We are puzzled. Our little city suddenly has apartment buildings going up all over the damn place. All at the same time, after years of stasis. If this were Austin or Atlanta, say, this would make perfect sense. Charlotte or Charleston, sure. But Columbia is the Sunbelt city that never grew. We have no industry except for gubmint and every surrounding city has a better climate due to the meteorological phenomena known as mountains or ocean. We hit 100,000 people by the end of the '60s and topped out there. There's a largish college here, but as far as I know, there wasn't a post Gulf War baby boom, so it seems unlikely that there's a huge cohort of new students coming in.
One imagines it's just another result of a complete lack of planning, or perhaps the various stimulus packages of five-odd years ago took this long to get here. Speaking as somebody who rents, a glut of apartments might not be at all a bad thing for me personally, but unless somebody has a brilliant plan that they're keeping highly secret to bring the Research Triangle south, I imagine we're going to wind up looking pretty silly. One good thing is that the new buildings are a lot closer than many of the places students have stayed in the past, which would bring gas usage down, I guess. And I'm not doing much traveling anymore; maybe there are apartment buildings springing up in every part of the country as credit eases. It just looks funny right here, right now.
(And I'm totally not writing this to put off doing my taxes a little longer.)
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