The Chatham Shagbark

There's something fishy about a Student Generation Rate (SGR) of 0.4 for Briar Chapel. Read this from Chapel Hill, just 10 minutes north of Briar Chapel (emphasis mine):

We note that Orange County has commissioned a study on student generation rates (ratios comparing number of housing units with number of school-age children living in those units). Community-wide for the Chapel Hill-Carrboro district, the student generation rate for single-family houses is .57. That is, for every 100 houses in the community, there are likely to be 57 school-age children. However, a recent Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools study showed that for new development, the ratio is considerably higher. The student generation rate for new single family homes in a development currently being built is .98. That is, for every 100 new homes built in this new development, there are 98 new school-age children.

Note the difference between the SGR for all homes versus the SGR for recently built homes.

And last year, Tischler & Associates similarly advised Jefferson County (again, emphasis mine):

Paul Tischler and Associates recommended that it was appropriate to look at the average number of students per house during the first 20 years after houses are built, in order to estimate the amount of school space that would need to be built to serve new houses in the future. This suggestion was made by Tischler because the purpose of the committee is to project the number of pupils per house for new construction in the next few years. Houses built in the next few years are going to be more like houses built in the last 20 years than houses built in the more distant past.

Jefferson County settled on a .644 SGR for single family dwellings, a conservative estimate by their own accounts because their study "projected .93 children per house for the three year period of 2000-2003."

So, it makes sense, when calculating SGR numbers, to compare apples to apples, not new homes to 30 year old homes. Wouldn't you hope Newland's Briar Chapel figures did just that? And wouldn't you trust that our own independent, fiscal review of Newland's projections would do the same? Well, if you're buying their SGR number of 0.4, maybe you like to buy this, too.

Miley and Cowen, authors of the SGR analysis portion of our county's fiscal review, said that their calculations are "based on housing units that have been built in the last 50 years or more" (Appendix A of the A Fiscal Impact Analysis of the Briar Chapel Development). (Oh yeah, emphasis mine again.)

Someone's trying to sell us this.