Cary To Enforce …Uniqueness?

Back when we lived in Garner our neighbor, mayor Don Rohrbaugh, tapped me to sit on Garner’s land-use rewrite committee. Over the ensuing months I learned more than my fair share about zoning rules and planning. While educational, the whole process made me question the value of zoning and appearance laws. How does one even measure their success?

Raleigh’s neighbor Cary is known for strict appearance rules. The stores that populate Cary’s strip malls all must look the same. The many neighborhood homeowners’ associations mindlessly dictate mailbox dimensions. Even a shiny diner can put the city into a snit. With this in mind, I found Cary’s latest push to be highly amusing. Cary has finally decided that more of the same isn’t necessarily good. While most people can see the wisdom in that, the way Cary is going about it is what I find amusing: they’re going making more rules! Town planners are actually drawing up anti-monotony rules.

I’ve got two questions about this whole process. Number one, did it ever occur to Cary’s leaders that maybe the reason the whole city (er, I mean town, though this “town” happens to be the third largest in the state) looks the same is because of its stuffy planning rules? Might a better approach to be … oh, I don’t know … maybe to get rid of some rules, rather than create ones that contradict the previous ones?

Number two, are there really people in Cary who are just now figuring this out? Cary’s been this way for years and a lot of Caryites seem to like it this way. If you don’t want a cookie-cutter house complete with an approved mailbox, why in the world did you move to Cary? What did you expect?

Now there are some cool neighborhoods in Cary where houses don’t all look the same. Its the newer neighborhoods that give it a bad name: large subdivisions with each house looking the next in a cul-de-sac hell. Its going to take more than more silly rules to fix that.