As it happens, Bill Fulton, to whose article I linked yesterday, was in North Carolina last month at a policy wonk gathering in Greensboro, sponsored by the Institute for Emerging Issues at N.C. State, where the topic was dealing with strains on the state’s infrastructure due to growth.
In a piece he wrote afterward about North Carolina, “Is More Growth Bad For The ‘Good Growth’ State?” Fulton says, “The wonks are gingerly beginning to address the question of whether growth should be managed.”
Fulton also spoke at the conference, as an out-of-state expert, saying North Carolina and other parts of the Southeast have the nation’s most wasteful and costly patterns of development.
In his article, he writes, “As a Californian, I was struck by how similar the situation in North Carolina today is to what we in California experienced during the postwar boom.”
The biggest problem in North Carolina now, he suggests, is the growing divide between urban North Carolina and rural North Carolina.
Fulton is publisher of the California Planning & Development Report, whose web site says it’s the only independent publication in the nation covering planning and development issues in a single state.