If this matters…
Comment. Send a letter you'd like me to post. Like the Hickory Hound on my various platforms. Subscribe. Share it on your personal platforms. Share your ideas with me. Tell me where you think I am wrong. If you'd like to comment, but don't want your comments publicized, then they won't be. I am here to engage you.
Get in touch: hickoryhoundfeedback@gmail.com
HKYNC News & Views February 8, 2026 – Executive Summary
Hickory Hound News and Views Archive
📤This Week:
(Tuesday) - Hickory 102: 6th Verse - When Risk Becomes Normalized Instead of Resolved - It explains present-day behavior: why people tolerate conditions they once would have rejected.
(Thursday) - Middle Class Traction #5: Affordability → Optionality - Do households still have choices?
------------------------------------
📤Next Week:
(Tuesday) - Hickory 102: 7th Verse - When Time Horizons Collapse - It explains present-day behavior: why people tolerate conditions they once would have rejected.
🧠Opening Reflection:
The Maintenance of the Mirage
If you take a walk through Hickory today, in early 2026, the optics are undeniably polished. You see the finished segments of the Hickory Trail winding through the city, the new banners celebrating our "Well Crafted" identity, and the glossy renderings of the Innovation District. The institutional narrative—delivered through press releases and city council goals—is one of "unprecedented transformation." From the perspective of a bond report or a state-level grant application, Hickory is a machine that is finally humming. We are told that tens of millions in local investment have been leveraged into a billion-dollar ecosystem of progress.
On paper, the city is thriving. But for many people living here, that prosperity feels like a broadcast they’re watching through a window from the outside.
There is a specific kind of exhaustion that sets in when the reality you live in doesn't match the one being described by the "policy makers." This is the core of the Mirage. It is the psychological and economic gap between a city that looks "busy" and a resident who feels "buried." While the official dashboard tracks "industrial readiness" and "placemaking," the individual is tracking their own diminishing returns. They are measuring their life not in terms of multimodal urban trails, but in terms of the hour stolen by a glitchy utility portal—perhaps during a login error or delayed password reset on the city's Paymentus online payment system—or the added sting of recent rate hikes that make basic services feel like a luxury.
Consider the billing realities hitting Hickory households right now: The FY 2025-2026 budget brought a 1% increase in water and sewer customer and availability charges, a 5% bump in volume rates (adding roughly $1.51 monthly for average users), and a $1 hike in sanitation fees to $29 per month.
These aren't abstract numbers—they compound the frustration of navigating a digital-only payment push, where self-service portals offload troubleshooting onto residents, potentially leading to late fees or service disruptions for those without easy tech access. Add in broader utility pressures, like Duke Energy's approved residential electric rate increases of up to 16% statewide, and the Mirage sharpens: efficiency for the system means erosion for the citizen.
What we are witnessing is a quiet shift in the very architecture of our community. In the past, Hickory’s strength was its middle layer—the local owners, the human buffers in city offices, and the paths that allowed a person with a CVCC credential to build a stable life right here. Today, those human layers are being replaced by what I call The Institutional Machinery. We’ve swapped the "Good Friction" of a five-minute conversation at a counter for the "Bad Friction" of a digital gauntlet designed to offload the city’s administrative labor onto the citizen's time.
This isn't just about a few annoying websites or rising costs. It is about operational cannibalization. The system is preserving its metrics—low headcount, high revenue, "efficient" automation—by liquidating the time, patience, and future resilience of its residents. We are training our best talent at CVCC only to watch them hit a "Wage Ceiling" and export their skills to Charlotte or Raleigh because local wages don't create economic “grip” for the middle class. We are essentially subsidizing the exit of our own future to maintain the illusion of current stability.
When we talk about "Hickory Moving Forward," we have to ask: who is moving, and who is just running in circles to keep the machine flowing? Activity is not the same thing as traction. Traction is what allows ordinary people to convert effort into stability. When that traction erodes, the system does not stop functioning—it starts consuming its own foundation.
This week’s News & Views is not about any single policy or decision. It is an exploration of how a city can look modern while becoming increasingly unforgiving to those operating without a safety net. It is about how multiple reasonable actions combine into a single structural outcome: one where the work of keeping the city running is shifted quietly onto those least able to absorb it, while the system congratulates itself for functioning smoothly.
That is the maintenance of the mirage. And once you see it, it becomes impossible to unsee.
⭐ Feature Story ⭐
The Maintenance of the Mirage:
Why Hickory Feels Busy While You Feel Buried
There is a fundamental difference between growth and maintenance, and Hickory has been living in the gap between the two for longer than most are willing to admit.
Over the past few years, many changes in the city have been described as improvements. Things are more organized, more standardized, and more efficient. On the surface, that sounds like progress—and in some cases, it is. But it helps to separate the two kinds of change that often get mixed together. Some changes add room for growth, giving more flexibility and the ability to recover when something goes wrong. Other changes are strictly about keeping things in order, even if that requires tighter rules and less forgiveness underneath. Both can look like improvements from a distance, but the difference shows up in daily life. Changes for growth support stability. Changes focused on preserving order work smoothly until the gears grind, and then the strain lands on the people dealing with it. That difference is the lens for what follows.
Growth is the creation of capacity. It is the act of building something new that expands what a community can do, making life easier, more stable, or more prosperous for the people who live here. Maintenance, however, is often about the preservation of an appearance. It is the constant, grinding work required just to keep the lights from flickering and the paint from peeling. When a city shifts from building real progress to simply maintaining an image, the change doesn't happen with a sudden, loud crash. It arrives quietly, disguised as "modernization," "new digital portals," and "strategic vision plans."
On paper, everything looks functional. The streets are paved. The bills are sent. The city government issues press releases about new grants and "smart city" initiatives. Training programs at our community colleges graduate students with high-tech skills. On any given dashboard, the city of Hickory looks like it is moving forward.
But for the person sitting at their kitchen table at 9:00 PM, trying to navigate a broken password-recovery loop for a utility bill, or the small business owner watching their insurance premiums skyrocket while local wages stay flat, there is a massive disconnect. That disconnect is The Mirage: the gap between the "modern city" described in institutional reports and the exhausted, grinding reality of the people who actually live here.
To understand why Hickory feels so busy yet so many people feel like they are falling behind, we have to look at how we have lost our Grip. In a healthy community, your hard work converts into stability—it turns into a savings account, a home, or a path for your children to stay local. But when a system is tuned to maintain a Mirage, it starts to consume that effort just to stay where it’s at. It extracts your time, your patience, and your money to keep the institutional machinery running, leaving you with nothing to show for the extra work.
==============
Section I: The Technical Gauntlet – The High Cost of "Efficiency"
In the world of government and corporate management, "efficiency" usually means doing more with less. In Hickory, as in many cities across North Carolina, this has manifested as a move toward total automation of basic services. While it sounds good in theory, it often creates a hidden tax on your time.
Consider the recent shift in how we handle basic utilities and city services. We are told these systems are "secure" and "user-friendly." However, for many residents, "user-friendly" is a code word for offloading the administrative work onto them.
When a billing system has a glitch—something as simple as a misread meter or a date sync error—the solution is no longer a five-minute conversation with a human being at a counter. Instead, the resident is forced into an unpaid, part-time job. You spend 45 minutes on a phone tree, listening to hold music, only to be told to "use the portal." You go to the portal, only to find you are locked out. You request a password reset that never arrives.
For a salaried worker with a flexible schedule and a high-speed connection, this is a nuisance. For an hourly worker in Hickory, this is a disaster. It steals time from family, from rest, or from a second job. This is Bad Friction. It's the intentional design of systems to make it harder for the individual to resolve a problem so that the institution doesn't have to pay a person to provide service. You are more than a customer, but as a customer you deserve better customer service. The city has offloaded that responsibility without accountability built into the process.
The city's dashboard shows "efficiency" because they have reduced their headcount and automated their revenue collection. But the Mirage hides the fact that the total amount of work hasn't decreased—it has just been forcibly transferred to the residents who have the least amount of time to spare. In Hickory's case, this digital push coincides with tangible cost increases: the FY 2025-2026 budget included a 1% hike in water and sewer customer charges, a 5% increase in volume rates (adding about $1.51 monthly for average households), and a $1 bump in sanitation fees to $29 per month. For those least equipped to navigate technical hurdles—like seniors or low-wage earners—these changes mean late fees, disconnections, or extra trips to City Hall during limited hours.
Access to city workers isn't impossible, but it's streamlined for self-service: Call Utility Billing at (828) 323-7424 or (828) 323-7427 for help, or use the online portal for account setup. Yet, when the system falters, the burden falls on you to chase resolution, eroding your Grip on daily stability.
==============
Section II: The Insurance Cliff and the Death of Local Ownership
Nothing maintains a Mirage better than rising property values. When the "value" of Hickory property goes up through home sales and appraisals, it looks like the value of Hickory has risen, and the narrative is to sell this as a win for everyone. But beneath the surface, the "middle layer" of our city—the local property owners and small-scale landlords—is being liquidated.
The primary tool for this liquidation is the Insurance Squeeze. Recently, insurance companies in North Carolina requested rate hikes of up to 68% for "dwelling policies." These are the specific insurance policies used for rental houses and non-owner-occupied homes.
For a massive corporate investment firm based in Charlotte or Raleigh that owns thousands of units, a 30% or 60% hike is a line item that can be absorbed or passed down across a massive portfolio – to renters and leasers. But for a Hickory family that owns one or two small rental houses or a small shop as their retirement plan or "nest egg," that hike is a death sentence for their investment. When the cost of insurance and taxes exceeds the profit from the rent, the local owner is forced to sell.
Who buys? Usually, it isn't another local family. It is a regional private equity investment firm with deeper pockets and less connection to the neighborhood. These people aren’t going to invest in your town because they don’t live there.
The "Mirage" says our real estate market is "strong" because the sale prices are high. But the reality is that the path to local ownership and local wealth-building is being destroyed. We are trading local stakeholders—people who care if the grass is cut and the neighbors are safe—for out-of-town debt collectors. We are becoming a city of managed assets rather than a community of owners with a stake in the well-being of the community.
==================
Section III: The Export of Human Capital
We are often told that education is the key to our future, and in many ways, Catawba Valley Community College (CVCC) is a crown jewel of our region. The facilities are modern, the programs are sophisticated, and the students are hardworking. But without a local "Grip," this massive public investment becomes a subsidized exit pipeline for our best talent.
The Mirage suggests that because we are training people, we are growing. But training is only growth if those people we have invested in can stay and build a life here. Right now, Hickory faces a "Wage Ceiling." We train students in high-tech manufacturing, healthcare, and computer science, but when they look for a job that allows them to buy a home or start a family, they find that the local wages don't "grip."
They put in the effort, they get the degree, but the conversion of that effort into stability happens in Charlotte, Winston-Salem, Asheville, Raleigh, Wilmington, or a place like Greenville, South Carolina.
Hickory taxpayers take on the risk and the cost of the education, while other cities reap the rewards—the tax revenue, the spending power, and the civic participation and leadership of those young workers. We are essentially paying to stabilize other regions' economies while our own local economy remains a "low-wage" environment designed to serve the Mirage of “industrial efficiency.”
=============================
Section IV: The Ritual of Powerless Participation
Finally, we have to look at how the city manages the people who actually try to speak up. Public engagement has become a governance ritual—a series of surveys, "listening sessions," and visioning exercises like the ‘Hickory Moving Forward’ transportation plan.
These events are designed to look responsive. They use bright posters, sticky notes, and "engagement consultants." But in many cases, the actual decisions—where the money goes, which roads get widened, and which neighborhoods get bypassed—are locked in years in advance by engineering firms and state-level funding formulas.
The "listening session" isn't there to alter the plan; it is there to absorb your civic energy. It is a pressure-relief valve. By the time you get to speak, the "friction" of the bureaucracy has already smoothed over any chance of real change. You are given the feeling of participation without any of the power of participation.
The city gets to check a box for their grant applications saying they "engaged the community," while the residents go back to the same congested roads and unsafe intersections they’ve been complaining about for a decade. This is motion without movement. It is the maintenance of the Mirage of "democracy" while the actual machinery of power remains insulated from the public.
====================
My Own Time Ω
What Happens When Traction Disappears
I want to be careful here, because this is where discussions like this usually go off the rails.
This is not about assigning blame to any one institution, board, or office. It is not about nostalgia for a past that cannot be recreated. And it is not about denying that cities must adapt, modernize, and change. All of that is true. But it is also incomplete.
What gets lost in these conversations is the difference between a system that adapts with its people and one that adapts at their expense. When traction disappears, people do not suddenly stop trying. They adjust. They simplify. They narrow their expectations. They accept more friction and call it "resilience."
That is how a mirage survives.
I hear it in how people talk now. Not in dramatic complaints, but in quiet recalibration. Fewer long-term plans. Less confidence that effort will translate into security. More energy spent navigating systems instead of building lives. People are not disengaged—they are exhausted by compliance. When the "Institutional Machinery" replaces human middle layers with digital hurdles, the resident stops being a stakeholder and starts being an unpaid administrator for the city's revenue collection.
When the path forward becomes too narrow, people do not push harder. They step sideways. They leave—our "Human Capital Export Pipeline" is proof of that. Or they stay and stop expecting the system to work for them.
This is the danger of mistaking activity for health. A system can look busy while quietly shedding the very layers that once made it resilient. Middle layers matter. They absorb shocks. They provide redundancy. They allow a person to make a mistake without falling out of the economy entirely. When those layers erode—when the local landlord is liquidated by an "Insurance Squeeze" and the local graduate hits a "Wage Ceiling"—the system does not fall. It hardens. Participation becomes conditional. Ownership becomes a luxury. Progress becomes something that happens somewhere else.
None of this shows up cleanly in dashboards or annual reports. It shows up in timing. In who can still recover from a setback. In who can still say yes to opportunity. In who has room to breathe.
Traction requires friction—but in the right places. It requires systems that allow learning, recovery, and gradual advancement. When "Good Friction" is stripped out for the sake of institutional efficiency and "Bad Friction" is concentrated onto individuals, what you get is not progress. You get fragility disguised as order.
The mirage is maintained by activity. By upgrades. By constant motion. But motion without movement does not move a community forward; it only keeps it busy while the foundation is hollowed out.
If there is a task in front of us now, it is not to chase growth narratives or polish the language of progress. It is to ask harder questions about where effort still turns into stability—and where it no longer does. Because once a place loses that conversion, people do not fail the city. They simply stop investing in it.
And by the time that disinvestment becomes visible on a dashboard, the mirage has already done its work.
