The next Silicon Valley? NC’s booming regions are becoming overbuilt and overpriced.

The Triangle and the Charlotte region are the engines of North Carolina’s economy and they’re running fast.

The problem is no one is at the wheel.

Sure, chambers of commerce sell the virtues of their areas and regional councils advise local governments about how to accommodate growth. But these booming urban areas are without a broader authority equipped with the resources and power to steer regional growth in a balanced and sustainable direction.

Ryan Allen directs the Urban and Regional Planning program at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, a city where the Metropolitan Council guides growth across the Twin Cities region. “The kinds of challenges that accompany rapid growth – transportation congestion, rising prices, those sorts of challenges – are not things municipalities can tackle in a siloed fashion,” he said. “They need a cooperative approach.”

That approach is absent in North Carolina and unlikely to ever be put in place. Local governments don’t want to give up any of their control over land use. The state government is pouring out tax incentives to lure companies. And the Republican-led General Assembly is a fully owned subsidiary of corporate and development interests.

So, move over sprawl-strangled Austin, growth-choked Seattle and unaffordable Silicon Valley. We know the way to San Jose.

Last week in the Triangle offered an example of how growth is getting crazy. An investment group announced it would build a $1 billion bio-tech campus next to Research Triangle Park in Morrisville, a town already awash in high-paying tech and life science businesses. A few days later,a semiconductor manufacturer was reported to be eyeing the Triangle Innovation Point megasite in Chatham County to build what WRAL-Tv called “a project that could be worth as much as $30 billion and create as many as 10,000 jobs.”

This comes after a year in which the Triangle landed a new Apple campus that will bring 1,000 jobs at an average salary of $187,000 and two major life science companies announced plans to spend a total of $2.55 billion to build or expand manufacturing operations in the Triangle.

Charlotte’s growth in capital investment has not been as dramatic, but its increase in population made it the seventh fastest growing city in the nation between 2010 and 2020.

Wake County Commissioner Sig Hutchinson said the growth in the Triangle and North Carolina will keep surging. “It’s too expensive up North, it’s too hot down South, it’s burning up out West and everyone wants to live here,” he said.

But those already here may not be so enthused about the growth if it’s not better managed. As it is, land use planning is Balkanized between counties and municipalities who see only their own interests in padding their tax base.

A few U.S. cities have yielded some authority to regional governments, among them are Portland, San Diego and Twin Cities. But the process usually requires state legislation to create regional governing bodies and a local government’s willingness to give up a share of their tax revenue to fund the regional coordination.

The late Anthony Downs, a visionary economist and expert on “smart growth,” predicted the toll of rapid growth in his 1992 book “Stuck in Traffic” and his 2004 follow up “Still Stuck in Traffic.” He foresaw the need for regional growth control and what happens when local governments resist it.

“Adopting an effective strategy for regional growth management will require abandoning some politically sacred cows— particularly the untouchable sanctity of ‘local autonomy’ over land-use planning,” he wrote. ”But localities have no real power over traffic congestion, air pollution, overall open-space absorption, and shortages of affordable housing, which all occur regionally. In fact, leaving the solutions entirely to localities makes the problems worse.”

This story was originally published January 10, 2022 at 4:30 AM.