When Planning Feels Like Fantasy

The three easel pads at the front of Princeville's community center last month said everything about hope and nothing about reality. "5-Year Goals." "10-Year Vision." "20-Year Dreams." Mayor Bobbie Jones had set them up for the town's future planning session, black markers ready, but only twenty people showed up to fill them.

In a town of 1,200, those empty chairs told the real story.

I sat in the back watching residents trickle in on a humid July evening, many of them elders who've lived through Hurricane Fran in '96, Floyd in '99, Matthew in 2016. The woman next to me whispered that her daughter had moved to Charlotte after Matthew. "Said she couldn't watch us go through this again."

Twenty people in a room meant to hold a hundred. You could call it a planning meeting, but really we were taking attendance, counting who's left.

While Jones talked about federal grants and infrastructure projects, I kept thinking about the houses I'd driven past to get here. Six families have taken federal buyouts since Matthew. Their lots will be cleared and returned to floodplain. Twenty-two more homes are getting raised on concrete blocks with FEMA money. One house on Cypress Street already sits on stilts like a beach cottage, fifteen feet above where the living room used to be.

"We need to think about economic development," said a man in his sixties whose house flooded four times. "Maybe a farmers market, bring people in."

Others nodded politely, but I watched their faces. Everyone in that room knew the arithmetic: Princeville's population dropped from 2,300 to 1,500 after the last major floods. When FEMA offers you $80,000 to leave and you're looking at $40,000 to rebuild, the math isn't complicated.

The history makes it harder. This town was founded in 1865 as Freedom Hill by formerly enslaved people who settled in the Tar River floodplain because it was land they could claim. By 1885, they'd built a thriving community where Black residents could vote for their own mayor when Black people in nearby Tarboro couldn't vote at all.

You don't just walk away from that. Leaving means abandoning something that can't be rebuilt on higher ground.

Earlier this year, the Army Corps of Engineers told Princeville they were going back to the drawing board on the levee project the town has been waiting for since 1999. Not because the engineering was wrong. Because building it would flood Tarboro, the larger, whiter town across the river that sits safely on higher ground.

Princeville has been flooding for decades while waiting for protection. But the moment that protection threatens the town that never floods? Back to the drawing board.

A woman raised her hand to ask about the Princeville Floodprint project. It's a different kind of answer developed by NC State's Coastal Dynamics Design Lab—one that doesn't try to keep water out but works with it. Rain gardens at the elementary school. Wetland restoration on vacant lots where houses used to be. Community gardens on properties that flooded too many times to rebuild.

Nobody answered directly, but I saw people glance around the room, counting.

My grandmother's village in highland Guatemala planted corn at three different elevations—valley floor for good years, mid-slope for most years, ridge top for survival. No single harvest fed everyone, but the system as a whole did. Watching Princeville, I kept thinking about that distributed strategy. Some people leaving, some staying, some doing both.

I walked through downtown after the meeting in the thick August heat. The community center sits across from where the old business district used to be, before the floods. Now it's mostly empty lots and a few stubborn buildings. The Conservation Trust for North Carolina has been working with the town on these projects, converting former home sites into managed floodplain that might protect what remains. It's practical and it's an admission: we can't wait for the Army Corps anymore.

Maybe what I was witnessing was a community learning to exist in multiple places at once. Grandchildren in Charlotte sending money home. Cousins in Raleigh hosting family during evacuations. The town itself becoming something more distributed, more resilient, but also more fragile.

The next planning meeting is scheduled for November. I'll be there, counting chairs again. Because what matters now isn't what Princeville wants to become in twenty years—it's whether there will be enough people left who still believe in twenty-year plans.

The Tar River doesn't care about our timelines. But the people who've chosen to stay are here, planning. Converting flood-damaged lots into rain gardens and heritage trails, raising houses on stilts, teaching their children that survival sometimes means spreading risk across higher ground and deeper roots both.