Road Construction Isn't Keeping Up With Housing Expansion - And Response

  • Thursday, January 23, 2025

I have lived in the Ooltewah area since 2015. In the last few years housing construction has been off the charts. What I am seeing is that traffic is climbing astronomically without any expansions to the roads.

Drive north on Highway 58 in the evening after people get off from work. Drive on Ooltewah-Georgetown Road to see new subdivisions along roads that have no shoulders.

Drivers are speeding, do not use signals, and often do not have lights on when it is raining.

I’m sure that the county is prepared to receive taxes from all the new residents and businesses. The traffic crush is coming quickly. God help us.

Ted Ladd

* * *

The issues cited are common in America’s suburbs and subdivisions. In my mind there are two major factors that contribute to these issues becoming problems. 

First, people’s expectations need to be tempered when choosing to buy homes that are away from more developed infrastructure, like roads with shoulders. Don’t expect the road to get widened soon, or just because a lot of houses have been built out there recently. One must match one’s driving habit to the road condition. Narrow roads require slower speeds and more care. Narrow roads with lots more cars require care and patience and a forgiving attitude. 

Second, no entity has the money to build the roads that this population explosion has brought. The county will not have the cash to pave wider roads prior to more houses being built, and will never recoup those costs. Add to that the requirement for property taxes to be spent on fire services, trash, sewer, police, schools, etc. and you see that sprawling single family building is an unsustainable practice. The strategy to build a road in advance of houses being built there is similar to Transit Oriented Development, but even if specific roads were chosen to be improved prior to subdivisions being bought and sold, that might seem kind of fishy for owner X’s road to get improved and then he gets to sell his ranch as a subdivision for more $$ than the property served by unimproved roads, right?

Governments in this state are not equipped with the tax tools that would allow roads and sewers, etc. to get built as demand happens, or even to charge more tax to the people whose houses cost more to service. Property taxes on a single family subdivision will never pay for the roads or sewer that serve it. Period. 

One way to get these roads built in time is to require that developers take on the responsibility for building roads as a condition of the privilege of building more houses that attract more people and more cars. Those costs get passed on to the residents as they purchase the houses. This conflicts with the “drive til you qualify” strategy of hurry-hurry-sell real estate that is so popular these days, and the houses that should be cheaper, because they are farther out, would become less affordable.

Shannon Mikus

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