letterstotheeditor
‘Suburban sprawl,’ with heavy traffic, must be fought
As a ninth generation Knox County resident and a third generation Farragut resident, this community is near and dear to my heart. As such, the paid advertisement penned by Steve Williams on page 4A, July 1 issue, greatly upset me, as did the responses on 4A, July 8 issue.
First off, the attacks on the character of our Mayor (Ron Williams) and Vice Mayor (Louise Povlin) are completely unwarranted. It is important to remember that they are serving the community that they live in for free and have vested interests to ensure that the best practices are put into place.
Furthermore, Steve Williams’ comment that Farragut’s “neighborhoods and families were to be protected from claustrophobic urban sprawl” alarmed me. The biggest problem we face today is not urban sprawl, but suburban. The urban planner Andres Duany points out that the type of suburban sprawl that we now see in Farragut “doesn’t look like a place, it doesn’t act like a place, and, perhaps most significant, it doesn’t feel like a place.”
Farragut has very little undeveloped land left, and unless we use it wisely we will soon lose the opportunity to become a place worth caring about, instead of just a bedroom community.
We will soon be facing the nightmare traffic conditions of Cedar Bluff and Bearden unless we push back against our current conceptions of what a neighborhood should be.
I hope that we rally around our elected leaders and the FMPC to encourage them in their efforts to create a sustainable urban core, a town center, that will allow Farragut to continue to grow into the home it can be.
Jack Coker,
Farragut
