[Greater Spartanburg Projects & Developments]

I live there and will make one rebuttal, there are very few developments like this one in Spartanburg, much less Roebuck. Show me where you can buy a <$300,000 custom home in Spartanburg county (talking about Montgomery Lake which is a separate entity from the Gardens) that has a gate, lake, pavillion, pool, paved walking path and sidewalks. The failure so far hinges mostly on the developer. I am still optimistic that this will succeed once the current developer is gone.

This is an interesting article about what I see as an example of the failure of sprawl. The article does not discuss it that way, but I'm thinking about the big picture here.

The article is about Timm Creek, a new subdivision in Roebuck. For those unfamiliar with it, there are two sections: one is a large-lot "luxury" homes section, and the other is the less luxurious "Gardens" section. This suburban paradise has been developing since 2003, and for many years it was moving along just fine. I forgot that the neighborhood was supposed to be "mixed use" with retail and office space along 221. Anyway, you can get the more specific failures of these developers from the article if you're interested- and there are many.

I also didn't realize that the original owners of this development were tied into the Wild Wing Cafe too. There seems to be some shoddy deal making and bad money management going on. If you've been following the articles about their inability to pay their staff.

My interest in this piece is that I view this subdivision as a perfect case study on sprawl, and why it does not and will not work.

The subdivision- which looks like crap anyway because all of the houses look the basically same- is not selling its lots, and thus not being developed. The Herald-Journal paints the developer in a very bad light, which is fine. They chose, however, to ignore the economy. I view that issue as the main culprit here. The demand for uniform subdivided land and street after street of identical houses is falling off nationwide. There is absolutely nothing appealing about this subdivision that sets it apart from any other in Roebuck.

Except for the proximity to Dorman High School...

This neighborhood is "across the street" from the county's largest high school- but don't you dare try to walk to school kids, because its the most pedestrian unfriendly school in the history of school design. So much so that the National Safe Routes to School organization uses it as an example "worst in the nation" for school design. From the entrance of Timm Creek to the "senior campus" is about 1/2 mile walk with no pedestrian accommodations. To get to the "freshman academy" is 3/4 of a mile.

Even if the "mixed use" part of the development had been built, can any one guess what it would been? My money is a strip mall.

The worst part about it though, is that Spartanburg County's land development standards allow-- require-- things like this to happen. We have a large subdivision being built far, far away from any employment centers. We have a school that is so large you have to bus kids between its two campuses and the athletic fields. We can't walk or bike to anything, including nature (there are no public parks nearby, and incidentally the developer did not built the walking trails that they were supposed to). The one appealing feature of this development could be its proximity to the high school, except that you can probably drive to the nearest grocery store faster than you could drive to the main building on campus.

We need to require our county to develop more walkable neighborhoods, shopping centers, and mixed-use developments to avoid this horrible juxtaposition of land uses. There is no reason not to have a better organized development pattern. As a community we have to demand better things from OUR government. I hate to fall back on the Atlanta "scare tactic," but we're doing absolutely nothing to stop that from happening here in Spartanburg County.

So in summary, what we have here is the failure of a crappy subdivision, a crappy developer, and crappy land development standards in Spartanburg County. Hooray sprawl.

Herald Journal Article