I don’t think the current Town Council would care as much -if they’re not openly okay with that.
The town hired consultants who revealed that Chapel Hill needs to build nearly 450 new housing units per year to keep up with demand -and that was back in 2020. Combine this with how we have the lowest housing-to-job ratio in the region where nearly 90% of Chapel Hill workers have to commute in from elsewhere, and I think it basically means Chapel Hill knows they can’t handle the current demand for housing, and needs to be shielded from attention to do so as they build up additional supplies. Not being named in the MSA would indirectly help to achieve that, I think (in the same way lazy reporters and prospectors read that data and forget Raleigh and Durham “should” belong together).
While we’re on it, Chapel Hill is also looking into long-term solutions for that in policy and in future developments, but that doesn’t change the fact that Chapel Hill needs a lot of time and effort to have the bandwidth for new developments, again. Still, this makes us much better than Palo Alto, CA, where we’re compared against but their leaders have seemingly denied the existence of their housing crisis and have been doubling down on their opposition to affordable housing and other market dynamics problems not unlike Chapel Hill’s.
Speaking of MSA definitions, it seems like the OMB acknowledged the three comments they received last year on re-combining the Triangle into a single statistical area when they considered process changes, but that didn’t happen (and we’re keeping the 2003 rules that split our MSAs apart) because we still didn’t meet the criteria to merge back together. What are your thoughts on that, @John?