Cary, North Carolina

Can we ever get away from the sprawl?

“Where are you from?” 

It should have been an extremely easy drive - one that I’d taken dozens if not hundreds of times before in my life. Just take the exit for Jordan Lake off of I-40, drive the backroad along the lake until you hit the pick-your-own-berries and pumpkin farm, take a left until you see the little barn with a colorful sun painted on the side, a few more backroads, then the final country road that would take me to my house. I didn’t need to use Google maps; I’m from here, goddamnit, and I knew where to go. 

Except it wasn’t my home, these weren’t my backroads, and I had no idea how to actually get to my childhood home. I didn’t recognize any of it. The berry patch was still there, and the barn was technically standing, though the sun had faded to unrecognition. But what should have been quiet, farmland backroads were now engulfed by cookie-cutter subdivisions packed with $900,000 single-family homes squished onto 0.2 acre lots. 

I shouldn’t have been so shocked by this rapid development. Cary, essentially since its inception, is simply a town in pursuit of suburban sprawl and economic development. Nothing more. 

In the 1950s, North Carolina ranked 47th out of 48th in the nation in per capita income.¹ Like much of the south, the state was still largely dependent on its dying antebellum crop, tobacco, and the textile and furniture industries were fading in the shadows of globalization. In 1959, a group of businesses, politicians, and universities opened Research Triangle Park, and the population of Cary has doubled every decade since that year. What really pushed Cary over the edge from a sleepy railroad town to a booming exurb was SAS Institute: at the time, an NIH-funded project with some grad school-level statisticians from NC State to better analyze soil samples; now, a $3.1 billion statistical analysis software company. They employ about 5,500 people in Cary alone. 

And now, Cary is the number one safest mid-sized city in America according to the FBI. Very cool. Cary has a beautifully maintained greenway system to give suburbanites the health benefits of living in a walkable city without the expectation to have to actually use them for everyday errands. Cary has a lovely outdoor amphitheater where tribute bands and Broadway stars with solo albums come to perform. Cary is perfectly fine. 

When people ask where I’m from, I never tell them Cary, for a few reasons: 

1. I was not born in Cary. My family moved there for my mom’s job when I was about 4 years old and I left when I was 18, with no intention of ever returning. Even though I care about my actual place of birth, Charlotte, significantly less, it still feels like a contributing factor as to why I feel disconnected from a place my parents chose to move to. 

2. Neither of my parents are from Cary. This is a common situation for most of my peers growing up. In fact, most of the kids I knew had transplant parents: Boston, New Jersey, Ahmedabad, Hanoi, Chicago, but rarely ever North Carolina for more than one generation. It was all new money, parents who got jobs in pharmaceuticals, biotech, or software in RTP. I can only remember a few Thanksgivings or Christmases spent at our own home; we always drove a day’s worth or more to visit family in West Virginia or New Orleans instead. 

3. I didn’t go to school in Cary. Instead, my brother and I attended public magnet schools mostly in downtown Raleigh. Magnet schools in North Carolina are the remnants of busing programs,² predicated on the idea that funding schools in low-income areas with arts, science, and advanced placement offerings would “attract”³ suburban kids to attend, resulting in more diverse classrooms taught by highly educated, motivated teachers. My brother and I would drive half an hour or more into the city for school, making friends with kids from all over the county, and disconnecting us even further from our suburb.

4. I don’t even know if our house was officially in Cary – it was technically “unincorporated Wake County” for a while. Thanks to North Carolina’s “almost surgical precision”⁴ efforts to carve out extremely specific voting districts rather frequently, my voting district changed based on what side of the road I was standing on. Our house was just rural enough to be at the perfect intersection of districts 2, 9, and 13. Through redistricting in 2010, 2017, and 2020, our home’s district changed every time. I think once we were technically in the fourth district. Beyond the districts themselves, nothing about Cary really seemed to distinguish it from the other amorphous suburbs around it: Apex, Morrisville, and even Holley Springs looked all pretty much the same. And the more the region sprawled, the less the boundaries of these towns seemed to matter. 

5. Cary fucking sucks.

I couldn’t remember the last time I visited Cary. When my parents got divorced in 2017, the house sold quickly after. Other than weddings and the occasional business trip to Raleigh, there was no need for me to visit area, let alone the suburban hellscape of Cary. 

I’m always quietly envious of people whose parents remained in their childhood homes post-empty nesting. My parents were alone in the house for a while, but I rarely came home for long periods of time. I opted instead to teach abroad for a few months over breaks, max out my credits over the summer to graduate college a year early, or intern and work part-time to pay rent in DC. I liked staying busy with exciting new trips and jobs and stories to tell my parents when I saw them. I never realized one could be jealous of being able to visit a place in time, too. 

I don’t quite know why this was the trip I decided to visit my childhood suburb after all of this time. Something about being in the van for a few months had me questioning my memories of places I’d considered home over the years. I had two physical houses I needed to visit: the one in the subdivision, and the one in the boonies. 

The Subdivision

Turning off of the main thoroughfare - now, a full-blown interstate - I entered the meticulously planned, extremely beige subdivision. Nearly every house, tree, water feature, bike path, and shrub in my old neighborhood looked the exact same as it had since the turn of the millennia. The main road curved slowly along, offering turnoffs to ever-smaller subcommunities within the subdivision; the differences between one turn-off and the next were imperceptible given that all of the Colonial homes were within a few shades of the same white. In true Levittown⁵ fashion, they were out-of-the-box and mass-produced. I turned down my street to find the house I grew up in, from 1995 to 2004. 

The lawn was perfectly mowed and the yard was closely maintained, albeit a bit bland without my mother’s obsessive green thumb. In fact, every lawn on the block still looked idyllic, almost preserved. I felt nostalgic in a mechanic, not romantic, way. I couldn’t find much emotion behind the memories as I reminisced about my running around with my friends in this very front yard.

To be fair, I don’t have much of an emotional attachment to this home as I do the following one. I’d still visit friends in the old neighborhood after we left, which was easy since we only moved about 10 minutes down the road. And since I didn’t go to school with the kids on the block, little by little, I stopped going entirely. Driving down that subdivision street felt more like visiting a museum of my childhood than it felt like coming home. 

The point of moving to a place like this was specifically to have a built-in community. It was segmented down to 20-family mini-units and missing the intermediary fixtures of a community like communal spaces or occupational relationships, but it hosted children around the same age as us and parents working the same kinds of jobs as mine. The kids had community through playing together after school and during summer breaks, with older siblings being asked to babysit or watch over a small gaggle of children at a time. The parents had community through getting wine wasted and playing bunco. (Have our methods of making new friends in adulthood really not evolved from “get drunk, play game”?) 

It all felt so boring to me. The perfect grass, the colonial-style three-bedroom, two-point-five bathroom layouts, and just enough of a yard for a medium-sized dog. A subdivision within a subdivision carefully crafted to be a safe enclave for a few nuclear families. I drove slowly up the street, rounded the cul-de-sac, and back down, almost begging to find an imperfection somewhere. 

But my spiral of judgment stopped short when I recognized two of the neighborhood parents walking toward me. I stopped to say hello and we chatted about the neighborhood. I asked them how their sons, who were both within two years of my age, were doing. Both lived nearby, though in different towns, with their respective wives and babies.

I watched as they beamed with joy telling me about their grandkids and how happy they were to be close enough to see them all frequently. And they were in the same house with the same driveway where I broke my wrist on rollerskates with their son nearly two decades ago. Their home would forever be a refuge for their children and their children’s children.

I saw this place as uneventful and stagnant; a place I never wanted to end up. But in that moment of seeing the closeness of this family facilitated the stability of a decades-old singular family home on an unchanged street with unchanged neighbors, I coveted every element of it.

This neighborhood certainly served its purpose to create and maintain a community. I felt jealous that this iteration of interconnectedness worked very well, forever, for some people. It just wasn’t the version of community that I was looking for. I told them to tell the family I said hi and drove off to my second destination. 

The Boonies

The real value of the second house was in its land: two undeveloped acres that close to amenities was a dream. But it was its proximity to the sprawl that would put me on the wrong backroad, unable to find the house without Google maps. Absolutely embarrassing. 

I grew anxious as I neared the house in the boonies when I realized that nearly all of the land leading up to the house was sold and developed already. There wasn’t much of a difference between these new subdivisions and the one I just visited except that these had about two bedrooms, a thousand square feet, and $300,000 in current value on the old ones. No difference on the lot size though: these new houses are still slotted tightly in on 0.2 acres like little bricks in a wall.

The one structure that threw me off the most was a brand new high school that opened sometime since the house sold. It felt like a new public school must pop up somewhere in the county once a year to keep up with the population growth. Wake County is currently proposing to add three new schools next year alone. Hundreds, if not thousands, of kids get shuffled around this ballooning school district every few years. All of that shuffling can lead a kid to internalize a transient feeling that new people can constantly come into our lives and be redistricted away just as quickly. How can we expect any community to be made when we’re pushing to continually grow in search of spiralingly large economic goals? 

It’s odd that so many of us want to move somewhere that’s been designated as “growing.” Of course, people want the values of their homes to increase. But it seems to imply that we’re expecting and attracted to the idea of a place getting better in some distant future. We want to put roots down in cities and then ask, “but it’ll get better, right?” 

I pulled just past my old house and idled across the street. I was immediately relieved to see the house perfectly as-is and sat quietly for a moment. I’d never said goodbye to this house. I didn’t know that one random Christmas break would be the last time I felt like I really had a home. Maybe it’s sentiment, maybe it’s masochism, but I needed to see this house one more time to make peace with the death of my old concept of home. 

At that moment, a man in his 40s walked outside to check the mail. I could immediately sense that he wasn’t actually checking the mail: he was trying to figure out who the fuck was creepily idling just across the street, starting at his house. He walked away, and then back out again, and I knew I had to say something.

“Hi! Um, sorry about this! I just used to live here and I just sort of, uh, wanted to see it. I guess.” I didn’t really have a good reason to be there, actually. I just wanted to look at this house felt like a fake excuse to stalk someone. I expected him to just sort of nod and go back, allowing me to drive away.

Instead, he said “no kidding! Do you want to come inside?” 

Robert Frost once said: "Home is the place that, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." I can think of a few places like that. This house was not one of them. 

I couldn’t believe the timing that would find me here, at this house I hadn’t visited in five years when this man and his whole beautiful family would be home. I shook his hand and formally introduced myself. 

He lead me down my old driveway and through the gate to the backyard as we chatted about the house and our families. All of my mother’s gardening was still somehow intact: the towering blue hydrangeas, the rosemary bush, the red Japanese maple. “I’m surprised you’ve kept all of this up,” I told him.

“Honestly? It’s because your mom did just a beautiful job; all we do is maintain it.” 

We kept talking and his wife joined us outside. “I have to be honest with y’all, I was half expecting this house to be totally gone when I got here. These developments are just insane.”

“We’ve had a few offers, but we’ll never take them. You could never find a house with this much space in the whole county again.” They told me about moving to this house for his job in healthcare and were expecting a little bit more of a rural lifestyle. “I don’t care if it’s the last two acres in the county, we’re keeping it.” 

I told them about growing up here: how we took sophomore year prom pictures on the deck stairs; how the boulder in the yard actually has a name and its Stella; how the room above the detached garage never got finished because our dad refused to hire somebody to work on it, insisting he’d do it himself. 

We talked about the complications of getting their kids into the right public schools. “I mean, I know they’re all good schools, but it’s a total mess. Do you know what school they’re getting moved to next year, hon?”

The wife thought for a moment and responded with the name of a new elementary school. “I guess it’s supposed to be close to the house, but their friends are going somewhere else, it’s just all over the place.” 

Of course, they were part of why schools were all over the place. No economic development plan can sustain without periods of slow calibration. Development needs time to breathe and assess before barreling down the road, full-speed. At this rate, their kids will just have to shuffle to another school again, and they can look to the new batch of transplants and be mad at them instead. 

I met their two sons, who were two or three years younger than my brother and me when we first moved in 17 years ago. The interior of the house was equally frozen in time with the exception of an upgraded kitchen and grey paint over my mom’s previously bright green walls. Both were good design decisions. 

The kids proudly showed every room off as if they were convincing me to buy it: we love having two sinks in the bathroom because this one is his and this one is mine! I showed them how we used to open the window and crawl onto the roof of the house, which their mother did not like. One of them asked why there were so many empty lighters in the crawl spaces behind the closets. I told him not to worry about it. 

As we wrapped up our tour, the parents told me over and over again how lucky they felt to have found this house at the right price and time. Since everything happened so quickly, my parents weren’t exactly in a rush to see how much they could hold out and make money off of the sale; they wanted out, and that’s why I never saw it again. That’s also why this couple could afford it in the first place. Seeing another family build a life together in this home secured every loose end I could have imagined. 

“If you ever do decide to sell this house,” I mentioned on the way out, “I would just love it if you sent me an email about it. Not saying that I’d buy it, but I’d like the option to, if that’s okay.” 

They both smiled, “of course that’s okay. Here, let me get a piece of paper for you to write your information down.” 

The wife pulled a small notepad from the top drawer of the built-in desk that had been there since we moved in. As I wrote down my name and email, I noticed the header: it was my mother’s name, with her first married name and her old company’s letterhead. 

I don’t think you can ever truly go home again. Not because a structure is gone, but because the time, the place, and the people who made it home have been rearranged, or simply ended. Home is a lot of things and a house is not a requirement for that definition. 

Cary is a place where I lived until I was old enough to choose a place to live. It’s not that it used to be cool and now it’s lame or that it used to have culture and now it’s bland: it’s always been just fine. It will continue to sprawl and absorb farmland for interchangeable pockets of 20-family communities who cycle in and out until one day, in a not-so-far-off distance, there’s no land left. And the state that couldn’t survive without agriculture will effectively drive out the families that once tended to the land in exchange for an Apple campus.⁶

1.  https://www.rtp.org/history/

2. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/supreme-court-declares-desegregation-busing-constitutional-swann-v-charlotte-mecklenburg

3. Like a magnet attracts. Do you get it?

4.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/us/politics/voter-id-laws-supreme-court-north-carolina.html

5. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/apr/28/levittown-america-prototypical-suburb-history-cities

6.  https://www.carolinajournal.com/n-c-s-apple-deal-named-worst-of-2021/