardwalk greenways.  A walk across the Four Mile Creek boardwalk over the wetlands there was a revelation - one I encourage you to discover sometime.

A misty walk along Four Mile Creek with my son

You can have both commercial growth and responsible environmental stewardship, amazingly.  You can have convenience for travelers visiting and shopping in our city and safety and security for residents living here.  Yes, you do have to make trade-offs.  And you have to know when not to trade-off.  Perhaps a forty-year delay in developing something should tell us something.  Lots of folks over time said, "not here, please."  I worry that our City leaders have unilaterally decided they are going to develop this parcel and the northside of Interstate 85 so much that there won't be any aesthetics around that southside parcel to call a greenway.  It's easier to make a dump out of an easement.  No matter what the delay and containment systems upstream, water finds the weak points and will flood, when released, into the low spots - around this southside parcel, in my and my neighbors' backyards, and in spots downstream.

The Gaston Gazette lauded the defeat of neighbors' concerns in the Glenwood rezoning last year with editorial words of self-righteous piety over the wisdom of unfettered development:

Readers of this page know well our strong support of property rights and our belief that owners, not government, should determine how property is used. Restrictions on property use are best entered into voluntarily by individual owners forming their own associations and making decisions freely among themselves.

We are not all landed gentry, discussing the gentlemanly transitions of our distant boundaries.  There are many of us, with differing visions for what we want our lands to be.  And our neighbor counties show us there may well be many more of us soon, most unfamiliar with local traditions and families and ways, increasingly more tight together. Which is why we need strong and predictable City and County planning processes, with active and ongoing input from a host of our citizens. Most growing places find it helpful to unify those decisions in one City-County board, not parse them.  But however it is done, every city needs to plan for both areas of commerce and places of residential calm.

Every home needs a kitchen and a restroom.  Most folks think it unwise to put the toilet next to the fridge. The business of one location infringes on the business of the other.  Why should City residents not expect some deference in planning decisions to their concerns over the location of commerce?  I worry that the zeal to maximize the profit from every inch of real estate for owners and developers will blind the City to the fact that it does have a say in how we grow. Just this week word comes that the NC Senate has voted to end the 90-year old protest petition process that insured that neighbors concerns got special attention from local boards before rezoning decisions were made.  From our Democratic Mayor to our Republican legislators, it seems many of our politicians "are all developers now."

The Greater Gaston Development Corporation has set as a goal for 2015 a review of local UDOs to remove as many needless regulations, or regulators, as possible.  Yet I know the chair of that group had to value the government guidance that led to preservation tax credits for the Loray Mill renovation.  Would that a few developers remember that neighbors and average citizens are stakeholders in building a community, too.  The land, after all, isn't going anywhere.  Perhaps, by recovering slower in our county than our other Charlotte neighbors, we have been given an opportunity to develop smarter than our neighboring counties. As long as we look from the highways like a place with a mash of chain stores and pursuing the quick dollar, we will be just that, and invest nothing to turn our drive-thru guests into move-here investors and community stakeholders.  

It was strange, when I moved back in 2012 after a thirty-year absence from the day-to-day here, how many people told me the place to go for a night on the town in Gastonia was... Belmont. Heck, they've even moved the Visitors Center for the County to Belmont - and that might be the one smart thing to put on the Franklin Corridor.

For I'd put the Visitors Center where you have the most traffic, near it at least.  Maybe I'd make a small version of it with restrooms nestled in the gravel parking lot of the Lineberger Heritage Trail. You know, that greenway whose parking lot you turn into across from the Lowe's entrance? Yes, the one in the woods right where they were gonna put another gosh-awful big box store and mow down the trees.  It's a really pretty contrast to all that bustle.  So glad they kept it that way.  It's my little piece of sanity in that drive sometimes, you know....

Sorry.  Dreaming out loud there at the end.  My personal preference for the site.  Seeing those woods was my first memory of Gastonia after a long car ride up US 74 in 1969.