Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 2, 1993 TAG: 9305030024
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Jeff DeBell Staff Writer
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
\ IF you pay even the slightest attention to economic matters in the Roanoke Valley, you've heard the C-word.
C for Charlotte, as in Charlotte, N.C.
The city Roanokers love to love, and love to hate.
Admirers of the busy metropolis regard it as the city that Roanoke could have become if only it had built a bigger airport, elected more imaginative leaders, da da, da da, da da, da da . . .
To others, Charlotte exemplifies everything that's wrong with rapid urban growth. Pointing to problems like crime and traffic congestion in North Carolina's largest city, these municipal Jeremiahs warn darkly against allowing Roanoke to turn into "another Charlotte."
Fact is, the Roanoke-Charlotte comparison doesn't work very well. It's a matter of geography. Charlotte is in the North Carolina Piedmont, a relatively flat area where there is room to expand.
The Roanoke Valley, on the other hand, is . . . well, it's a valley. It's belted by mountains and their foothills, and it's replete with topographical ups and downs. The upshot is that runaway growth probably never will be a problem in the valley.
"People talk about Roanoke being another Charlotte," said Phillip Sparks, an economic development administrator with the city. "Roanoke's never going to be another Charlotte. We simply do not have enough developable land."
The executive director of the Roanoke Valley Economic Development Partnership agrees.
"The mountains make terrain rougher," Beth Doughty said. "That translates into less land that's available for development, and more costly development."
To say the valley can't be another Charlotte (in the positive sense) is not to say it can't prosper. There is developable land, despite the hilly terrain, and Sparks, Doughty and others are working night and day to recruit companies to use it.
Aside from that, the topsy-turvy topography presents intriguing possibilities in its own right. While it may limit industrial growth, it has the offsetting virtue of natural beauty. When the mountain scenery is coupled with the valley's other amenities - accessibility, modest size and relative freedom from the worst curses of the urban centers - the result can be an appealing blend.
It can appeal to retirees and to people who want to build weekend retreats or second homes.
It can appeal to workers who are able to live wherever they want because of the revolution in communications technology. Thanks to computers, the modem and the fax machine, they don't have to live where the home office is. They can opt instead for places where the "quality of life" index is higher.
Scenery attracts tourists, too, of course, and there are those who believe the Roanoke Valley has definite possibilities in that department.
"Unfortunately, the folks down in North Carolina, Asheville especially, have done a much better job of selling that," Sparks said. "I'm from that area, and I know their leaves aren't any prettier than ours."
"The Roanoke Valley is missing a real prime opportunity," said Jim Woltz, a Roanoke-based real estate dealer. "Industrial development is fine, but [valley economic development officials] ought to be concentrating just as much on the tourist trade or the retirement trade. There's no reason Roanoke can't be everything Asheville is."
Actually, Asheville is considerably more than a tourist destination. North Carolina's famed mountain city has extensive retirement and second-home communities. It's a regional medical and trade center. There are three colleges or universities. There is extensive arts and crafts activity; Asheville is headquarters of the highly regarded Southern Highland Handicraft Guild. And about 20 percent of the area's jobs are in manufacturing, according to the Asheville Chamber of Commerce.
"The diversity has helped [Asheville] through the ups and downs of the economy," said Delos Monteith, community development specialist for the Center for Improving Mountain Living at nearby Western Carolina University. Tourism "certainly can aid an area," he said, "but it's not the salvation of an area."
That isn't stopping mountain cities in the region from cultivating the traveler. Hotel room taxes in 1992 put more than $2 million into the treasury of Chattanooga, Tenn., which is spending millions to redevelop a 20-mile stretch of waterfront along the Tennessee River as a tourist attraction.
A huge freshwater aquarium, already completed, has drawn more than 1.3 million visitors since opening in May 1992. Other planned attractions include a children's museum, a water park and a greenway.
Chattanooga became one of the south's premier industrial cities after the Civil War and grew rapidly in the 1930s after the Tennessee Valley Authority was established. But, like cities everywhere, it has seen manufacturing decline as a part of its economy in recent years.
"Everybody's going after tourism," said Sue Knapp of Partnership for Economic Progress, Chattanooga's agency for economic development.
Heather Brewster of the Knoxville, Tenn., Chamber of Commerce said 1989-90 travel spending reached $377 million in the East Tennessee Development District. The 16-county district encompasses not only Knoxville, known as the gateway to Great Smoky Mountain National Park, but the nearby tourist centers of Gatlinburg and Sevier County. Travel-related sales tax receipts exceeded $71 million for the Knoxville metropolitan statistical area in 1992, Brewster said.
Among the potential long-range benefits of tourism is an ability to help attract retirees and second-home owners. According to Denise Snodgrass of the Center for Creative Retirement at the University of North Carolina-Asheville, many of that area's retirees are former tourists who came back to settle because they liked what they had seen as visitors.
What they had seen was a city of manageable size (1990 census: 61,607) with manageable problems, a moderate climate, cultural and recreational amenities - and attractive mountain scenery.
According to studies by the Center for Creative Retirement, the natural setting often is the primary attraction to Asheville's immigrant retirees. In many cases, it has induced them to move from previous retirement homes in Florida or elsewhere.
Communities can merely accommodate retirees or, like Asheville, they can cultivate them. What they won't be able to do is ignore them, especially when the so-called "baby boomers" reach retirement age and cause a surge in the over-65 portion of the population.
"2010 is generally given as the year they will `age out,' " Snodgrass said. "We're coming up on a time bomb."
Many boomers are in the 45-54 age group. Often, said Tom Black of the Urban Land Institute in Washington, they are the ones who have been freed by communications technology to "flee the chaos of metro life" and take up at least part-time residence in places that offer scenic beauty and other amenities.
Black said the Roanoke Valley would be a theoretical candidate to attract such people, though it "would be competing with thousands of such places."
A few smaller cities already have attracted clusters of such people, according to Forbes Magazine. One of them is Santa Fe, N.M., a city of 60,000 in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Besides meeting the requirements of being conveniently accessible by air and within reach of modern communications, it is known for sophisticated and extensive cultural amenities that include a respected opera company.
"The mountains per se are not enough," Black said. "You need to differentiate yourself."
There are likely to be more and more "location free" jobs in the future, according to urban affairs professor Paul Knox of Virginia Tech. Not just individuals, but whole firms may be able to flee problem-ridden urban centers.
"We're kind of here waiting," he said.
Knox cautioned that such benefits will not simply fall into the lap of this community or any other. The appropriate technological infrastructure will have to be in place - along with solid government, a stable investment atmosphere, a regional outlook and the ability to take "the long view" of "where Roanoke is in the world and how the world is changing."
Knox said he is thinking "long term" - sometime in the early part of the next century - and Roanoke, like other small cities, may continue to suffer economic knocks in the interim.
But "if all the ducks are in a row, Roanoke could capitalize," he said.
"Roanoke's competitive edge may be as a midsize city with advantages," among them its "fantastic natural scenery."
by CNB