Fred First, the dean of Floyd County bloggers, raised the inevitable question over the weekend: Are we, as bloggers, leading the county down the path of doom by promoting the lifestyle here?
Sit in a local restaurant on any weekend day and most of the tables will be filled with visitors pouring over real estate brochures, looking for their patch of heaven here in paradise.
Take a walk along any county road and you most likely will find those ominous yellow surveying stakes carving up yet another farm to become housing lots. Head up or down U.S. 221 or Virginia Route 8 and the lights of new homes erected along the tops of ridge lines spoil what was once a pristine view. A Roanoke developer is planning a gated community of 39 25-acre lots in the north part of the county near Bent Mountain.
Is Floyd headed down the one-way road of over-construction, over-population and over-saturation?
Probably. Not so much a question of if but when and how long. More and more city residents seek refuge from the stresses of urban life, thinking they can find it in more bucolic places like Floyd but the influx of city dwellers brings with it the threat of just the kind of life they flee here to avoid.
City residents quickly find life in the country has its shortcomings. It starts with comments like “wouldn’t it be nice if…†Each wants to bring a piece of city life with them. Pretty soon the landscape is dotted with strip malls, Starbucks, chain drug stores and the neon of fast-food franchises. Those who can’t change things fast enough often leave. Studies show 60 percent of city dwellers who seek refuge in the county return to the urban life within five years.
But the threat lies not just with those who move into the county but also from those who have lived here all their lives and run our county government. They see salvation not in preservation but in industrial parks and smokestacks and roads clogged with 18-wheelers hauling the products of an industry they hope will call Floyd home.
That short-sighted view has given us a cavernous shell of a building on Christiansburg Pike, a monstrosity built on spec by a Tidewater developer with a spotty track record. If the building is not fully leased in a few years, the county – and the taxpayers – have to buy it. Potential leases? Not a nibble.
Floyd’s residents stand at a crossroads and they must make a decision soon on which path to take. Either path is risky if residents and government are not willing to make hard decisions and pledge to work together to keep the magic that has drawn so many of us to the county.
But we who promote life in the county must also make sure we tell the whole story. Along with the pretty pictures and pretty prose about an idyllic life in the country, we need to talk about brutal winters, unresponsive county governments, septics that back up, wells that run dry, provincial attitudes and, yes, Ladybugs on the walls and floors.
If we don’t, we only help assure the road to Floyd’s future is rutted and impassable.
I want that car…lust for another project I have no time to finish.
I live at the other end of the country, in the Sierra Nevadas, where we are facing very similar issues. It is not if, or when, but a reality, that others have found our paradise, and priced it out of our reach. My county has one of the best General Plans in the country, as far as protecting large areas of open space in the Sierra Valley, and 80% of the land is national forest, which leaves the remaining chunks available to become gemstone quality in the eyes of potential buyers. Now, jobs are going unfilled because the salaries offered will not cover the housing costs, and school enrollment has been steadily dwindling as families move on, forcing partial closures. The median age in the last census rose to 56, while it dropped in the urban areas of California.
I doubt that my sad story will give you many tools to keep growth from coming your way, but there are some ways to creatively manage it, such as ensuring an involvement in your communities at an early stage from such organizations as Habitat for Humanity. Co-housing is another way for people to live in close proximity while sharing larger amounts of open space and preserving a neighborhood feeling. This can help preserve economic diversity, instead of turning your region into a rich man’s paradise… did you know that something similar has been happening on the coasts of Scotland and Ireland for the past five years? People want to live in beautiful places, then want all the “things” they had before, not realizing how ugly those developments will make the place.
I actually stumbled on your blog, and was so impressed with the photography that I kept on reading, and got caught up in this topic. I love the images.