Working up high

North Carolina's mountain counties take economic comfort in a housing boom, but manufacturing jobs are sorely missed

Out in Western North Carolina, Christmas tree season is about wrapped up. For weeks now, tree-lot owners and workers cut, bagged and shipped the hot-selling Fraser firs that are part of the landscape in many mountain counties. The firs are shipped all over the country, but they are, sad to say, one of few green spots in the high country's economic landscape.

Manufacturing, that's another story. Judging by layoffs and the shuttered plants that litter Western North Carolina's small towns, it's not much of a stretch to say that jobs are the region's main export. Light industry, a mainstay of recent decades, is running away. Textiles, furniture, assembly work...if a plant's output hasn't yet been transferred to China or Mexico, someone at corporate is working the calculator right now. The state, in response, offers incentives, training, development assistance -- but it's an uphill slog.

So in many ways it's good to see mountain counties building a second career as a second-home mecca.

Even tiny, remote Alleghany County, we're told in a recent report, is feeling the overflow from mountain-home booms in counties farther south, closer to Charlotte and Atlanta. Alleghany (population 10,900; county seat Sparta; located on the Virginia line near North Carolina's northwest corner) is eyeing proposals for about 500 new building lots. Subdivision proposals could bring more than 1,300 new houses. One project envisions up to 300 luxury homes "on the mountainside where evergreens grew just a year ago."

Good thing, because the county lost more than 60 percent of its manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2005.

All that homebuilding spurs the need for skilled workers such as plumbers, painters and electricians. And new residents, even seasonal ones, mean growth in the economy's service sector.

But are jobs in the building trades or in the services a better deal for year-round residents than manufacturing? They're an answer, but not the answer.

Construction-trade wages can be higher than factory work, but the hours are less certain. Plenty of people will take service jobs, but that work isn't high-wage anywhere, let alone in a county where median and household incomes are 80 percent of the national average.

Growth, if it doesn't get out of hand, is surely a good thing for counties fighting to keep their people. But remember those luxury homes on the mountainside? Pristine views that lure lowlanders can disappear quickly in zoning-free jurisdictions that allow nearly anything, anywhere. Steep slopes and rapid runoff pose special problems out west, with streams and rivers endangered by silt.

In many ways, development pressure on the mountain counties parallels the situation along North Carolina's coast and just inland, as detailed in an N&O series this summer. The boom in vacation homes offers the state a mixed picture -- for residents, more days on the beach or in cool mountain air; for the environment, potential trouble; for year-round residents, new taxes, new land values and new jobs that may or not be as rewarding as the ones that got away.

One factor, it's said, in the Democrats' Election Day resurgence was widespread unease about jobs. Heath Shuler, newly elected to Congress in Western North Carolina's 11th District, campaigned against free trade agreements, pointing to layoffs all around. That answer may be too pat, but livelihoods dependent on second homes are no vacation. Western North Carolina needs carefully crafted houses -- and an industrial renewal.