I wrote recently about accidentally driving into downtown Cary, North Carolina, on an evening when they had a Christmas market set up. It was very hard to park, but once we found a spot, it was lovely to walk around the bright, decorated old town.

We had dinner in downtown Cary too, which is why we were there in the first place. And while I knew Cary was a “real town,” I had never been there. I had simply assumed our restaurant, which we found on Yelp, was somewhere in the suburbs.

But I’m glad we ended up in the old town, because this is what we saw:

And this is part of what I wrote:

There isn’t really anywhere you could do this in the suburbs. Sure, you could claim a parking lot for a farmer’s market, which is where they usually go. But the feeling of wonder as you walk down the streets, traversing the whole little town (which always feels bigger when everything is decorated and lit up), seeing a familiar place in a different way? Seeing shops alive, churches and houses asleep, like temporarily inhabiting the pages of a children’s book?

The pattern of suburban development forecloses that magic. We’ve built most of our country in a way that renders impossible so many things we love.

Now, downtown Cary looks a lot like my own hometown of Flemington, New Jersey. Cary is a little bigger, but not by that much. Flemington has a population of about 5,000 people, and its city limits are only a little larger than its old street grid. The “Flemington area” is considerably larger—about 22,000 people live in the township that surrounds the town. So the overall area that people call “Flemington” is home to close to 30,000 people.

So if you took only the downtown of Cary, you might guess that the overall “Cary area,” extrapolating from the usual pattern with old towns that have newer suburban penumbras, was home to anywhere from say 20,000 to 30,000 people, roughly, with a few thousand in the actual town and the rest in the newer surrounding area.

And if you looked at the Census data over the decades, you’d think you were pretty close. In 1930, Cary’s population was 909. (For comparison, in that year Flemington had 2,729 people.) In 1980, Cary had 21,763. Even in 1990, it was about 44,000.

Today, its about 177,000.

Cary is “the seventh largest municipality in North Carolina, and the 148th largest in the United States.”

I don’t quite know what to make of that. It’s nice that the original town is still mostly intact, and still attracts crowds. But its such a tremendous shame that all of that growth—a doubling every 10-20 years for over half a century—took place outside of any sort of traditional urban pattern. Time and time again, we see this phenomenon where people live in, and builders build, suburban sprawl, but where the handful of surviving places built in the traditional development pattern cost more and draw more people.

At one time—any time before the 1970s, probably—the “old town” of Cary was Cary. Over the years, as the region grew, the new development simply neglected the existing center of the place, until it became this leftover appendage—at best, an entertainment center, not a pattern for the new growth where most people who live in Cary actually live.

This is much more typical of Cary than the photos above:

It’s an old farmhouse being moved away, to make room for a subdivision.

As in so many other growing regions, the debate seems to end up being between people who feel development threatens the old character and feel of the place, and want as little as possible, versus developers who just want to build and will follow the path of least resistance. And typically the path of least resistance is the disconnected patchwork of low-density development and strip malls, maybe with townhomes or apartments thrown in. But it doesn’t amount to an overall place, an overall fabric. Why is it that you just know you’re somewhere on a classic Main Street, but you don’t get that feeling out in modern suburbia?

Yet few people, and even few municipal governments, seem to take seriously the idea that we could build a lot more new stuff along the old pattern. Why? I keep asking this question. Why don’t more people demand that we build more of what we all love?

The failure to do so no doubt intensifies the idea that a place is “full,” and that development is inherently opposed to whatever it is that makes the place nice right now.

This is Durham, but it’s typical of the whole region’s newer development:

Yeah, when it’s this or nothing, nothing can sound pretty good. But it doesn’t have to be. The Triangle is one of the nation’s fastest growing metro areas. Imagine if it were collectively one of America’s finest urban environments. So much opportunity to turn growth into beauty.

Related Reading:

The Chester Houses

The Rest of Staunton

Inhabiting Old Ghosts

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