Most small towns in rural Iowa are all pretty much the same. Town square, fading business district etc. So I remember how bizarre it was when I drove through Fairfield, Iowa last summer and saw all these restaurants selling Indian food. The reason: It’s home to the Maharishi University of Management, formerly Fairfield University. These are the transcendental meditation folks who used to own lots of property in eastern Watauga County and had built a meditation center there called Heavenly Mountain.
I thought about them this morning because of our story on what’s happened to the land. The TM connection is gone, and the property—all 6,000 acres—is going to be developed as a huge mountain resort with more than 1,000 homes.
It’s hard to get your arms—literally and figuratively—around how big 6,000 acres is. So here’s the deal. It’s a little more than 9 square miles. Picture a square with each side being three miles. It’s huge.
In much of the mountains, development and tourism are the top industries. And second and third homes for the wealthy are on some levels almost perfect for county governments because the homeowners pay a lot in taxes but don’t require much in the way of services such as schools. It’s why Dare and Currituck counties on the coast, for example, have some of the lowest tax rates in the state.
But you have to wonder about what the gating of the mountains means in the long run to our collective heritage and our sense of ownership in the wondrous resources North Carolina has to offer.
Your host is Ken Otterbourg, the managing editor at the Winston-Salem Journal. It's a forum to discuss the media, from
The Ginn Resort, Laurelmor, which is planned to be built near where I live is a terrible problem for Watauga County. You may be right that resorts need less services and provide more taxes but they also cause residents to work low paying jobs while dealing with rising costs for living. Many people who work at ASU campus already commute from far out in the county or even Tennessee and live in mobile homes. Soon, new homes will only be available for the wealthy, many who only live in them for part of the year. I wish our local government would stand up for the working class. I feel like our welfare is second to developers.
And on the front page February 28, right next to the article you reference, was an article about where not to put a landfill. Not next to those folks! The rich have land, and the rich have clout.
Good points, Beth. The disconnect between where people work and where they are forced to live because of costs is a growing concern in many resort areas, from Vail to the Outer Banks.
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