Is Transylvania the next Tampa?

Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

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Not anytime soon. But Steve Otto of the Tampa Tribune writes about Brevard and compares development pressures there to what’s happening in Florida:

Stella Trapp is the editor and publisher of the Transylvania Times. She closes the door to her office and then asks me if I am allergic to cats. I notice that one is spread out across her desk fiddling with what appears to be a newspaper page layout.
Trapp’s paper is doing fine. She doesn’t mess with the Internet, and e-mail is a foreign word in her vocabulary. She looks like she could be your grandmother but has a well-earned reputation for her defense of Brevard and sensitive environmental issues, from protecting the French Broad River to urban sprawl.
“You don’t want to ruin the very things that make this such a special place,” she says.
Battle of Brevard
That is the constant battle of Brevard as the big-box stores open establishments on one of the arteries leading into town. You don’t have to squint hard to imagine that road evolving into another Dale Mabry Highway or Fowler Avenue.
I mentioned to Trapp that only that morning I had gone online to see what was happening back in Tampa and that the familiar stories of developers pressuring commissioners and others to relax standards never seemed to stop.
She asked me if I had seen a giant condo-retail project going up across from the college. It had been a long and painful battle, with one side claiming this would be an economic stimulus while others wondered if the project would be a blow to the character and small-town characteristics so important to the community.
The details are different. No one is ever going to confuse this small mountain college town with the sprawling urban and suburban complex of towns and cities that is the Tampa Bay region.
But the issues are the same and forces at work have a striking familiarity as we struggle to determine what is progress and why it is people choose to come to an area to live in the first place.