As a boy some 30 years ago, I often roamed the roads and trails that stretched out from the home of a childhood friend, Paul Weber, who lived near Raleigh's northern city limits.

On bike or foot, we'd jump on Six Forks Road near its intersection with Lynn Road, taking the two-lane blacktop north or west with little worry about the occasional car. Dogs running freely in the yards of isolated homes occupied our fears to a far greater degree than the traffic.

After a summer shower, we'd charge down Lynn Road to see if the rain had pushed any box turtles from their daytime haunts to the roadside. Along the wooded trails beyond the intersection, small creeks and ponds awaited, promising adventure.

Anyone familiar with the city today knows that areas north and west of that intersection have since boomed. Subdivisions with $500,000 homes, office buildings and strip shopping centers stretch for miles toward Falls Lake and Raleigh-Durham International Airport.

Raleigh and the surrounding Triangle have become one of the jewels of the New South, a humming economic engine helping to push the nation's economy. Charlotte strides right with it. Greensboro and Winston-Salem aren't far behind.

North Carolina's top cities stand in marked contrast to those of our neighbor to the north, Virginia. They're also quite different from the city where I now make my home, Fayetteville.

Consider that Forbes magazine's 2006 listing of the best places to do business in America ranked Wilmington and Asheville ahead of Richmond. In fact, at 41st, Richmond lagged behind most of the Southeast's major cities. Raleigh ranked second.

Fayetteville came in at 143.

The Forbes ranking is no be-all, end-all accounting of the economic merits of the nation's cities. Still, it generally falls into line with similar rankings.

So why has Raleigh boomed while Richmond lags? Why has Fayetteville struggled to realize the economic growth enjoyed by its fellow North Carolina cities?

There is a common denominator: annexation.

Virginia lawmakers began limiting cities' ability to annex new territory in the early 1970s. By the mid-80s, new laws brought Richmond under the no-annexation stranglehold.

For Fayetteville, a local bill put the city under an annexation moratorium in 1959. The General Assembly repealed the moratorium in the 1980s, but city officials only recently took steps to bring major portions of the adjoining sprawl into city boundaries.

For their good deed, Fayetteville residents and local home builders, intent on building substandard subdivisions with no curb and gutter, promptly tossed the bums out.

Today, there's a strong push by conservative activists to repeal North Carolina annexation laws, which allow towns and cities to expand without the approval of new residents.

Annexation opponents don't want to pay new taxes, and involuntary annexation seems un-American.

But there is another side to the annexation debate, and two good case studies of what happens when legal boundaries aren't allowed to keep pace with the lines of economic growth.