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nationalgeographic.com
In Suburban Sprawl
By Joel Bourne, Jr. Photographs by Scott Lewis
All roads lead to a cul-de-sac in this mushrooming high-tech hometown of transplanted Yankees. A friendly game of bunco, anyone?
Get a taste of what awaits you in print from this compelling excerpt.
Rolling red clay tobacco fields and loblolly pine forests have given way to sweeping new subdivisions and brick-fronted shopping centers that look remarkably similar. The town’s largest employers now include IBM, Cisco Systems, Lucent Technology, and SAS Institute, whose world headquarters occupies a 500-acre (2-square-kilometer) campus on the edge of town. Named for the Statistical Analysis System its founders developed at nearby North Carolina State University to analyze agricultural data, SAS produces software that scans oceans of information to find relevant patterns and meaning. Its uses now range from developing new drugs to calculating the consumer price index of the United States.
“SAS Institute mirrors Cary and Cary mirrors SAS,” says Koka Booth, a former mayor who works for the software giant. The average age in Cary is 33, the average SAS employee is 35. The median household income in Cary is about $60,000, the average salary at SAS is $60,000. Striding the hushed corridors adorned with modern art, Booth reels off a laundry list of employee benefits—from on-site day care to belly dancing lessons at lunch—that have led various business magazines to rate SAS, and in turn Cary, one of the best places to live and work in the country.
The symbiosis between the company and the community extends beyond the front gate. Jim Goodnight, SAS co-founder and CEO, bankrolled the town’s largest developer, who built subdivision after upscale subdivision. Just as every employee works in a 10-foot-by-12-foot (3-meter-by-4-meter) office, nearly everyone in the 27513 zip code lives in a “five, four, and a door”—a two-story colonial with five windows across the top and two windows on either side of the entrance. Fifteen percent of all households include someone with an advanced degree. The crime rate is among the state’s lowest for cities of its size. Cary resembles a futuristic Pleasantville.
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