Road closures.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: North Carolina is planning to reduce money on highway projects

North Carolina's desire to save money on future highway projects has caused hardship for thousands. Their pleas for relief rest with the state's highest court.

The shouting rousts them. The couple leap from bed and rush to the window to find police cars and an assault vehicle surrounding the house next door.

Men with guns are darting through the yard screaming, "Police, police!" One rushes the house and hurls a stun grenade through the door. There's a flash and explosion, and the bedroom window from where the man and woman watch quivers.

It's dawn east of Apex. The husband is 78 and his wife, 74. She reminisces about life as it was 28 years ago when they moved here, to what was then their new home in a neighborhood just beginning to feel the Triangle's creeping suburbia. Whippoorwills trilled in the dewy night air of Deerfield Park. "Our house is where the old homeplace was," she says. Next door where the drug raid unfolds used to be the farm family's garden, full of flowers, plants and a grapevine trellis.

About a decade later, a letter arrived from the N.C. Department of Transportation. Soon, officials told them, the state would build the Triangle Expressway along a 1,000-foot-wide Wake County corridor that included their property. DOT would eventually buy the couple's home, but until then, a law restricted their options. They could repair the roof or replace a leaking faucet but make no room additions or anything substantial enough to require a building permit. They could sell, though finding a buyer for a house in the path of a promised highway would be unlikely.

Only if the couple had a terminal illness, bankruptcy or some other hardship would the state buy the house before road construction started. If it did, the state would then rent it, which explains why drug dealers lived next door in the neighborhood of $200,000 homes. How long, the couple asked, will this go on? "As long," replied the highway officials, "as it takes North Carolina to get the money to build the road."

That was 18 years ago. Stymied by a lack of funds and environmental snags, this southern leg of Raleigh's Triangle Expressway exists only on paper. Now, another DOT-owned house nearby was raided by police. Several are vacant. The couple, trapped in their own home and fearful--they asked that their names not be used--are among an unenviable cadre of Tar Heels whose complaints about the process could cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Transportation Department estimates 4,400 home and business owners, investors and others are frozen by a law passed when urban loops first gained popularity in a state dominated by rural roads. The 1987 Transportation Corridor Official Map Act, since shortened to Map Act, is intended to hold down public costs by halting development where highway planners envision expressways. While state and federal agencies have poured more than $60 billion into North Carolina's nearly 80,000-mile highway system in recent decades, congestion has steadily increased in urban areas. That has prompted demand for loops and bypasses. (See page 54.)

About a dozen states have similar laws, though none is as draconian as North Carolina's, says state Rep. Paul Stam of Apex. His efforts to repeal or weaken the law have repeatedly failed. "I wasn't there at the time," says the Republican House speaker pro tern, "but my guess is they never contemplated it would be preserving these corridors for 20, 30 or 40 years."

The act was intended to put a temporary hold on development, but in 2010, then-N.C. Transportation Secretary Gene Conti told some owners that, at the rate the state was funding urban-loop construction, some wouldn't be built for 60 years. The eventual tab he projected: $8 billion.

While they wait, owners pay lower local property taxes until projects are funded and the state condemns their property in traditional eminent domain proceedings. By then, real-estate agents and some internal DOT documents say the value will wither to a fraction of similar property outside a corridor. Businesses will be shuttered, local governments will lose hundreds of millions in property taxes, and neighborhood deterioration known as condemnation blight will often breed crime and fear among stranded owners. Though "temporary," the process can drag indefinitely. About 700 affected property owners, for instance, are in the path of the 34-mile Winston-Salem Northern Beltway, first sketched out in the 1960s and officially designated a...