The Naked City Blog

Why did the chicken cross the 'stroad'?

2012-03-06T17:35:00.000-05:00

The inventive Charles Marohn has coined, or at least well-publicized, a badly needed word for those paved places in most U.S. cities that you find where a city street ought to be but that are designed like highways: stroad. In this piece in Better! Cities & Towns (the video at the end about traffic engineering is highly recommended), he writes:

"A STROAD is a street/road hybrid; the futon of transportation alternatives. It functions neither as a road that moves people quickly between two places nor as a street that provides a platform for capturing value. As such, STROADs are the most financially unproductive type of transportation corridor that we can build; they cost a ton, but financially yield very little return for the governments that must pay to maintain them."

A quick Google search found several references to stroads, so I hope the term is catching on. It's a good, tongue-in-cheek way to make the point that U.S. cities and traffic engineers have confused the purposes of city streets and country roads. I wrote about this in 2009, after years of getting more and more fretful at the confusion between streets and roads.

So starting now, let's just call them Providence Stroad, Park Stroad, Rea Stroad, Colony Stroad (except for the actual street section where it starts in Myers Park). North and South Tryon Stroads and Eastway/Wendover/Runnymede/Woodlawn Stroads. Don't get me started on the corruption of "boulevard" and "parkway." (Don't believe me? See photo of Independence "Boulevard," above, for evidence.) Naming that freeway Billy Graham "Parkway" is truly Orwellian, in using a word that means one thing and applying it to something that's the complete opposite.

Marohn points to a new report from the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) and a nonprofit group called TRIP, about the hazards found with an aging population and a driving-dependent transportation system. The report is Keeping Baby Boomers Mobile: Preserving the Mobility and Safety of Older Americans. North Carolina has 1,045,281 drivers 65 or older, ranking ninth in the U.S. It ranks fifth, however, in traffic fatalities where at least one driver was 65 or older. And it was No. 3 in traffic wrecks where a driver 65 or older died. Those numbers should sober anyone worried about traffic safety as the demographic bulge that is the Boomer generation (OK, that includes me) ages.

The problems are real, of course, but as Marohn points out, the report misses a good point: One excellent way to give elderly people (and everyone else) mobility is to build streets and neighborhoods that people can walk on, with stores and other destinations in close proximity to housing.

Photo credit: Nancy Pierce.

'The divided city is a subjugated city'

2012-03-05T18:48:00.001-05:00

Last weekend, the book I took to the Dowd YMCA to take my mind off the mindlessness of stationary bicycling was Mindy Thompson Fullilove's "Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It.

Fullilove's theme is that urban renewal displaced not just homes and businesses but ripped apart essential community networks, the loss of which created havoc for people, neighborhoods and cities.

As I pedaled, I could see out the windows to the Interstate 277 trench and the bland, dead area beyond, where Charlotte's Second Ward once held the lively, black neighborhood called Brooklyn, erased by urban "renewal" in the 1960s and 1970s.

Only shards remain: the old McCrory Y gym survives behind the United Way building, as does the old Second Ward High School gym. A sliver of storefronts survives on South Brevard. All else was leveled. The trauma urban "renewal" inflicted on Charlotte remains virtually unexamined here outside the recollections of the older black generation. A few efforts have been made to document where houses and buildings used to be and to collect and showcase old photos, but to my knowledge no one has studied the emotional and economic toll: the resentment, anger and grief people experienced from that disruption, and how its ripples affect the city to this day.

And as Fullilove explains, wounds from urban "renewal" damaged more than just the neighborhoods she studied in Roanoke, Va., Pittsburgh and near Newark, N.J. I came across this wonderful passage. It comes after a description of Orange, N.J., and a church singing group that survived urban "renewal" and lives on, although the neighborhood surrounding the church has fallen into decline.

"The inhospitable, damaged city still had gathering places of all kinds. Within that shelter, people made good times. It took enormous effort, but people were willing to do it, to keep the community going, to keep spirits up.

"The problems with events-as-city extend beyond the burden that this places on the event-makers. The most serious problem is that events tend to be created for some and not for others. The Essex Chorale sings for the 'haves,' not out of any wish to exclude, but out of patterns of cultural separation that make going some places possible for some people but not for all.

"The great gift of the city is that of propinquity: anybody can meet anybody on the streets of a great city. Once the streets collapse, or the market is bulldozed, or the parks are fenced, or the beach erodes, people lose the ways and means of public intercourse. The ensuing separations follow social fault lines that divide populations by class, race, religion, age, culture, or whatever else suggests to people what they like. The street is not about 'what I like,' but going to a concert is. In that lies the profound structural difference imposed on social relations by the collapse of the city.

"The 'haves' at Patty's concert, like Patty, have talent, education, wealth, and family support. What they do not have is the 'right to the city,' the freedom to move anywhere and everywhere. They are not, as in the past, restricted by Jim Crow laws. Now, they are restricted by danger and by difference. In this tense atmosphere, the 'haves' must protect what they have, as Patty had to protect her children by driving them to school. This creates a form of isolation – whether it is expressed in the gated, moated housing complex or not – that blocks the creative, generative energy of the city from flowing forth. The divided city is a subjugated city."

Feed the meter with a cell phone app

2012-03-02T16:22:00.000-05:00

Short of quarters? Next week Charlotte launches a program to let you use your cell phone to pay for on-street parking.

According to a city memo sent Friday to Charlotte City Council members, the program will have a "soft launch" Thursday and a "hard launch" in April. According to the memo:

The cell-phone-payment system will be available at both parking meters and the pay stations located on some uptown streets.

To use it, you have to register with the Pay by Cell service provider, at www.parkmobile.com. Registration is free, although each pay-by-cell transaction costs a 35-cent fee to Parkmobile USA.

To pay, you would:

Find a parking spot. Then either launch a mobile app, access the Internet or call toll-free, 1-877-727-5301. You enter the parking zone number on the meter or nearby sign or the pay-station stall number. Choose the parking time desired.

You could extend the time you choose, via another transaction, but not beyond the two-hour limit.

The city memo cautions that parking meters won't display the payment and time remaining, although the city's handheld ticketing equipment will let ticket agents know the customer's payment.

Will the 35-cent fee deter people? Hard to say: I'm a penny-pincher and I try to keep my ashtray stashed with quarters. But if you're facing a choice of on-street-with-fee or expensive parking deck, 35 cents may be an easy hurdle to take.

An aside: I first saw the pay-by-cell-phone parking fees in Sofia, Bulgaria, and wondered how long before Charlotte began using it. And I have seen pay-by-cell-phone signs posted in some of the privately owned surface lots uptown, so it's clear the technology is finally arriving here.

Author: Redevelop in increments

2012-02-26T14:46:00.002-05:00

Architect, planner and author Stephen Mouzon, did more than just give some lectures from his book, Original Green: Unlocking the Mystery of True Sustainability, when he was in town recently. He also took a look at a section of south Charlotte that he thinks might be ripe for a different kind of long-range plan: The Park Road-Woodlawn Avenue neighborhood.

City planners are drawing up an area plan for that part of town, home to Park Road Shopping Center and Montford Drive's burgeoning restaurant and bar scene, among other things.

Like many places in Charlotte, the area has most elements of a strong city neighborhood – houses, apartments, condos, shopping, offices, schools, churches, parks and greenways – but is suburban and auto-oriented in its layout and the way it functions. I've long thought it would be a good area to transition to a more urban flavor as it redevelops over time. But the zoning now in place for most of the area requires suburban-style building: stores and offices sitting behind huge parking lots, single-uses, apartments quarantined from single-family houses, and all the buildings too far apart to make walking practical, much less pleasant.

An aside: Don't get me wrong; I love Park Road Shopping Center, despite its hopelessly car-focused design. It opened in 1956 as Charlotte's first open-air shopping center, and for years has offered a mix of stores that works exceptionally well. I hope to heaven its new owners, Edens & Avant, don't mess up a good thing.

Stephen Mouzon

Mouzon suggested the area could show how to do what planners and developers call a suburban retrofit: Taking an aging suburban area and making it a more village- or town-center type of area, with housing and stores and workplaces closer to one another. But, he said, most redevelopments require a developer buying up a big chunk of property and doing a big-footprint development. [Much of uptown Charlotte was redeveloped this way. Example: The EpiCentre.] Why not try something different, he proposed. Why not do it incrementally? Code every street frontage to its climax condition – that is, put codes in place that envision 30 years out and work toward that vision over time, as property changes hands and owners of small parcels redevelop and rebuild. Don't wait for one deep-pocketed savior developer.

He said he's going to draw up an idea and send it to the city. I asked him to share that with me, as well. I'll write more on it, if this comes to pass.

During his public lecture, sponsored by the Charlotte chapter of the Urban Land Institute and by the Charlotte Department of Transportation, he expounded on many of the ideas in his book: Build buildings that are designed to be able to transition from one use to another over time; live where you can walk to the grocery story; don't be afraid to look to the past for wisdom about how to design buildings and construct cities.

Indeed, Mouzon's pitch is what many architects might scorn as nostalgic. He said his goal is for audiences to leave his lectures having no idea what his politics are.

How to get Americans walking again

2012-02-22T11:19:00.004-05:00

Uptown Charlotte, one of the city's few walkable areas

Yes, we in Charlotte are geeky enough that it's exciting when the mighty BBC takes note of North Carolina. And the WalkRaleigh campaign that I wrote about Feb. 6 in "Guerrilla wayfinding and the Charlotte dilemma" has hit the big-time, so to speak.

Asking, "How to get America to walk?" the BBC's piece on Raleigh features WalkRaleigh's Matt Tomasulo, who was behind what he calls a "self-motivated and unsanctioned" posting of signs telling passers-by how many minutes it takes to walk places in Raleigh. Note, too, that in the video Raleigh's chief planning officer, Mitchell Silver, appears disinclined to call in the sign police to take down the signs. [Update: Silver reported via Twitter that the signs came down Wednesday. He is in charge of zoning enforcement, he said. He talked first with Tomasulo and they are working on a longer-term strategy to make the signs either a pilot project or permanent, Silver said.]

But maybe the best snippets are from the jogging stroller exercise class, where women with children work out, in a gym, with their strollers because they can't, or don't, actually take the strollers out for exercise or a walk. In one great visual, a woman points to a sidewalk that ends abruptly, keeping her from walking to a nearby grocery store.

All of which leads to a question I keep bugging my friends and colleagues with: Why isn't there a pedestrian advocacy group in Charlotte to do what the bicycle advocates have been doing so effectively? Charlotte Area Bicycle Alliance (aka charlottebikes.org) was founded in 1997 and has successfully raised the profile of bicycling. Is this bicycle nirvana? Of course not. But CABA has worked diligently to be at the table for policy discussions, and has clearly made a difference. So where's the pedestrian counterpart?

Yes, the Charlotte Department of Transportation did hire a pedestrian planner a few years back, to its credit. But where are the people who'll hound CDOT about cracked sidewalks and ankle-threatening potholes? Where are the people pushing, pushing, pushing for motorist- and pedestrian-safety campaigns, for more crosswalks and more pedestrian lights and for those pedestrian push-button signals to react sooner than 5 minutes (or so it often seems) after you push them?

(Related news: On Wednesday two young children were killed when they were hit by a truck as they walked with their father to a day care center. They were on a stretch of West Tyvola Road that lacks sidewalks and has narrow shoulders.)

I know plenty of people who care about pedestrian issues, not least of whom is the city's pedestrian planner, Malisa Mccreedy. But city staff can't be the effective advocacy group that Charlotte needs. How about a Walk Charlotte? Somebody?

Commuter rail to Gaston and Union counties?

2012-02-17T16:38:00.000-05:00

Here's an interesting snippet from deep inside a report to a Charlotte City Council committee. It suggests that some of the money from a proposed special tax on property along the proposed Red Line commuter rail would be set aside to help pay for commuter rail to Union and Gaston counties.

This is intriguing, but extremely preliminary.

The mention is in a memo emailed to council members of the Transportation and Planning Committee in advance of the panel's Feb. 23 meeting (noon-1:30 p.m. in the city-county government center, room 280); the documents haven't been posted online yet.

The Red Line proposal is complex, but in a nutshell it proposes setting up a special tax district near the would-be commuter rail line from uptown Charlotte to north of Davidson. Whether it would extend into Iredell County remains an open question; Iredell County commissioners have been relentlessly negative so far. Here's a link to a slide-show presentation the city council committee heard last month. The idea is to upgrade the not-well-used existing Norfolk Southern tracks for both commuter rail and more freight traffic. You've heard of Transit-Oriented Development? The idea is to promote Freight-Oriented Development, luring industries and jobs in some spots, as well as mixed-use residential and retail development in other spots.

The special tax district flanking the rail line would assess 75 cents per $100 of property value on income-producing property, that is, not on single-family residential property. For most of the special tax district, 75 percent of the revenue would go to pay for building and operating the Red Line, with 25 percent going to the local municipality.

BUT, the Friday report emailed to the committee says, "At Charlotte Gateway Station, the proposal would:

• Direct 25% of the tax increment capture proceeds to the Red Line.

• Direct 75% of the tax increment capture to a reserve fund for future commuter rail projects to Union and Gaston Counties

The proposal presumes the future commuter rail projects to Union and Gaston Counties would terminate at Charlotte Gateway Station."

The Gateway Station is the long-proposed new Amtrak station on West Trade Street, which would also be the end point of the commuter rail line. Some people, notably local planner and architect Michael Gallis, have criticized the idea of having two different rail stations, one at Gateway and the other, for the Blue Line light rail, six or seven blocks away at the Transportation Center. The Charlotte Area Transit System proposes running shuttles between the two stations.

But commuter rail to Gaston County? If you're thinking that's more pie-in-the-sky than anything you've heard recently, then consider this: The N.C. Department of Transportation has bought several chunks of the old Piedmont and Northern Railroad right-of-way that runs from uptown Charlotte through the Wesley Heights neighborhood, crosses Tuckaseegee Road, crosses the Catawba River near N.C. 27 and heads into Mount Holly. CSX owns much of the line in Mecklenburg County, but the state owns enough of the Gaston County sections that it is introducing freight traffic there. Hmmm. The old P&N was an electrified passenger rail line built and operated between Charlotte and Gastonia by a precursor of Duke Energy. When passenger service stopped it became a freight line.

Commuter rail to Union County, though, might be in that pie-in-sky category.

'Original Green' author to speak in Charlotte

2012-02-08T17:00:00.001-05:00

Steven Mouzon, whose book Original Green makes the point that environmentally sensitive living requires more than what he dubs "gizmo green" gadgets, will give a public lecture in Charlotte on Wednesday Feb. 15.

Sponsored by the Charlotte Department of Transportation and the local chapter of the Urban Land Institute, Mouzon's talk will be at 6 p.m. in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center, Room 267.

Mouzon, an architect and author, is founder of the New Urban Guild in Miami, "a group of architects, designers and other New Urbanists dedicated to the study and design of true traditional buildings and places native to, and inspired by, the regions in which they are built."

One of the things I find interesting about Mouzon's writing is that, to my mind, he's an illustration of how New Urbanism can't be so easily pigeonholed as "liberal" or "conservative." He writes in his blog, for instance, that Original Green is what we had "before the Thermostat Age," when "the places we made and the buildings we built had no choice but to be green."

I'm not sure if trying to return to the building and living styles of old can be considered anything other than conservative, but as I wrote in "Is sustainability for Commies?" there's a school of thought that anyone who mentions protecting the environment or conserving energy must be a Marxist who'll rip people from their cars and subdivision houses and force-march them into Pruitt-Igoe-style high-rises. Note the Gaston County commissioners' action late last month: "County leaders identify ‘insidious’ threat of Agenda 21."

In an unfortunate architectural convergence, the UNC Charlotte College of Arts + Architecture, the Charlotte Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, and the Mint Museum of Art have planned another architectural lecture for the same night: Craig Dykers of the firm Snøhetta will give a lecture about his firm's work. It's at the UNC Charlotte Center City Building. A reception is at 5 p.m., and the lecture at 6 p.m. Both are free and open to the public, but require registration here.

Guerrilla wayfinding and the Charlotte dilemma

2012-02-06T15:32:00.002-05:00

I spotted this article, from Atlantic Cities.com, "Guerrilla Wayfinding in Raleigh," about mysterious signs that have sprouted in downtown Raleigh, to help pedestrians, courtesy of a project calling itself WalkRaleigh. The Raleigh piece is a follow-up to this article on wayfinding in cities.

All of which brings us to three Charlotte-related thoughts.

1. Why don't we have more guerrilla urbanism here? Tom Low of Civic by Design has been trying to work on an idea for pop-up porches, which isn't a bad notion but it begs the question: If you're getting official authorization for your plans, is it truly "guerrilla"?

2. Why isn't there a WalkCharlotte project out there, like WalkRaleigh, doing similar things, such as what Charlotte Observer editorial cartoonist Kevin Siers (@KevinSiers) suggested today via Twitter: "Maybe we need urban guerrillas to post pedestrian crossing signs in Charlotte, since the city doesn't bother."

WalkRaleigh is a project of CityFabric, "Wear You Live," a clever idea and definitely place-centric. Has anything of that sort been launched in Charlotte? If so, I'd love to hear/see more about it.

3. While we're on the topic of wayfinding, what's with those supposedly helpful signs on freeways and streets heading into uptown Charlotte, dividing uptown into color-coded quadrants, N, S, E and W?

Do you know anyone who has found those N, S, E and W signs helpful? I don't want to trash them if I'm the only one who isn't being helped. After all, I worked uptown for decades and have a pretty solid idea where things are and can ignore those signs.

The problem of finding your way around uptown is significant, I realize. Anything that helps people is a good idea, especially with the continuing problem of confusing one-way streets – thank goodness the city has restored some to two-way – and the existence of too many barriers between uptown and the rest of the city: I-77, I-277, the Indy Freeway, Irwin Creek, Little Sugar Creek and various railroads.

But the color-coded signs do not work for me.

Maybe it's because uptown Charlotte is not laid out according to north-south or east-west, but on the diagonal. Tryon may be named "North" and "South" but it runs northeast-southwest. Trade Street may be "East" and "West," but it runs northwest-southeast. So the only way your mental map can dovetail with an uptown map showing Tryon running vertically is if your mental map knows nothing else about any other parts of Charlotte. (I have even seen some maps that place Tryon horizontally, which is a perversion not only of the actual compass points but also of the long-established tradition in maps of north being at the top.)

The best way to find your way around uptown, as with almost any city, is to get out and walk around in it. To Walk Charlotte, if you will.

New transit rules from the feds, part II

2012-01-31T11:19:00.000-05:00

John Muth, chief development officer for the Charlotte Area Transit System confirms that yes, as I speculated in "New transit rules from the feds" yesterday, the rules changes being proposed by the Federal Transit Administration do "cover how fixed guideway projects such as commuter rail, light rail, and bus rapid transit are evaluated for possible federal funding." He said in an email that he hadn't yet reviewed the notice of proposed rule-making but will do so.

"We will be using most of the time between now and the March 26th deadline to review the guidance, compare notes with others in the industry, and prepare our comments," Muth reports.

The latest news on the Red Line proposal is that the consultants are saying the letter from Norfolk Southern railway is not the final word on the project. Here's a report from DavidsonNews.net.

Interesting tidbit inside that last link: Note that on Feb. 8, Randall O'Toole from the conservative/libertarian Cato Institute is giving a presentation and analysis of the Red Line plan at 9 a.m. at Cornelius Town Hall. That's, er, interesting.

New transit rules from the feds

2012-01-30T17:04:00.000-05:00

We've been waiting months for the Federal Transit Administration to pop out with some supposed new guidelines for how the FTA will evaluate its transit projects. Is this it? "FTA proposes New Starts streamline," from the U.S. Department of Transportation's official blog, Fast Lane, says proposed new rules "will speed up the New Starts process and focus more on transit options that fit local needs."

Here's the press release.

I'm checking with CATS folks to see if the proposed changes might, for instance, help the proposed Red Line commuter rail to north Mecklenburg (and maybe Iredell but that's iffy), compete for federal funds. Currently it does not. Commuter rail projects, in general, have not met the FTA's standards for cost-effectiveness. That's the big reason CATS and the N.C. Department of Transportation and the Red Line task force have created the idea of pairing commuter rail with freight rail-oriented development.

And by the way, the fact that Norfolk Southern says freight and commuter rail are incompatible may not mean the railroad is not willing to partner. Or it may. It's worth remembering that the railroads have a reputation for driving a very hard bargain. Or being great negotiators, if you want to put it another way.

Grid love: NYC's brutal 1811 plan survives, adapts

2012-01-23T17:45:00.002-05:00

Drawing from New York's earliest years shows now-leveled hills

NEW YORK – It brutally assaulted the land's natural features. It rejected contemporary ideals of strong city planning in favor of helping business and real estate interests. Its disrespect for existing property lines and uses would be reviled today as government overreach.

In 1811, a three-man commission created and imposed a relentless street grid onto almost all of Manhattan's then-undeveloped land. The grid ignored hills, ponds, creeks and swamps. With only a few exceptions it mandated that all of the island generally north of Houston Street would hold rectangular blocks – no curving streets, quirky intersections or irregularities to ease the eye. It offered only a few spots for parks or squares, and those generally weren't built as planned anyway.

But viewed from 200 years later, the famous New York City street grid turns out to have been stunningly resilient, in contrast to the faddish and already failing cul-de-sacs and freeways of the past 60 years. It has accommodated dramatic changes in transportation habits. By creating short blocks and multiple street corners it boosted commerce. By making it easy for people to walk places, and to bump into each other at those same corners, it enhanced the proximity effect – the way random encounters among smart people in a city can spark partnerships, innovations, creativity and build new businesses. That, too, boosted New York's growing role as the country's top business hub.

With numbered avenues and streets logically marching northward and westward, the easy-to-navigate map also helped the city welcome and assimilate newcomers: foreign and domestic immigrants as well as millions of tourists. Its ease of use projected a subliminal welcome mat. Contrast that with the you're-not-wanted-here feeling that Charlotte's confusing maze of Myers Park streets projects to outsiders.

I spent a large chunk of Saturday afternoon at the new exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York: “The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan,1811-2011.” It might sound boring. It was anything but.

The exhibit calls the plan "a vision of brazen ambition" and one that "required vigilant enforcement." The grid was not hailed as brilliant planning, in an era that saw more sophisticated plans for the District of Columbia, Paris and Savannah. And one of the interesting insights I gained was the recognition that, if I'd been writing in 1811, I would probably have criticized the plan for its disdain of natural features, its disregard for existing farmland and its general lack of elegance, in favor of enhancing commerce. But as the New York Times' Michael Kimmelman writes, "It’s true that Manhattan lacks the elegant squares, axial boulevards and civic monuments around which other cities designed their public spaces. But it has evolved a public realm of streets and sidewalks that creates urban theater on the grandest level. No two blocks are ever precisely the same because the grid indulges variety, building to building, street to street."

If you can take it in before the exhibit closes April 15, I recommend it.

And if you're from Charlotte, it's worth thinking for a minute what this city would be like if its development, like New York's, had taken place under the guidance of a plan that assumed – admittedly with arrogance and grandiosity – that a small village was destined for big growth and would need city streets, city blocks and city corners, multiple route choices for traffic (whether horse and buggy or Hummers) and a layout to make walking as convenient as driving.

It's too late for Charlotte. Retrofitting will be necessary over time, but that's hugely expensive, contentious and politically fraught. Notice what happens when the city tries to connect streets between neighborhoods. People go nuts at the prospect that city streets near them will carry traffic. In the largest city between Washington and Atlanta, they are shocked at the thought of traffic. Go figure.

Better to have done it differently from the get-go.

We love parks, but do we love parking more?

2012-01-19T15:55:00.004-05:00

2005 aerial photo in west Charlotte (Photo: Nancy Pierce)

Two lengthy and thought-provoking articles about parking are making the rounds this month, sparking what I hope will be a lot more thinking about, and innovative approaches toward, that mundane but ugly creature, the parking lot.

New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman, in "Paved But Still Alive: It's Time To Take Parking Lots Seriously, As Public Spaces," lists some astounding numbers: Estimates of the number of U.S. parking spaces range from 105 million to 2 billion, a third of them in parking lots. Eight parking places for every car in this country. Houston has 30 parking places per resident. If you estimate the country has 500 million parking spaces (as author Eran Ben-Joseph of MIT does), they cover a combined 3,590 square miles, an area larger than Delaware and Rhode Island put together.

Kimmelman writes about the so-called Pensacola Parking Syndrome (a term possibly coined by architect Andres Duany in Suburban Nation), in which a city tears down its old buildings to create parking spaces to entice more people downtown, until people no longer want to go there because it has become an empty lot. He suggests that more cities should set limits on the number of parking spaces and urges New York to abandon what he calls "outmoded zoning codes from the auto-boom days requiring specific ratios of parking spaces per housing unit, or per square foot of retail space." And he tells the interesting tale of the parking lot of the Dutchess County Mall in Fishkill, N.Y., and the planning firm Interboro. Well, you can read that yourself.

Longer, quirkier and even more interesting, is Dave Gardetta's "Between the Lines," in Los Angeles magazine. He has his own set of amazing stats, such as this:

In Los Angeles, at least, building a spot in an above-ground deck costs developers as much as $40,000 per parking spot. With an underground deck, it's more like $140,000 per space. And he makes the point, or at least, he lets UCLA planning professor and parking expert Donald Shoup make the point, that building so much parking for Disney Hall – space for 2,188 cars below ground, costing $110 million, paid with county bonds – was remarkably poor planning. "Like any parking lot entrance," Gardetta writes, "the one on Bunker Hill sucked air from street life. 'L.A.,' says Shoup, 'required 50 times more parking under Disney Hall than San Francisco would allow at their own hall.' "

It's a conundrum faced all over the country, and one Charlotte's planners wrestle with continually. When institutions such as churches, hospitals and schools locate in neighborhoods and especially when they grow, they build large surface parking lots and start gobbling the neighborhood. Squabbles over lots and decks (but mostly lots) have erupted for years in Myers Park, Dilworth and, more recently, in Wilmore, where Greater Galilee Baptist Church wanted to expand and build a bigger parking lot.

Cities, including Charlotte, need to be leaders on this issue. That's tough, especially politically. People may say they love parks, but what really has the tightest grip on their hearts appears to be parking. Every one of us who drives seems to have an instinct to find The Best Parking Space, an impulse so powerful I think it must be hardwired into our brains, the search for the direct route and prime spot. I think it's related to the hardwiring that propels us to jaywalk instead of go to the corner to cross and to create goat-paths across the grass instead of taking a less convenient paved walk. Whatever it is, letting city neighborhoods be consumed by parking lots is terribly unwise.

But unlike New York or Los Angeles, which have extensive public transit systems, a Sun Belt city like Charlotte can't just assume that if parking becomes too inconvenient people will take the bus or the subway. Here, lousy parking can kill a business. Yet, as Kimmelman points out, many parking lots are built that then aren't full. Garages near the new Yankee Stadium, built over objections of Bronx neighbors, are never more than 60 percent full, even on game days, he reports.

I've long wondered if the city of Charlotte couldn't somehow create a parking deck revolving fund, to build decks (lined with businesses or apartments so they're not ugly; excellent examples to be found in Gateway Village on West Trade Street) that churches and offices and smaller businesses could share, as a way to cut down on surface parking lots. The city has helped large developments with parking decks, but that requires a big development; most of the city's development is much smaller-scale.

Decks are expensive. Surface lots aren't, except for buying the land to put them on. That's why the city needs to take the lead on building decks and using revenues to pay down construction costs, or maybe pay to improve transit. ("Free" parking isn't really free anyway, so why not make its cost more visible to users?) I'm not a banker or a developer so the aforementioned scheme probably has lots of holes in it. But smart, creative people could figure out a scheme that would work – IF we had city leaders willing to be out front on the issue.

I checked with Planning Director Debra Campbell to make sure the city hadn't already done some studies of the overall parking dilemma that I had missed. It hasn't. "We have revised some standards for certain areas and for certain districts," she answered, via e-mail. Surface lots are no longer allowed as a primary use in areas zoned UMUD (the uptown mixed-use district), for instance. Transit areas have lower parking requirements.

And, she said, "We may look at this issue [parking] pending the results of a project we are calling the Zoning Ordinance Assessment that will be launched this summer."

Why greenways matter

2012-01-10T15:04:00.003-05:00

UNCC student Jamie Prince and her dog, Tolstoy

I took a brisk walk today on the Ruth G. Shaw Trail along the Toby Creek Greenway through the UNC Charlotte campus. It was part of my job. Really. I was taking photos of the greenway for an article we'll be publishing, with luck this week. (Update: It's now posted here.)

It was warm-ish for January, and as I walked to where the trail intersects with the Mallard Creek Greenway I saw runners, bicyclers, one skateboarder, and a woman with a child in a stroller. Except for roller skates and hand-powered wheelchairs, I think I saw just about every non-motorized mode of transportation. Which makes the point: Greenways are a transportation venue as well as a recreation venue. If I had had the time and inclination, I could have used the greenway to head south instead of north and I'd have arrived at N.C. 49, aka University City Boulevard, at a light where I could have crossed to get to the strip shopping center at Harris Boulevard which has many useful businesses: grocery, drug store, bank, restaurants, etc.

Greenways are good for exercise and recreation, and most of the people I saw today were using it that way. But they're also a good way to get from one place to another without using gasoline or creating carbon emissions. In the University City area and other suburban-developed places that lack sidewalks and pedestrian crossings and lights, greenways can provide essential, off-road walkways and bikeways.

But while the Mecklenburg County greenway system (sections of which are part of the larger Carolina Thread Trail) are welcome and much-needed, here's something that makes me sad. Most of the greenways run alongside creeks, on land that A) is difficult to develop anyway, and B) parallels the county sewer system's sewage lines. That leads to unpleasant sights such as this one:

Pipe crosses Mallard Creek near the Toby Creek Greenway

This is a sewer pipe that crosses Mallard Creek just below the spot where the Shaw trail intersects the Mallard Creek trail. It's not a pleasant sight, especially with the debris clogged against the column holding the pipe up. The many raised concrete cylinders holding manholes along the Shaw trail don't exactly make one's heart soar, either. It all makes me wish that the county and its taxpayers valued greenways enough to find the money to build more of them through places where our sewer system isn't quite so noticeable. Not that I'm not grateful for what we have ... just wishing.

(One more greenway note: In watching Showtime's series "Homeland," filmed in and around Charlotte, I noted that one key scene, in which one important character kills someone, appears to have been filmed in one of the spots along the new Little Sugar Creek Greenway near uptown, where the path goes through a concrete tunnel under a street. Given the nature of the scene, it's clear the spot was chosen for its eerie sense of being a concrete-flanked, urban no-mans'-land. I had to muse over the situation: We Charlotteans are celebrating the arrival of our wonderful new uptown greenway, yet an out-of-town location scout has chosen a piece of it for a scene of creepy ugliness. Hmmm.)

Is sustainability for Commies?

2012-01-05T12:36:00.017-05:00

Here's something I keep wondering: If you drew a Venn diagram with one circle being people who say they believe free markets need little intervention and that government has no business telling people what to do with their property, and another circle being people who think there's a liberal conspiracy to force apartment buildings and stores into suburban residential neighborhoods now restricted to single-family houses on large lots, how big would be the part of the Venn diagram where the two sets overlap?

My guess: Huge.

Somehow some people have gotten the idea that land in a city (and suburbs) would, if left to the natural laws of economics, shape itself into quarter-acre and half-acre lots with one house sitting in the middle. They don't seem to get it: Valuable land, without zoning restrictions, would attract higher income-producing uses. Apartment buildings. Stores. Office towers. It's government intervention that is keeping all those high-priced neighborhoods near Charlotte's SouthPark mall as single-family homes. Large-lot subdivisions are often built in times and places where that's considered the highest and best use (to use real estate speak) of the dirt. But as cities evolve, a lot of those neighborhoods hold land that becomes more valuable for other uses. Examples: Myers Park, Dilworth, Elizabeth, Barclay Downs. Keeping those valuable areas zoned for single-family residential may or may not be wise public policy – that's a debate for another day – but it's clearly not letting the free market have its way. So why have some parts of the tin-foil cap crowd decided that efforts to build more high-density neighborhoods, i.e. "sustainable development," is a global socialist plot using a U.N. policy called Agenda 21 to co-opt municipal governments all over America?

Think about it: Wouldn't big-government socialists be the ones wanting regulations to override private ownership, via single-family-housing zoning?

It's part of a larger mystery.

Why did preserving the environment come to be seen as "liberal" instead of just, well, smart? Seems to me the liberal-conservative battles ought to be fought over the best methods with which to ensure resources aren't depleted and water and air remain clean. After all, those things are important necessities for human life, not to mention long-term local and national economic health. Some would argue government regulations are the best method. Others would argue that regulations don't work, or aren't enforced, or that a private market approach works better, as in cap-and-trade programs. But why would anyone argue that to be a true conservative you shouldn't care about the environment?

After all, the environmental movement has had plenty of Republican champions, including President Richard Nixon. Former N.C. Govs. Jim Martin and Jim Holshouser and Charlotte's long-time U.S. Rep. Alex McMillan are all Republicans who understood the importance of conserving land and using government to try to ensure clean air and water.

Indeed, after Republican City Council member Edwin Peacock III, who chaired the council's Environment Committee, lost his seat in November, I called longtime Charlotte environmental activist Rick Roti to get his sense of Peacock's role. "He has been, especially for a Republican, a more balanced leader," Roti said. Understand, Roti doesn't just blindly compliment politicians. He has served on multiple stakeholder committees, chaired the Charlotte Tree Advisory Commission and is now president of the nonprofit Charlotte Public Tree Fund. He has seen the sausage being made, from up close, and probably has psychic scars to prove it.

So what I'm about to say probably betrays my own inadvertent stereotyping. Out of routine, I asked Roti what party he was in. "Republican," he said. "People are often surprised when I tell them that." Uh, yep.

He favors Republican financial policies, he said. "When it comes to the environment, they're [the Republican party] not where where they need to be."

What does this have to do with sustainable development and Agenda 21? Only this: One of the key goals underpinning advocacy of sustainable development is to improve and protect the environment by helping people live in ways that use less energy: Less driving, more walking and bicycling and transit. Living closer together, to save building energy and make transit easier (see the part about less driving). Of course, one hugely important reason to do this, in addition to saving a lot of money and energy, is to try to combat human-caused global climate change. But for some reason, that, too, has become a red-blue litmus test. If you believe the world's climate scientists, you must be a liberal elitist.

Again, it seems to me the liberals and conservatives ought to be arguing over what's the best way to fight climate change, not about whether it exists.

Here's a final thought about the relationship between sustainable development, and policies, and politics. It's in an op-ed in the Boston Globe, "A frugal answer to zoning pitfalls, needlessly slashed," in which Paul McMorrow, an associate editor at CommonWealth magazine, writes about the congressional move to de-fund an Obama initiative, the Sustainable Communities program. Lodged in Housing and Urban Development, the program was trying to get multiple federal agencies – EPA, HUD and the Department of Transportation – to work more efficiently together and to promote policies to curb sprawling development. (Clarification, 1/6/12: I consulted with officials in the HUD Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, which coordinates federal policy with DOT and the EPA. They say the office remains very much alive, as is the Partnership for Sustainable Communities, the collaboration among the three agencies. What lost funding is the grants program, which in 2011 awarded a $5 million regional planning grant to the Charlotte region, among $96 million in regional planning and community challenge grants around the country.)

McMorrow notes that sprawl is fiscally wasteful for governments: "If we’re going to build new homes and businesses anyway, we should at least construct them in a way that’s not deliberately wasteful," he writes. "This wastefulness applies to the open space that sprawl consumes, as well as the enormous cost of developing and maintaining the infrastructure serving new suburbs and exurbs."

Locust beer and scuppernong petards

2012-01-05T11:12:00.002-05:00

An article about locust beer on the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute's website – Ruth Ann Grissom's Locust trees (and locust beer) from Nov. 10 – brought this intriguing reminiscence from reader Richard Lasater of Raleigh, recalling other Tar Heel wine-making from years gone by. Lasater's emailed note:

I’m from Durham and most of my grandfather’s generation had been raised in the country and went to Durham to keep from being farmers. He was a great fan of making locust beer

and other folk beverages. According to my father, locust beer was only slightly alcoholic, but was fizzy from fermentation. Usually, men were the beer- and wine-makers.

North Carolina voted for Prohibition by county before WWI. When temperatures dropped into the teens, people would set out locust beer (and scuppernong wine) in shallow pans on the porch overnight to freeze. The frozen slush was then put into cheesecloth and suspended over a pan. All of the alcohol would drip out first, producing a very potent brandy. This is called freeze separation.

Pod from honey locust, used for beer

Back then, nobody had home freezers. My father said that every house in the neighborhood would be freezing locust beer or wine on a very cold night. I have read that this is also done by French Canadians using red wine or fermented maple sap. Supposedly, freeze separation doesn’t separate out the unwanted “fusel oils” that can be removed during distillation (save only the middle part of the distillate) which will cause hangovers.

My other grandmother ran a boarding house and bought chickens, butter and eggs from a farm family behind what’s now Northern Hill School on Roxboro Road. Pearl and Sam Moore had the biggest scuppernong arbor that I’ve ever seen. When I was very small, I couldn’t reach around the main vine. My grandfather would make a batch of scuppernong wine every fall using a stoneware churn. He would put a weighted plate on top of the fermenting grapes to keep out air until fermentation had stopped.

Pearl made “roasting ear wine” by taking a lot of fresh corn cobs and packing them in a stoneware churn. She would cut off the corn kernels, but not scrape the cobs. She would then fill the churn with boiling water and cover it with cheesecloth until fermentation started. Then she would put a weighted plate on the top until it quit working. The end result was clear as water, but strong! The wine was then bottled.

One year, our family had to go to Baltimore suddenly because of a family emergency. My grandfather’s wine was in mid-ferment Someone told him that if he could cover the churn and keep out air after it quit fermenting, the wine wouldn’t turn to vinegar. He cut a piece out of an automobile inner tube that had an air valve in it and secured it over the churn’s mouth with string and wax. After pulling out the valve stem, he connected a piece of air hose and put the other end of the hose in a bucket of water. This let the carbon dioxide from the fermenting grapes bubble out but kept out air.

When they got back a week later, they entered a dark, very quiet house. They didn’t hear the gas bubbling up from the hose. When they cut on the kitchen light, they saw that a grape hull had floated and stuck in the hose, and the piece of inner tube had swollen like a balloon. You could see through it. My grandmother told my grandfather that she wasn’t going into the kitchen to cook until he defused his bomb. When he touched it, it burst, throwing grape hulls and wine everywhere. There were grapes stuck to the ceiling. All wine-making was thereafter banished to the coal shed.

Photo from Ruth Ann Grissom

Why Charlotte needs that 'noose' study

2011-12-15T17:44:00.000-05:00

As expected, the Charlotte City Council on Monday approved the measure to allow a study of the uptown loop and all its interchanges. As I wrote in Time to neuter that noose around uptown Charlotte? the idea to put a cap onto part of Interstate 277 (leaving the highway there, but creating usable space above it) has been proposed since at least 1997.

During discussions for the Center City 2020 Vision Plan, the idea was broached of converting the section of the loop at the north end of uptown into a boulevard, although the final plan only recommended further study.

I checked with Charlotte Department of Transportation's manager of planning and design, Norm Steinman, about the I-277/I-77 study. He pointed out that the study – which might or might not end up making recommendations for a freeway cap or boulevardization – is needed for a more essential reason. It's been at least 40 years since the I-277 loop was designed, with its early alignment concepts more than 50 years old. "Obviously," he said in an email, "a lot of growth has happened since then." The NCDOT and the Federal Highway Administration essentially have said no more changes can happen to any of the I-277 interchanges without a study.

"For the first time in 50 years we're taking a look at what should be done," Steinman told me.

I have in my possession a copy of the 1960 master highway transportation plan for the city of Charlotte, prepared by Wilbur Smith and Associates. It shows the route for I-77 and for a loop around uptown a lot like what eventually opened in the 1980s. (It also shows the Independence Boulevard Freeway, which remains unfinished. Gee.)

Atop this blog is a not-great-quality cellphone photo of that map. Notice how similar it looks to today's configuration. The study is dated April 1960, so the designs for I-277 must be more than 50 years old. Goodness knows how old the original concept is.

Another highway-street design tidbit: Monday night the council also OK'd a "roadway classification study" for the Brookshire Boulevard and W.T. Harris Boulevard. This is deep in the weeds of transportation policy, but it could be potentially significant. The classification for roadways affects lane widths, speed limits and whether, for instance, they'd have bicycle lanes and sidewalks, which aren't appropriate along a freeway. The study is necessary, the agenda says, because these two roadways today contain a variety of different roadway classifications, and "are being affected by discrete land development and transportation investment decisions."

And, let me add, both are high-volume city corridors that, today, look like highways but cut through neighborhood and commercial areas that maybe would be healthier if they weren't next to freeway-style highways? But that's just me ....

The huge significance of the Red Line proposal

2011-12-13T16:19:00.009-05:00

MOORESVILLE – "Revolutionary is not too strong a word for plans being laid out today to a room full of government officials, consultants and interested laypeople. We're at a "summit" to discuss ideas for reviving a long-stalled proposal to build a commuter rail line to Iredell County.

For starters, the plan involves regional cooperation. Second, the current public money crunch has forced a creative new way of thinking about transportation financing.

Even for a region that's had plenty of regional "discussions" for decades, what's being proposed is a major leap forward for working across county boundaries. The complicated proposal depends, in part, on seven governmental bodies agreeing to form a new legal entity, called a joint powers authority. Members would be Mecklenburg and Iredell counties, and Charlotte, Huntersville, Cornelius, Davidson and Mooresville.(The JPA wouldn't have taxing authority.)

Not since the great Mecklenburg annexation/spheres of influence agreements of the 1980s and the formation of the Mecklenburg-only Metropolitan Transit Commission in the 1990s have so many local governments been asked to come to a formal, legal agreement of this sort. And this time the agreement must cross county lines. That's a rare proposition around here, where crossing the county line can put you into a place with an entirely different political culture, and where most of the counties outside Mecklenburg harbor, if not fear, then at least wariness of Charlotte's behemoth footprint.

But if there's to be any hope of prudently guiding this huge and sprawling metro region away from financially unsupportable growth, it's going to have to come with a large dose of inter-county cooperation. The choices at hand are these: Cooperate, and continue to progress? Or maintain geographic silos and find the region bypassed by other, more cooperative metro regions?

Viewed that way, what happens to the Red Line proposal could well be a harbinger of the region's future.

The other reason today's summit and the Red Line plan carries major significance is this: For the first time since the 1998 transit sales tax campaign, the MTC and member governments are putting on their thinking caps about financing.

Here's a link to the slide show presentation Tuesday.

Until now, most people here pretty much figured transportation money – including roads, not just transit – would eternally flow down from the feds and the state. For transit, you'd also add in the local revenue stream from the half-cent sales tax, collected only in Mecklenburg. (Individual cities, of course, also use local tax money for local street projects that aren't part of the vast state road network.)

Even before the 2008 financial crash, it was starting to look as if the MTC couldn't build out its five-corridor plan in 25 years without more money than it could expect from the half-cent sales tax and expected state and federal funds. Since then, the recession and continuing high unemployment have battered the sales tax revenue. Until a year ago the MTC appeared to believe it had few options beyond delaying transit construction for decades, pushing for a politically unlikely sales tax increase or passively hoping the sales tax revived.

Finally, with help from the N.C. Department of Transportation and some savvy consultants, it has gotten smarter and more creative about finding money. They have looked around the country at other metro areas that are building transit systems. Two important words arose: Value capture.

That means recognizing that building infrastructure such as highways and transit lines makes nearby property more valuable. (It's why land speculators like to buy property 20 years before the state highway goes through.) Instead of letting public spending enrich private landowners with little monetary benefit to the public, why not "capture" some of that increased value for public purposes?

A value-capture set-up would use some of the new, higher tax revenues from the now-more-valuable property to pay off bonds sold to build those same infrastructure improvements. The Washington Metro, the Dallas Area Rapid Transit System and the Portland, Ore., streetcar system have all used value capture in their construction.

The Red Line plan proposes two value-capture techniques. One is tax-increment financing (TIF) – using some of the expected higher property taxes to pay off bonds. Another is a special assessment district, formed when a majority of the income-producing property owners (i.e. not owner-occupied residential homes) along the Red Line rail line agree to an extra property tax (.75 per $100 in assessed property value is what's been proposed). Most of that tax revenue would help fund construction, but 25 percent would go to the general fund of the local governments.

The proposals laid out today must undergo weeks of examination and discussion among elected officials before any decisions. And nothing is certain. For instance, Iredell County is a key player, yet not one Iredell County commissioner was at today's meeting in Mooresville. All other affected elected bodies had representatives in the room. What does that mean for the proposal's chances?

But even if the proposal ultimately fails, the precedents it's setting, in pushing for smarter transit financing and in pushing for cross-county cooperation, will have far-reaching resonance.

Time to neuter that noose around uptown Charlotte?

2011-12-12T14:02:00.003-05:00

Is Charlotte finally making a move toward taming the uptown noose – I mean, the uptown loop? The freeway encircling uptown, made up of Interstate 277 and a section of Interstate 77, strangles uptown, eliminating easy pedestrian and bicycle connections and creating bottlenecks for traffic flow into and out of the center city.

It was Feb. 15, 1997, (but who's counting?) when I first heard the idea to cap the below-grade section of I-277 between South End and the south part of the center city. The idea keeps being proposed, and being dismissed as too expensive, or too difficult. But it's a great idea that deserves serious study.

Now, at last, something may be happening. The Charlotte City Council tonight is supposed to vote on an agreement with the N.C. Department of Transportation to launch a study of the whole uptown freeway loop. Here's a link to the city council agenda. Go to agenda page 19.

Despite misgivings, capping a freeway, or more precisely, sending it through a tunnel, is comparatively inexpensive and has been done in many other cities. It's neither revolutionary nor extreme. It is NOT as expensive as digging a tunnel, a la Big Dig in Boston. The digging took place years ago, before I-277 opened in the 1980s.

Other cities are going further, pushing to turn old freeways into high-volume boulevards, which can move plenty of traffic but are designed so that shops, restaurants, housing and workplaces can grow along their sidewalks. The classic example of a high-volume boulevard is the Champs Elysees in Paris. Here's a list of other projects, some still in planning phases.

Uptown needs better connections to neighborhoods around it, and this includes street connections. If you ever drive in from south Charlotte on a weekday morning you'll probably hit a tie-up on Providence Road as it nears uptown, and on Third-Fourth streets or Seventh Street. You may wish longingly for more connecting streets into uptown, which would divert some of the traffic load onto those other streets. (Morehead usually isn't as crowded, nor is Stonewall, but they apparently are too far from the center of uptown to get as much of the traffic load.) We could use more connections via Second (MLK Boulevard), Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Ninth streets, but I-277 and its spaghetti bowl interchanges block those possibilities.

Back to the freeway cap: I know the date was Feb. 15, 1997, because I first heard the idea at an all-day workshop organized by the old Charlotte Urban Forum public interest group. Open to the public, the event was to draw up possibilities for redesigning uptown. The impetus was an ill-considered plan to build a new arena uptown (that part was OK) and "development," drawings for which resembled a suburban shopping mall plopped into the city.

The workshop had no official purpose, but we did get then-Mayor Pat McCrory to drop by, as well as some planning commission officials (the commission was one of the sponsors) and some of the developers and uptown boosters calling themselves 24-Uptown Partners. The Partners' goal was to build that arena and shopping center-esque "entertainment complex" – well-intended but clumsily suburban in its proposed execution.
In order to write the preceding paragraph, I looked back at the 1997 articles I wrote for the Charlotte Observer and spotted some interesting notes of what had been proposed at that workshop. How about the idea of a NASCAR museum? Hmmm. That may fall in the category of "be careful what you wish for., because you may get it." The list contains so many projects that were built in the next 10 years that in hindsight I wonder how many of the architects and developers there already knew what they were planning?

Among the other discussion topics were, and I warn you that these will sound familiar:

• Put more housing uptown.

• Mix uses, not just on the same block, but within a building, so that the vacant areas of uptown fill with five- or six-story buildings with retail space on the street, offices above, and housing above that.

• Expand the trolley system.

But here's a list of some of the ideas that, at the time, I characterized as not among the predictable ones:

• Bury I-277 where it crosses South Tryon and fill the land created atop it with mixed-use, five-or six-story buildings.
• A NASCAR Museum next to the NFL stadium, with condos topping the museum. [The NASCAR Hall of Fame opened on Brevard Street in 2010, and has drawn far fewer visitors than projected, losing money.]

• Put housing back into Second Ward, where the old Brooklyn neighborhood was demolished for urban renewal. [A development deal to do this stalled after the crash of 2008.]
• Move the Amtrak station from North Tryon to West Trade. [This is in N.C. DOT rail plans.]• Put a convention hotel next to I-277. [Done.]
• Convert the old convention center to a museum or city market. [Old convention center was demolished to build the EpiCentre, a slightly more urban-style entertainment complex than was envisioned in 1997. It's tied up in an acrimonious bankruptcy case.]• Rehabilitate the Carolina Theatre.[Not done. But not demolished, either.]
• Concentrate retail on South Tryon Street. [Other than art museum gift shops, little retail beyond restaurants has come to South Tryon Street.]
• Build a zoo. [Insert quip of your choice here.]

In looking at my 1997 articles I noticed that other sponsors of the workshop were the UNC Charlotte College of Architecture, the Charlotte chapter of the American Institute of Architects, and the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, my current employer.

Charlotte transit plan makeover goes beyond cosmetic surgery

2011-12-02T10:52:00.003-05:00

The stalled-for-years proposal to build a commuter rail line from downtown Charlotte north to the booming suburban towns of Huntersville, Cornelius, Davidson and Mooresville is getting a significant makeover, not just cosmetic surgery. The state and local officials involved are looking to find funding with freight-oriented development, a sort of cousin to the more widely recognized transit-oriented development (a.k.a. TOD).

The project has been stalled because it hasn't qualified for federal funding, which typically pays half the cost of a transit line. After years of patiently sitting by, towns in northern Mecklenburg County and Mooresville in Iredell County formed the Lake Norman Transportation Commission, which succeeded in kick-starting a fresh look at the so-called Red Line (which honors the Davidson College school color).

A Wednesday meeting of the Metropolitan Transit Commission heard a detailed presentation of the financing plans. I couldn't make it, but here are several looks at the presentation: The Charlotte Business Journal's Erik Spanberg "Red Line rolls toward 2012 vote" and DavidsonNews.net/CorneliusNews.net's Christina Ritchie Rogers' "Homeowners won't see tax hike in Red Line plans, consultants say."

Here's a link to the various presentations and handouts from the MTC meeting.

Nothing's been decided yet, of course. The Lake Norman Transportation Commission will hold a four-hour summit on the proposal Dec. 13 in Mooresville (10 a.m.-2 p.m. at the Charles Mack Citizens Center, 215 N. Main St.).

Then the different governments, who'd have to agree to create a joint powers authority, must study the proposal and decide whether to opt in. From my observations, I'd predict Charlotte, Mecklenburg County and the Mecklenburg towns are on board. The trickier discussions will be in Mooresville and Iredell County. Although many in Mooresville have favored the transit idea, Iredell County commissioners have traditionally been wary of anything that might be viewed as a tax increase.

This proposal would create a sort of self-imposed tax assessment on owners of income-producing property (that is, not residential property) along the line. A part of the tax revenue from the new development would be used to help pay the costs of the rail construction. A portion of the new tax revenue generated from rail-related development would go to local general funds. ~~This proposal would create a sort of self-imposed tax increase on property owners along the line, although it would send a proportion of those extra revenues into local general funds.~~ (2:50 p.m.: Wording refinement on details of the proposal.)

Adding the freight proposal, which takes advantage of a national boom in freight rail fed by rising gas prices rise and freeway congestion, makes the Red Line plan more clearly an economic development maneuver. Luring freight-oriented industry might be a strategy Iredell leaders can be comfortable with, as opposed to simply building a commuter rail line that will draw more Charlotte-bound workers, which will bring homes and children needing county-funded services.

Like the $5 million regional HUD planning grant, the Red Line joint powers authority proposal is one more example of the need to treat the Charlotte region as more than a disconnected set of individual governments, but as, well, a region.

Did rogue columnist hit, or miss, in Charlotte critique?

2011-11-29T17:55:00.000-05:00

Reading the happy Tweets out of Charlotte this afternoon, as the Chiquita headquarters announcement came through, I stumbled on a link from former Charlotte Observer business editor Jon Talton, who decamped years ago for Phoenix and Seattle. Talton always had an astute, if acerbic, analysis on Charlotte and its civic pride (or boosterism, take your pick).

After Talton (@jontalton) sent out this Tweet: "Chiquita: Say goodbye to world-class symphony, museums, architecture in #Cincinnati. Say hello to Waffle House," he started getting some replies from Charlotteans who didn't like seeing their city reduced to a Waffle House stereotype.

"That's kind of a harsh statement. Have you actually been to Charlotte?!" asked one Charlottean. Talton, of course, had lived here for years, though he confessed he rarely went outside the uptown beltway, because that gave him the "fantods." And his comeback to critics who said he was offending them and their city: "Oh, hell, I've been offending Charlotteans for years."

But Talton had an insightful, if gloomy, assessment of the relative merits of Chicago and Charlotte, in this 2009 piece, "Tales of Two Cities: What Chicago and Charlotte Say About The Future Of America." It contains a wonderful quote from Pericles, “All good things come to the city because of the city’s greatness,” and one characterization I'd take issue with. The Bank of America Corporate Center was not built in "one of downtown's most blighted areas."

But is Talton too gloomy about the long-term prospects of Charlotte and other postwar, Sun Belt cities, built as though 1965 and its gas prices would last forever? I fear he's right. And I hope he's wrong.

What's up with the federal courthouse?

2011-11-29T17:33:00.000-05:00

The majestic federal courthouse on West Trade Street, while stilled used by the federal courts, is owned by the City of Charlotte now. Monday night the City Council unanimously OK'd a change to the city's agreement with Queens University of Charlotte, which has an option to purchase the building.

The previous agreement was for Queens to use the building as a future law school. Now that the for-profit Charlotte School of Law has opened, Queens requested a change in the agreement to give the school more leeway in what it could use the building for.

The Charles R. Jonas Federal building, built in 1917 and expanded in 1934, is not a local historic landmark although by most definitions of the term it should be, given its role in such historic federal cases as Judge James McMillan's Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 1971. And the building also holds the only remaining courtroom that looks and feels like a courtroom. Whatever happens, let us hope Queens honors its history and ambiance.

Here's a link to the council's agenda packet. The courthouse section is agenda item 18.

The U.S. General Services Administration plans eventually (I am not holding my breath) to build a new courthouse at 500 E. Trade Street, over in the part of uptown that has been steadily deadened with courthouses, the Federal Reserve building, the government center and the jail. Not much room over there for many uses that will help create lively sidewalks along East Trade or Fourth or Third Streets, other than Occupy Charlotte at Old City Hall (which if you take the long view is temporary) and the occasionally excellent people-watching in front of the new Mecklenburg County Courthouse way down at McDowell and Fourth streets.

City panel endorses bike-share demo program for DNC

2011-11-28T14:02:00.001-05:00

A Charlotte City Council committee today is expected to recommend whether the city should start work on launching a bike-sharing program for uptown, as a demonstration project during the Democratic National Convention in September 2012.

City Department of Transportation staffer Dan Gallagher was to give the Transportation and Planning Committee a presentation at its noon meeting today. Here's a link to Gallagher's PowerPoint presentation. City staffers are recommending that the city collaborate with partners on a demo project (estimated time to launch is six months) and spend the next eight months on a feasibility study to let the city transition to an ongoing bike share program, assuming the program is deemed feasible.

The council has been talking about this idea since at least August. Here's my August report. And here's the report from September, when it was on the committee's agenda, but the committee spent so much time discussing transportation funding that it had to postpone bike-sharing.
~~I'll update this when I get a report on what the committee opts to recommend to the full council.~~

Update: The committee voted to have staff proceed with planning for the demonstration project and continue to work on feasibility planning for an ongoing bike-share program. The other two options on the PowerPoint, involving longer-term studies, didn't win the committee's endorsement. Gallagher said the full council will be briefed on the bike-share proposals at a dinner meeting in the future.

Charlotte area snags $5 million regional grant

2011-11-21T15:17:00.007-05:00

Rebecca Yarbrough of Centralina COG, with check

It was just a bit of horseplay at Monday morning's announcement that the 14-county Charlotte region won a $4.9 million federal grant for sustainability planning. But it was a metaphor for one of the historic hurdles that the initiative may at last be able to overcome.

As always a Big Fake Check was on display for photo opps, and after the ceremonial presentation, Charlotte Mayor Pro Tem Patrick Cannon made a jokingly fake attempt to stash the $5 million check in his coat pocket. Martha Sue Hall, the Albemarle City Council member who chairs the Centralina Council of Governments, the lead agency that pulled together the grant application, wrestled the big check out of Cannon's grasp. Everyone laughed at the light moment.

But of course, even if inadvertently, it exemplified the fear communities outside Charlotte have: that the region's big city will take most of the pie, leaving smaller places with just a few crumbs. [Never mind that on a per capita basis, many state and federal expenditures give large urban areas short shrift.] That fear, and the lack of trust that resources will be shared judiciously rather than snatched and hoarded, is one of many dynamics that make attempts at regionalism tough, no matter where you are. My article last week for Citiwire.net, "Regionalism: Wonky but Real," explores the issue of urban regions more thoroughly. A longer version, with more Charlotte and N.C. information, ran on the website of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, where I work, www.ui.uncc.edu. ~~(That site is down for tinkering today and tomorrow. Check it out later this week.)~~

The grant dwarfs the $1.6 million each won last year by two other N.C. regions, the Piedmont Triad (Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point) and the Asheville-area Land of the Sky. Other N.C. grant winners announced Monday were the Wilmington region, $1.1 million, and the City of High Point, $240,000 for a new downtown plan. The only larger grants than Charlotte's announced Monday were $4.9 million to the San Francisco Bay area and $5 million to a 13-county area in northern New Jersey.

Unless you're a regional planner, by now your eyes are probably glazing over at the idea of a "regional plan" among 10 N.C. and 4 S.C. counties. It all probably seems remote from what you do every day. But it isn't. Think about it. Throughout the Charlotte region people routinely cross city, county and state lines in the Charlotte region. We all drink water from rivers that flow through many jurisdictions and that sometimes hold cities' treated waste water. The air we breathe flows invisibly (we hope!) across the landscape. People live in one place and work in another – if they are lucky enough to have jobs.

In other words, plenty of things that affect all of us daily – jobs, our water and air, farmland preservation, traffic congestion and the availability, or not, of transit or walkable/bikable routes – need to be approached regionally, not city council by city council or county board by county board.

The grant won't solve all those problems of course. But the intent is to build on some work that started in 2007, which you probably never heard about. A 17-county bi-state group began hashing out a series of regional goals in the areas of economic development, the environment, growth, education, and so on. They include aiming for well-managed growth; for improving air and water quality and protecting wildlife, trees and rural areas; for improving social equity and inclusion, for collaborative approaches to economic development; for collaboration on educational initiatives, etc.

Those goals are laudable, but essentially they are just the result of a lot of conversations among a lot of people over several years, i.e., not backed by specific data. The grant will translate that large vision into an implementable plan, using yet-to-be-devised performance metrics. In other words, as the COG's Rebecca Yarbrough put it, they're now switching from anecdotal evidence to getting metrics for what represents sustainable growth for the whole region. It isn't implementing anything, but trying to continue the difficult work of getting a lot of different people with different interests to pull together on common goals, using commonly shared and trusted information.

The grant is from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, a partnership among HUD, the EPA and the U.S. Department of Transportation. The partnership works to get the three branches of the U.S. government to working together instead of, as sometimes happens, at cross purposes.

(Disclosure: The the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, where I work, is a partner in the grant, and will get $179,000 for research to provide those metrics. The UNCC Metropolitan Studies program, which houses the institute, will get $253,000 for a regional affordable housing market study. The UNCC Urban Design Program in the School of Architecture will get $46,000 to help provide urban design guidance to the plan.)

More than 100 public and private sector partners will work on the process, but the core partners on the grant are: the Catawba Regional Council of Governments, UNC Charlotte, The Lee Institute, Urban Land Institute, Mecklenburg County CONNECT council, City of Charlotte CONNECT council, Charlotte Housing Authority, Regional Workforce Alliance, Charlotte Regional Partnership CONNECT council, Johnson C. Smith University and Winthrop University.

Why cities need Republicans

2011-11-11T15:23:00.003-05:00

When a Wake County district school board election is being hailed nationally as evidence that the whole Tea Party movement is defunct, as in this not-at-all-objective piece from the Huffington Post, you know the hyperbole is hyper, indeed. Should the Charlotte City Council election be considered another piece of evidence that Republican power is withering nationally?

I am not at all sure it should be. Nevertheless, it's still worth pondering the implications of moderate Republican Edwin Peacock's loss in a Democratic sweep of all four at-large positions. In addition to Mayor Anthony Foxx, Democrats will have a 9-2 edge, with district representatives Andy Dulin (District 6) and Warren Cooksey (District 7) the council's only Republicans.

I sought the thoughts of a well-known local political observer, Bill McCoy, a political scientist who handily for me is the emeritus director of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, where I work. "I don’t remember anything like a 9-2 split on City Council," McCoy said. "I was totally surprised that Peacock lost."

He went on to say this, about such a heavily Democratic council: "Although I might fall in the category of a yellow dog Democrat, I believe a balance among the parties is a good thing, particularly when the other party has a person like Peacock – a great role model for what a moderate Republican should be like." Whether a "balance" has to be 6-5 or could be 7-4 or even 8-3 is debatable, he said, but 9-2 is beyond the pale for a "good balance."

Charlotte has become more Democratic-leaning in recent years, although Mecklenburg County commissioners are less so (5-4 Democrat-Republican). The legislative delegation is also mixed: 6-4 Democrat-Republican in the N.C. House, and 3-1 in the N.C. Senate, or 3-2 if you county Tommy Tucker, whose district is mostly in Union County.

McCoy's point is one I heard articulated in slightly different form at a roundtable discussion last month in New York, where the topic was urban regions and their relationships – political, economic and otherwise – with state governments. Sitting next to me was Joe McLaughlin, a former lobbyist, former adviser to Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell and now director of Temple University's Institute for Public Affairs in Philadelphia. As we all chewed over the issue, McLaughlin said that one overlooked need cities have is, as he put it, "rebuilding" the Republican Party in urban areas.

He elaborated on his thinking to me this week, sharing a 2003 paper he wrote which said, "Particularly in a competitive two-party state like Pennsylvania, Philadelphia benefits from having two viable parties; many big cities do not."

That reminded me of the oft-told story of how then-Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory, a Republican, and then-Mecklenburg County commissioners' chair Parks Helms, a Democrat, teamed up when they visited Washington to lobby for transit funds. McCrory courted the Republicans, Helms the Democrats.

In many states, large cities are viewed with suspicion or jealousy at the state level. Georgia legislators have been known to compare Atlanta to Sodom and Gomorrah. Last year two former presidents of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, ex-Mayors Manny Diaz of Miami and Greg Nickels of Seattle, told me they knew of no U.S. cities whose relationships with their states worked well. And of course we know the derisive term, "The Great State of Mecklenburg," has not vanished from the halls of Raleigh.

So it's important for urban regions to be able to speak with a unified voice on important topics such as transportation, economic development and the environment. If suburban jurisdictions are Republican-dominated and city ones are Democratic, that poses one more hurdle to a region's effectiveness at the state and federal levels.

Depending on how one defines "moderate," Peacock may well be the last of the moderate Republicans elected to a partisan office from Charlotte, a tradition that includes, among others, former Gov. Jim Martin, former U.S. Rep. Alex McMillan, former county commissioners Carla DuPuy, Tom Cox and Peacock's father, Ed Peacock, and former council members Velva Woollen, Lynn Wheeler and John Lassiter, to name just a few. (Whether some of today's conservative Republicans might be more moderate if the Republican Party itself hadn't veered strongly to the right is essentially unknowable.)

Finding ways for Democrats and Republicans to find common ground in solving common local problems remains important. But it's likely to get a lot harder.

Voters oust GOP, raise their own taxes

2011-11-09T17:18:00.002-05:00

Durham County voters OK'd a transit tax Tuesday

Tuesday's municipal elections in Charlotte and across the state offered some unexpected results, especially if one considers that the state legislature is dominated by conservative, anti-tax Republicans. Voters in four N.C. counties voted to tax themselves, with Durham voters opting for two new taxes, one for transit.

In Charlotte, voters re-elected Mayor Anthony Foxx, a Democrat, over a conservative Republican and political newcomer, Scott Stone. That wasn't unexpected. But voters swept into office all four Democratic candidates for at-large City Council seats, ousting moderate incumbent Republican Edwin Peacock III in favor of Claire Fallon, a planning commissioner and neighborhood activist, and Beth Pickering. Pickering had never run for office and just arrived in Charlotte five years ago from Denver, Colo.

That gives Democrats a 9-2 council majority, which I believe is more than at any time since the council went to districts in 1977. (Are any political historians out there to confirm or deny this?) The two lone Republicans, Andy Dulin and Warren Cooksey, didn't have Democratic opposition in their districts; Cooksey dispatched a Republican opponent in the primary.

But across the state, voters in four counties made a kind of history by agreeing to raise their own taxes, something that conventional political wisdom has said isn't likely during an economic downturn, or in a state that just last year sent to the General Assembly a slew of conservative Republicans.

A quick rundown:

– Durham County voters approved (about 60-40 percent) a half-cent sales tax for transit, making it the state's second county, after Mecklenburg in 1998, to do so. Voters in Orange County (Chapel Hill) and Wake (Raleigh) are expected to face similar ballot measures next year, with Orange voting in the spring and Wake sometime later. That should finally give the Triangle area a funding stream hefty enough to start building a long-awaited rail transit system of light rail and commuter rail.

– Durham County voters also OK'd (57 percent) a quarter-cent sales tax for education.

– Orange County passed a quarter-cent sales tax for school building improvements and economic development infrastructure. The county voters rejected the tax a year ago. This year it passed with almost 61 percent of the vote.

– Buncombe County voters approved a quarter-cent sales tax increase to pay for renovations and new buildings at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College.

– Montgomery County voters also approved a quarter-cent sales tax, for buildings at Montgomery County Schools and Montgomery Community College.

The N.C. Association of County Commissioners' website tally shows a clean sweep for those taxes for this year, with Cabarrus voters approving one in May, Halifax County in February. Compare that to 2010 results. The same quarter-cent sales tax was on the ballot in 23 counties at various times throughout that year. Of the nine votes before Nov. 3, seven were successful. Of those Nov. 2, all lost, including in Orange and Montgomery counties. Does this mean the Nov. 2, 2010, anti-tax fervor was a one-time blip? Or was Nov. 8, 2011, the oddball election?

Sales taxes, of course, are an easier sell to most taxpayers than other types of tax. Suzanne Leland, a UNC Charlotte associate professor of political science, tells me voters usually prefer sales taxes over income or – the most hated – property taxes. Sales taxes, as Leland and many others point out, disproportionately hurt low-income households, where a higher proportion of income has to go for necessities such as housing, transportation, food, etc. Nevertheless, many voters consider them a more fair way to assess a tax.

The problem of pedestrian crossings

2011-11-04T14:54:00.007-04:00

After a customer at an Elizabeth neighborhood bar was killed while crossing Seventh Street, the bar's owner is trying to begin a campaign to add safety measures to the street. (The Observer ran a moving article today on the life of the victim, an Air Force veteran who was engaged to marry.)

A safer Seventh Street is an excellent goal, but the problem is not just for one street in one neighborhood. In another accident late Tuesday, a 14-year-old boy was killed when several cars hit him as he crossed W.T. Harris Boulevard.

The city, to its credit, has been working hard to add sidewalks and tame traffic on many neighborhood streets and thoroughfares. But those measures, by themselves, aren't all that's needed to make conditions comfortable and safe for people traveling on foot. Pedestrian crossings are essential. Charlotte doesn't have enough of them.

In my possession is the 2008 draft of the City of Charlotte's Pedestrian Plan. It remains unfinished, and thus unadopted. One of the most interesting maps in it shows the distances between signalized intersections (click here for a larger view. If the link doesn't work, we're working on that.). Segments greater than a half-mile (a 10-minute walk) are shown in purple, those greater than a quarter-mile (a five-minute walk) are in brown.

Except for a nugget in the center of the map (uptown) the map is a snake-pit of brown and purple squiggles. And I know, from driving around and checking the odometer, that many signalized intersections are farther apart than a half-mile.

For instance, yesterday I used the odometer to check distances between signals (where one could safely cross) on heavily traveled Eastway Drive, North Tryon Street and University City Boulevard, all of them bus routes. I frequently see pedestrians perched on tiny concrete medians as cars whiz past, or crossing in front of cars, typically to get to bus stops on the other side. My findings:

Eastway Drive: From Central Avenue to Kilborne Drive, no signal for crossing for .9 mile. I saw two pedestrians in the median.
From Kilborne to Shamrock Drive, one-third of a mile between traffic signals.
From Shamrock Drive to the signal at Sugar Creek Road, at Garinger High, .4 mile but no pedestrian crosswalk at the light.
Sugar Creek to The Plaza, .4 mile.

North Tryon Street: From Old Concord Road to Tom Hunter Road (served by two bus routes), 1 mile.
From the newly opened I-85 Connector Road to University City Boulevard, a stretch served by two bus routes but with huge gaps in the sidewalk network, .5 mile.

University City Boulevard: No sidewalks from the light at North Tryon to the light at the Target near W.T. Harris Boulevard, no way to cross for .4 mile.

On first glance you'd say a five-minute walk to go 1/4 mile to a signal isn't so bad. But consider that you have to walk to the light, then back again if, for instance, you're trying to get across a busy street to get to a bus stop. Humans are not prudent, and most people resist walking 20 minutes out of their way just to cross the street. If the street looks clear, they will cross where they can.

I know trade-offs exist. The more pedestrian lights you have the slower traffic will flow. In spots where motorists aren't expecting to see a light they tend not to stop, even if the light is red. Pedestrians who believe they can safely cross might get hit. (Update 6:48 p.m. 11/4/11: One unfortunate example took place Thursday night, when a Davidson professor was badly injured when he was hit while in a pedestrian crosswalk.) (Update Nov. 13: The injured man died Nov. 11.)

I ran much of this past Malisa Mccreedy, the pedestrian program manager for the Charlotte Department of Transportation. She replied, via email: "Your effort to bring attention to pedestrian crossings is much appreciated. While the City has a history of working to address the inherited challenges of how our land use and road networks function, it is an ongoing balancing act." CDOT will focus anew on its Pedestrian Plan starting in 2012, she said.

Tell them where you really go

2011-11-01T14:45:00.002-04:00

Where do you really travel, and how do you get there, and how long does it take? The collection of transportation planning groups in the Charlotte metro area (a group I like to call the Seven Dwarfs), is undertaking a survey to learn more.

I learned this tidbit in reading the Oct. 28 memo to Charlotte City Council from City Manager Curt Walton. (This is why the world needs journalists; someone has to read these things and sort the chaff from the wheat. Whether this survey is chaff or wheat remains to be discovered.)

The memo reports:

Over the next few months, a sample of residents of Mecklenburg, Gaston, Union, Cabarrus, Iredell, Rowan, Cleveland, Lincoln, and Stanly counties in North Carolina and residents of York and Lancaster counties in South Carolina will be contacted by phone to participate in the regional household travel survey. ETC Institute, the firm conducting the random survey on behalf of the planning agencies, will be recruiting 4,000 households to participate based on geographic location, household income, and household size.

Households participating in the survey will have each household member keep a travel diary for one day. They will be asked to record the destination address, travel time, travel mode, and vehicle occupancy for their trips throughout the day. The travel diary results will be used to understand travel patterns, and specifically, how, when, and where people travel. All information collected is confidential and individual responses will not be released.

Wondering about the reference to Seven Dwarfs?

The memo goes on to list the multiple transportation planning agencies in the Charlotte region, saying, "This study was programmed by Mecklenburg-Union MPO (MUMPO), Cabarrus-Rowan MPO (CRMPO), Gaston Urban Area MPO (GUAMPO), Rock Hill-Fort Mill Transportation Study (RFATS), NCDOT, SCDOT, Rocky River RPO (RRRPO), and Lake Norman RPO (LNRPO)." Where's the seventh dwarf? That would be the Hickory-area MPO, also known as GHMPO.

Getting better information about how and where people travel is sound planning. If you worry that it's sort of Big Brotherish you don't have to take part in the survey. Plus, your cellphone is keeping a record of everywhere you go, anyway, courtesy of AT&T or Verizon or whoever.

But the larger point about transportation planning is this: How in the world can the Charlotte region think it is doing anything that is even in the same hemisphere as "sane transportation planning" while it is split among seven different planning groups, each jealously guarding its own projects and only one of them (MUMPO) shouldering the very real need for regional mass transit? Merge them all. Even consider – gasp! – merging transportation planning and the Charlotte regional land-planning agency, the Centralina Council of Governments. Many, many large and successful metro areas did that years ago. It's not a cure-all. But it's a smart start.

Charlotte Trolley to roll through new neighborhood?

2011-10-25T17:47:00.006-04:00

The nonprofit Charlotte Trolley has won a $15,000 grant from Wells Fargo to work toward putting historic Car 85 back on track, this time through the Wesley Heights neighborhood just northwest of uptown.

The organization hopes to start another demonstration project, like the one along South Boulevard that in the 1990s ignited enthusiasm for light rail. This time, the route would be the rail line adjacent to the Stewart Creek Greenway, said Charlotte Trolley board president Greg Pappanastos. It was the site of an original line of the former Piedmont & Northern electrified passenger railroad. Charlotte Trolley is exploring how it could use that still-existing pathway.

Here's why Charlotte Trolley's role is more than just that of a bunch of history and rail buffs.

As I wrote in a piece for Grist.org last year:

Back in the 1980s, many of top leaders of both political parties in Charlotte knew regional transit was needed. But any suggestions for taxes to fund it were DOA at the rural-dominated state legislature, whose permission was needed. Two barriers had to fall: Convincing a conservative electorate that transit wasn't a frill, and finding millions to build it.

Enter Charlotte Trolley, a volunteer group of rail buffs and enlightened developers who decided to restore an antique trolley car (found being used as a rental home outside Charlotte) and run it on an unused railbed near downtown. In 1996, after eight years of fundraisers, Charlotte Trolley launched a 1.8-mile ride, drawing throngs who loved the taste of old-fashioned streetcar travel. Keen-eyed developers built rail-oriented mixed-use projects, betting light rail service would follow.

Car 85, the last Charlotte streetcar to be put out to pasture in 1938, wasn't allowed to run on the Lynx Blue Line tracks for safety reasons and was put out to pasture again. The Charlotte Area Transit System, in a budget-cutting move, scrapped the trolley service that was using replica cars.

"Their [Wells Fargo's] support helps us pursue our mission to engage the community and put a vintage trolley back on tracks," Pappanastos said. "We're excited about the possibility of running historic Car 85 again, and believe we have a viable prospect for doing that on the city’s west side."

The group will hold a “Vision Launch” on Wednesday, Nov. 2, at the Trolley Museum to celebrate the Wells Fargo grant and kick off planning and neighborhood outreach for the new line.

A reminder for rail purists: A streetcar runs in the street. A trolley runs from an overhead electric wire. Sometimes a trolley is also a streetcar. But if it doesn't run in a street, it isn't.

(Disclosure: Until a few months ago my husband, Frank Barrows, was on the Charlotte Trolley board, an unpaid volunteer position.)

Suburbia, dissected

2011-10-24T16:56:00.003-04:00

Jason Griffiths writes a short essay, "Colonial Vista," to the suburban Colonial-style house he found in a subdivision in Charlotte – a style ubiquitous in these parts. It's part of his slide show on "Manifest Destiny: A Guide to the Essential Indifference of American Suburban Housing" on the online forum, Places.

Griffiths is an assistant professor of architecture at the Design School at Arizona State University, hence the prominence of Arizona landscapes in his slide show. He was in Charlotte a few years back, he reports, to help review work at UNC Charlotte. (Want his book? Here's a link.)

The Colonial-style of housing, he notes, is perhaps more appropriate in North Carolina (which was, for a time, an actual colony) than other places, but, he points out the oddity that "the most abject facade of this building enjoys the most commanding view while the actual front elevation is stubbornly fixated by an abbreviated prospect of the road and the house opposite."

What do they (the creatives) really want?

2011-10-21T14:03:00.005-04:00

What is that big armadillo-like edifice, and will it really attract the creative class to Kansas City, Mo.? Philip Langdon of the New Urban Network poses that question in his article, "Injecting spontaneity into urban development."

He writes: "I peered at The Atlantic’s photo of what Kansas City is building to lure the creatives, and thought for a moment I was viewing a gigantic armadillo. Oops, my mistake. The picture isn’t of an armadillo inflated to enormous size (though it certain looks like one). It’s the Kauffman Center, a $326 million performing arts facility [designed by architect Moshe Safdie] — purportedly a means for enticing talented young people to Missouri’s second-largest metropolis.

"Excuse me, but aren’t gigantic performing arts centers the sort of thing that cities were erecting thirty years ago? My understanding of the Richard Florida take on urban development is that bright young workers are less interested in vast cultural and entertainment institutions than in having access to stimulating everyday locales — places they can walk to from their workplaces or their homes."

I hope that message from Langdon and others can get more traction in Charlotte, where building big cultural institutions draws plenty of support and attention, (and don't get me wrong; I love the new Mint and Bechtler museums and Gantt Center uptown) but preserving "everyday locales" has gotten short shrift. The remaining walkable, everyday locales (Plaza-Central district, NoDa, Elizabeth, a few parts of Dilworth and by some measures the Q2P2 corner) have survived mostly out of neglect by large corporations and officialdom combined with strong neighborhood support.

The city even, for a time, had a plan to raze almost all the retail spots in the gentrifying Belmont neighborhood and build a suburban-style strip shopping center to replace the stores. Thank heavens that plan got scrapped in 2007 after then-Mayor Pat McCrory vetoed a 10-1 council vote. The next week the council voted 10-1 to study the proposal. (It had arisen without going through the council's committee system.) It's those small, human-scale retail spots that, when fixed up and cleaned up, become the spaces that neighborhood residents walk to - what Langdon termed "stimulating everyday locales." This city needs more of them.

And finally, a short word of thanks that our new arts campus uptown doesn't look like the Michelin Man mated with an armadillo. I don't know that anyone has completely fathomed what it takes to attract young artistic and creative residents. Maybe, in fact, they are looking for large Dasypus novemcinctus. But somehow I doubt it.

A planning and 'public input' dilemma

2011-10-20T16:20:00.001-04:00

Is it just me, or have others also been spotting an increasing trickle of articles that might be viewed as anti-planning. Consider this one: "The false hope of comprehensive planning," from Michael Lewyn, an assistant professor at Florida Coastal School of Law in Jacksonville, Fla., on the Planetizen.com website.

Lewyn uses the Jacksonville comprehensive plan to point out that a city plan can be a sprawl-promoter or a sprawl-fighter. The devil is in the details. Just having a comprehensive plan for your city doesn't mean your city will necessarily grow in a prudent way. This has been one of my concerns about Charlotte and much of this metro region. The city's plans say all kinds of wonderful things, but the underlying zoning ordinances allow much that the plans don't call for – examples being the very suburban-style, highway-oriented retail development along North Tryon Street, which has been a designated light rail corridor since 1998.

But how can planners even hope to do a good job of listening to their communities AND promoting sensible provisions for growth, when apparently the overwhelming majority of Americans don't want to see ANY development?

Andres Duany, the visionary architect and planner who was instrumental in founding New Urbanism and in changing the way many professionals write zoning codes and transportation plans, has been pooh-poohing the idea of too much public involvement, especially when the NIMBYs carry too much weight (not traditionally a problem in development-happy Charlotte, let me add). In this piece in January's Architect magazine he discusses the relative merits of top-down planning (more efficient) and bottom-up planning (involves people but takes a lot longer and is more expensive. Here is a counterpoint from Della Rucker, in NewGeography, who still trusts the public to know what's best in the end.
But what if the public really doesn't want any development at all? A survey from The Saint Index found that 79 percent of Americans said their hometown is fine the way it is or already over-developed. Some 86 percent of suburban Americans don't want new development in their community. The anti-development sentiment is the highest in six years of Saint Index surveys.

So if you try to involve the community and listen to what they want, do you end up with a plan that forbids growth? How smart is that? Should planners heed community wishes, even if they know what the community wants is impossible or imprudent? If the community wants cul-de-sacs and single-family subdivisions and no retail near where they live and also hates traffic congestion (the inevitable result of spread-out development that requires you to drive everywhere, and of cul-de-sac street patterns that funnel everyone onto a few arterials), what's a planner to do?

Duany used to say that people hate growth because for the past 50 years it's mostly been soul-searingly ugly and has, indeed, made life more unpleasant for the neighbors. I think he's onto something. When people today imagine "development" the image they have is big-box strip centers, single-family subdivisions, grassy and boring office parks or apartment complexes scattered around a site like dead earthworms. No wonder they're NIMBYs.

The challenge for planners, it seems, is first to educate people on the repercussions of their choices and then, to show them choices for other ways to develop: tree-lined urban streets, with shops and shop windows on the sidewalks, to choose one example. But the planners can't stop there. Step Three has to be to make sure the supporting ordinances and standards require the good and disallow the bad. Without Step Three, too many plans will, as Lewyn points out, produce development that pleases neither the planners nor the NIMBYs.

N.C.'s mayors: Who won, who's still campaigning?

2011-10-18T11:53:00.002-04:00

Courtesy of the N.C. Metropolitan Mayors Coalition, here's the skinny on mayoral elections so far this fall in N.C. cities:

Election results are in. Nancy McFarlane is the new mayor of Raleigh, and Raleigh voters passed bond referendums for transportation and housing. Cary Mayor Harold Weinbrecht and Monroe Mayor Bobby Kilgore each won re-election. Durham Mayor Bill Bell and Fayetteville Mayor Tony Chavonne won their primaries. Incumbent Greensboro Mayor Bill Knight will face off against City Council Member Robbie Perkins next month.

The following mayors will stand for election on Nov. 8: Apex Mayor Keith Weatherly, Burlington Mayor Ronnie Wall, Carrboro Mayor Mark Chilton, Chapel Hill Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt, Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx, Greenville Mayor Pat Dunn, Huntersville Mayor Jill Swain, Jacksonville Mayor Sammy Phillips, Salisbury Mayor Susan Kluttz and Wilmington Mayor Bill Saffo.

N.C. a gas-tax donor state? No more

2011-10-16T17:44:00.003-04:00

N.C policymakers for years complained justly that this is a net donor state when it comes to federal transportation taxes paid versus federal transportation money spent in the state.

A new analysis by the General Accounting Office of 2005-09, reported by Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, in “Can highway spending ever be fair?” finds that, when looking at how much federal highway money each state gets, per dollar of gas-tax revenue that the state’s motorists pay, it turns out every state gets more federal highway aid than it is paying. Here's a link to the GAO report.
“There’s not a state in the union where federally funded highways 'pay for themselves,’ ” Klein writes.

I’ve reproduced a map here (via a screenshot) from the GAO report and Klein's piece. If my count is correct, compared with other states North Carolina remains at a big disadvantage, although it gets $1.09 back for every $1 paid in. Only five states (Texas $1.03, Arizona, $1.07, Indiana $1.07, South Carolina and New Jersey, both at $1.08) get less. Two other states (Maryland and Colorado) also get $1.09.

Klein muses on whether highway spending can ever be "fair," in part because what's "fair" can be construed in different ways. And his commenters point out one of many reasons that's true: Northern states where hard freezes and salting damage the pavement will need more repair and maintenance money. (Tell that to New Jersey and Indiana.) But even if perfect fairness will always be elusive, for a state that is both geographically large as well as in the Top 10 most populous, it does seem that North Carolina has been on the losing end for too long.

Carroll Gray to leave N.Meck transportation group

2011-10-14T10:30:00.004-04:00

DavidsonNews.net tells us former Charlotte Chamber CEO Carroll Gray has told the Lake Norman Transportation Commission he'll leave the commission's executive director job at the end of this year. Gray, 71, of Cornelius helped launch and lead the regional lobbying group over the past three years. He told DavidsonNews.net he has mixed emotions about the decision, “but I think it’s time to move on.”
The LNTC has been effective in getting the long-planned and long-sidetracked proposal for commuter rail service from uptown Charlotte to Davidson (and possibly Mooresville) back into the mix for the Metropolitan Transit Commission, the group that oversees the Charlotte Area Transit System.

See my earlier posts on changes afoot in the strategy for funding the Red Line:
"Charlotte transit plans due for a makeover?"
and
"New strategy for transit to North Meck"

What's that P in APA? Hint: Not 'process'

2011-10-07T15:52:00.002-04:00

Journalists and planners share many interests – community wellbeing, policymaking and government, for instance – but here's one thing they don't share: A fascination with process. Most journalists I know get twitchy whenever people start talking about "the process" or about "creating a framework."

Maybe we shouldn't, because after all, the democratic process is just that. But truth is, process is tedious and all too often, an excuse for avoiding difficult or controversial decisions. Plus, it makes for boring coverage.

So it was music to the ears today to hear the national president of the American Planning Association, Raleigh's Planning Director Mitchell Silver, tell the state planning conference of the N.C. chapter of the APA that the P in APA should not stand for Process. "Very often people find comfort in process, not planning," he said.

His Friday morning talk, "The value of planning in the 21st century," was a rousing pep talk aimed at inspiring planners to start planning with a capital P, using plans to express their vision and values. "Sustainability," as a term, he said, has a shelf life, but its intent to support the economy, the environment and equity will live on because they've always been at the heart of the goals of planning. But planning evolves.

Fall back in love with planning, he urged the group. "This is the most exciting time to be in this profession."

I covered his talk via Twitter. (Silver is on Twitter as well, at @Mitchell_Silver.) So rather than blather on, I'll just offer up my Tweeting stream:

– APA Prez + RA Planning Director Mitchell Silver: The P in APA should not stand for Process.

– @Mitchell_Silver To NC planners: Fall back in love with planning. Take your comp plan out for a romantic dinner.

– This one I didn't Tweet because I got behind. But I would have said: People who say no to density are saying we don't want creative workers.

– China is graduating 20K planners a year.

– By 2030 NC will see 124% increase in people over 65.

– By 2015 in US 15.5 million ~~15.5 percent~~ of those 65+ will live in poor transit areas. (Corrected, via later information from Silver.)

– By 2030 US will have 22M excess single-family homes. (I.e. built but no buyers.)

– Do we still want to build "Polaroid" communities (suburban subdivisions) for a digital generation?

– If you want Gens Y and Z at your public meetings, gotta use social media.

– Wachovia Center in dntwn Raleigh = 90 times the tax value/acre of the average suburban subdivision.

Huntersville mayor’s a winner

2011-10-07T14:57:00.003-04:00

Huntersville Mayor Jill Swain won an award Thursday from the N.C. chapter of the American Planning Association for distinguished leadership by an elected official. The group held its annual statewide planning conference in Charlotte, Wednesday-Friday. Other awards for agencies in the greater Charlotte region:

Outstanding planning award for implementation (small community): Town of Davidson for its “Circles at 30” development at Exit 30 of Interstate 77.

Outstanding Planning Award for Implementation (large community): Iredell County for its land development code.

2011 Special Theme Award for community development: Town of Davidson for its affordable housing ordinance.

2011 Special Theme Award for sustainable community planning: City of Conover, for Conover Station, and the cities of Gastonia, Belmont and Bessemer City and the Gaston Urban Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (a.k.a. GUAMPO), for “Creating Opportunities for Active Living: An Action Plan to Promote Physical Activities in the Built Environment for Gastonia-Belmont-Bessemer City.”

The Town of Davidson won honorable mention for the Outstanding Planning Award for Comprehensive Planning (small community).

Not from this region, but the statewide winners for Outstanding Planning (large community) were the City of Raleigh’s 2030 Comprehensive Plan and the City of High Point for its University Area Plan.

Charlotte pedestrians - still waiting for that plan

2011-10-06T20:54:00.003-04:00

Wilson has one. Durham has one. Charlotte doesn’t. Yet.

Those other N.C. cities have eclipsed the state’s largest metro in this way, at least: They’ve adopted pedestrian p.lans, both in 2006, to shape the way their communities plan for people on foot as well as planning for cars. Charlotte’s proposed pedestrian plan has lagged for years, awaiting the city’s adoption of its Urban Street Design Guidelines – which took more than eight years to adopt as policy and then to codify in city ordinances – and then the re-adoption of its updated Transportation Action Plan.

To some extent that’s a reflection of the Charlotte Department of Transportation leaders' deciding to focus on the USDG – which faced strong opposition from a few influential developers of suburban-style projects – and to back-burner the ped plan.

Charlotte’s pedestrian advocate, Malisa Mccreedy, was one of the presenters Thursday afternoon at the state conference of the N.C. Chapter of the American Planning Association, taking place Wednesday-Friday in Charlotte. Mccreedy says the new goal is to get a Pedestrian Plan adopted by the end of 2012. And it's worth noting that even without a pedestrian plan, the city of Charlotte has pushed ahead with stronger programs to try to ensure that pedestrians' needs are considered along with those of motorists.

Planners from Durham and Wilson both described working with the UNC Highway Safety Research Center to analyze pedestrian-auto collisions. After the analysis, both cities made a top priority of reducing child pedestrian accidents. Durham’s Dale McKeel said his city has the highest rate of child pedestrian accidents per capita in the state.

Both also made the No. 2 priority to raise drivers’ awareness of pedestrians and drivers’ compliance with traffic laws. In other words, both education and enforcement of the laws are significant.

Charlotte's transit plans due for a make-over?

2011-09-29T17:52:00.001-04:00

It appears some basic assumptions about Charlotte's transit lines may be about to change.

One: The North Corridor transit line (formerly the Purple Line but now the Red Line) will be commuter rail on a little-used Norfolk Southern rail right-of-way leading from uptown to Mooresville in Iredell County.

Two: The Southeast Corridor (a.k.a. the Silver Line) will run down the center of Independence Boulevard from uptown to the Levine Campus of Central Piedmont Community College in Matthews. It's going to be bus rapid transit. Or maybe rail. In 2006 the Metropolitan Transit Commission agreed that BRT was the preferred alternative but it would wait at least five years to see if light rail made more sense by then.

But the governing body for transit in Mecklenburg County, the Metropolitan Transit Commission, heard two reports Wednesday night that contemplate changing both those assumptions. (My posting on the Red Line proposal. And my posting on the Silver Line proposal.) The MTC hasn't voted yet on either, but the discussion and questions didn't point to huge disagreements – at least not openly.

The problems, of course, stem from the MTC's diminished expectations for money. It can't afford to build and operate all five transit lines first envisioned in the mid-1990s.

The problem is especially acute for the Red Line, which has beaucoup ardent supporters in the north Mecklenburg towns of Huntersville, Cornelius and Davidson, who point out that the line is pretty much shovel-ready. Except for that pesky money thing. The new idea is borne of a strong push from the North Meck towns, who pooled their money and created the Lake Norman Transportation Commission, with former Charlotte Chamber CEO Carroll Gray as director. They've been strategically pushing political buttons and have succeeded in getting the attention of the N.C. Department of Transportation, among others.

Basically, they're looking for a strategy that will help find funding to make up for the lack of federal funding, which originally had been expected to pay 25 percent of the costs.

The new strategy: Position the rail line as "economic development," not just "carrying passengers." Be open to partnering with freight operations, which opens up new potential lending and other strategies. It's not "commuter rail," per se, but "rail." You've heard of TOD – transit-oriented development? Wednesday night there was talk of FOD – freight-oriented development.

For the Silver Line, the problem is also funding. This Southeast Corridor has been contentious. The vocal and organized neighborhood groups in East Charlotte have not been keen on the concept of any form of bus transit. Bus routes haven't been shown to perk up development the way rail does, although BRT supporters note that a fixed bus way is different from a changeable bus route on city streets. Hence the maybe-bus-maybe-rail position of the MTC.

But, as I and others have written, expecting any form of transit along Independence Boulevard to spark much pedestrian-friendly, close-knit transit-oriented development means closing your eyes to the reality of Independence. It's a freeway that barrels through miles of highway-oriented, suburban strip development. Unless someone plans to bulldoze miles of buildings and rebuild from the dirt up – which no one does, due to expense and the sheer impracticality of that notion – it's not going to be in the same universe as "walkable" for many generations to come.

A group from the nonprofit Urban Land Institute studied Indy Boulevard last year and recommended scrapping, for good, the idea of light rail down its median. You wouldn't get much development anyway, the ULI panel said. Instead, focus on the proposed Central Avenue streetcar and add a streetcar down Monroe Road as well. Since that proposal, a task force has been meeting and it's recommending similarly. It suggests being a tad vaguer about that Monroe Road streetcar in case some form of light rail down the CSX rail line to Matthews emerges as a possibility.

But it is suggesting the MTC "rescind the provision that reserves space in the center of the [Independence] highway." Use that space, now a high-occupancy-vehicle lane used only by buses, for a high-occupancy-toll lane to be used by buses and motorists willing to pay a toll to escape the regular Indy Boulevard congestion.

It was inevitable, of course, that the original five-corridor plans for Charlotte's transit system would evolve. In the next few months, look for some significant evolutions to take place.

Whatever do we do with Independence Boulevard?

2011-09-28T19:46:00.001-04:00

Charlotte's "hell highway" is never referred to by that term at public meetings. But that's what it is. Tonight, the Metropolitan Transit Commission is chewing over some recommendations from a group of officials and citizens over what, really, needs to happen to the now-vintage plans for light rail down Independence.

(Here's UNCC Professor David Walters' recent essay on the same topic.)

A panel from the nonprofit Urban Land Institute last winter recommended rethinking the earlier idea to put a light rail line down the median of Indy Blvd. The ULI panel pointed out the obvious: Putting a transit station in the middle of a huge multilane freeway would be about as pedestrian-unfriendly as you could be, and other cities have found you don't get much transit-oriented development at light rail stops along freeways. Turn the median into a high-occupancy-toll lane for buses and cars, and put the rail transit along Central Avenue (as in the planned streetcar) and along Monroe Road.

For the past six months a task force of transit, transportation and East Charlotte representatives has been meeting to see what, if any, of the ULI recommendations should be pursued. Tonight, the MTC heard its recommendations. In a nutshell: Do what the ULI said, only be more flexible in where, exactly, the rail transit along Monroe Road should go.

"The Metropolitan Transit Commission should rescind the special provision in the 2006 Transit System Plan that calls for preserving the ability to construct light rail transit or bus rapid transit in the center of Independence Boulevard," the task force says in a letter to Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx, who chairs the MTC.

MTC discussion was lively and enthusiastic – more so, really, than for the Red Line task force report earlier. Matthews Mayor Jim Taylor noted that "Union County [just southeast of Charlotte] seems to be the most interested I've ever seen them to be in the past 10 years." Getting tax-averse Union County interested in anything involving light rail transit would be a sea change in the local transit landscape.

And one tidbit: The state highway project to turn Indy Boulevard into a freeway has been nicknamed a "one mile per decade" project.

New strategy for transit to North Meck

2011-09-28T18:30:00.003-04:00

The Charlotte transit project getting the most attention the past four years has been extending the Lynx Blue Line from uptown to UNC Charlotte. But in recent months plenty of behind-the-curtains work has been focusing on the planned commuter rail line to north Mecklenburg. Tonight, the transit governing body heard about a significant shift in strategy for the Red Line. The idea is to change the focus from "commuter rail" to "rail."

Charlotte Area Transit System rendering of Red Line car

Quick background: The proposed commuter rail is a different form of transit from light rail. In many ways it's more like intercity passenger rail than the electric-overhead-wire, plenty-of-stops Lynx. The rules for federal money for commuter rail and the cost-benefit analyses the feds require are structured so as to make the proposed 25-mile Red Line from uptown to Mooresville ineligible for federal money. That left a huge gap – 50 percent of the total – in the proposed funding plans, estimated at $373 million total for both phases of the project.

In addition, the countywide half-cent sales tax revenues tanked in 2008 and haven't revived to the earlier estimated levels. The Charlotte Area Transit System has been stumped over the problem of finding local money for the Red Line to cover the gap left by the lack of federal money, not to mention how to operate the existing bus system and Lynx, plus pay the local share for the $900-million-some Lynx Blue Line Extension.

Back to tonight's meeting of the Metropolitan Transit Commission, which oversees CATS: The Red Line Task Force subcommittee that's been meeting for about a year has agreed on recommending a new approach. Led by Paul Morris – formerly a consultant and starting this month, the N.C. Department of Transportation's deputy secretary for transit – the group wants to pitch a strategy Morris says will be nationally unique. Use the rail line as an economic development strategy for both passenger rail and freight rail. And form a formal partnership among Huntersville, Cornelius and Davidson so they can share tax revenues from new development, via a Joint Powers Authority.

But where would the money come from? Morris said the JPA would have no taxing authority. Whether it could issue bonds might depend on how any financing package is structured. The Red Line Task Force is, for now, looking at four potential "value capture" ideas (warning, tax-policy-geekdom coming up): tax increment financing, special assessment districts, partnering agreements with private developers, or jointly developing property with a private owner. Which of those ideas, if any, would come to fruition can't be known at the moment.

For most of the past 15 years, the strategic thinking about the north corridor's Red Line was to use it to shape residential development. The area was booming, and the three towns adopted zoning ordinances to encourage transit-oriented development at the proposed station areas. The fact that the rail line's owner, Norfolk Southern, was still running freight trains on it was generally mentioned only in passing.

Now, residential and commercial development are, if not dead, certainly no longer booming. So the strategy being proposed is to use that freight line as a selling tool for industrial development while using the prospect of passenger rail on the same right of way as a selling point for residential and retail development.

Will it fly with the rest of the MTC? Tonight's discussion might make that more clear. No MTC vote comes until next month.

Here's a link to the PowerPoint presentation Morris gave to the Red Line Task Force in August.

How voice mail and email fall short

2011-09-16T17:28:00.001-04:00

All across America, offices have been carelessly casting one of the most valuable resources they have, and an irreplaceable service for their customers: employees like Joe Sovacool.

Joe hadn't been cast aside by his office – The Charlotte Observer – although like most workplaces I know of, it too has greatly reduced the pool of workers who do what Joe did so well for something like 30 years until his death Thursday night, from cancer, at age 53.

In "The real Weather Guy," Observer blogger and weather geek Steve Lyttle nailed it in describing Joe's value to the newsroom, just as Tommy Tomlinson, in "Observer, Sovacool," nailed the description of Joe's determinedly quirky personality.

Joe Sovacool, like many other unheralded-outside-the-newsroom staffers – too many to name here – was smart, informed and discreetly nosy enough to know when to shield writers and editors from calls, when to send calls through and when to just listen politely to a raving nutjob caller and say, "I'll be sure to deliver your message." Which he would, though sometimes with a sardonic quip or a droll expression.

Voice mail does not shield America's workers from nutjob callers nor can it cut through the ramblings of a disturbed reader who does, indeed, have a useful news tip. Those annoying voice mail menus that so many businesses have adopted do not know that, after a bit of gentle inquiry, a caller who thinks he wants Reporter X will be better served by Editor Y.

Nor does a voicemail menu know that when you leave a message for Reporter Z, said reporter won't get it for three weeks because she is on a honeymoon and the message is too important to languish. Yeah, yeah, we're all supposed to change our voicemail greetings but here in the reality-based community an alert receptionist is far more dependable (and hence, cost-effective to the organization) than depending on dozens of reporters and editors remembering to change voicemail and out-of-office assistance settings.

The U.S. workplace of today seems not to understand that people can do things machines can't and will, over time, more than make up the difference between the cost of buying and servicing a machine (and the attendant need for IT support) and a paycheck and benefits. People know things that make the place hum and that avert errors. They are things as different as knowing the difference between Iredell, the county, and Airedale, the terrier (around here, a lot of folks pronounce them the same) and knowing how to change toner cartridges and where to get them. They are things like how to sweet-talk a mulish copy machine and whom you call when the machine wheezes its last, and who else in the newsroom needs to know the machine is on strike, and the most efficient way to get that word out.

They are things like recognizing when a caller is volcanically peeved at being transferred all over kingdom come, and understanding the caller needs to talk to a competent human being who'll deal with whatever the problem is, even if the problem involves a wet newspaper or a screwed-up ad and you're not in the part of the company that delivers papers or composes ads.

They are things like knowing who's who in town, so when you spot a significant name on the daily list of obituaries you can tell an editor. If Joe were working today, he'd have been sure to tell an editor that one of the names on that list had worked for 30 years at The Observer and had a lot of friends, and maybe needs a headed obit.

And he'd have been right.

The fantasy land of transportation planning

2011-09-15T16:51:00.027-04:00

The N.C. Department of Transportation is seeking people's opinions to help guide them in putting together a 2040 plan. They've launched an online survey, which you can weigh in on at this link.

I encourage you to take the survey, but if you do, you'll notice most of the questions require only one answer where several answers are needed. Example: For the question: "Which of the following is the most important to address the transportation needs of our changing population?" your choices are:

Invest additional resources in public transportation (rail and buses).
Expand roadways in North Carolina’s major cities.
Encourage development with higher numbers of people per acre.
Better coordinate transportation and land development.
Other (please specify)

You can choose only one. Which seems, to me, a bogus choice. Transportation and land use have to be coordinated or they are all but worthless. Additional resources must be invested in public transportation. And we all need to encourage development where more people live closer together – the only way to make public transportation work. No one of those is more important than another.

Land use planning and transportation planning are as linked as conjoined twins. The state likes to say it doesn't do land use planning but that's a fig leaf of an excuse that doesn't hide the truth: Every time NCDOT makes a transportation decision, that decision affects land uses.

Accept that reality. Then accept the related reality that planning and transportation, to have validity, should be undertaken at a metro region level. Merge all the state-sanctioned transportation planning agencies in each of North Carolina's metro regions. Charlotte has four to seven, depending on what you count. (You gotta love their names, too: The MPOs are MUMPO, GUAMPO, CRMPO, GHMPO and RFATS. Lest you think that's not surreal enough, we also have two rural planning organizations, named LNRPO and the snarly sounding RRRPO.) We need just one, region-wide MPO.

If you're looking for true sanity, then (as I have often written before) merge all those metropolitan planning organizations (a.k.a. MPOs, which despite the name do only transportation planning) with the regional Councils of Government, which attempt a regional approach to land use planning – although of course they aren't allowed to adopt zoning ordinances and thus have little clout. Has all this made Salvador Dali seem reasoned and predictable by comparison?

So have your say on the NCDOT survey. But recognize that efforts at serious urban region planning are fantasy, until the state adopts a more realistic approach linking land use and transportation.

Bike-sharing deferred, but tax talk moves forward

2011-09-12T18:27:00.000-04:00

Did I mention that a Charlotte City Council committee scheduled to discuss a possible bike-sharing program this afternoon was also going to talk about "finding new revenues" for roads? I believe I did. And you don't have to be a political science professor to know elected officials won't breeze quickly through any talk of new or higher taxes.

The result: Much information about higher registration fees, new sales taxes, new toll roads and even a vehicle-miles-traveled tax. (For details, see below.) The council's transportation and planning committee voted to refer the whole topic to the council's budget committee and to urge city staff to make sure the topic comes up during the council's retreat next winter.

But no bike-sharing discussion. The committee ran out of time. That discussion is now scheduled for the committee's Oct. 10 meeting.

For transportation policy geeks and tax policy geeks (I plead guilty), the how-to-fund-it-all discussion was meaty and even, well, sort of fun. The presentation from developer Ned Curran, who chaired a 2008-09 citizen group called the Committee of 21, is here. (For details, read that PowerPoint.) In a nutshell, the Transportation Action Plan, adopted five years ago and due for an update, lays out a series of countywide transportation improvements. The Committee of 21 concluded the gap between identified road needs and known funding sources (federal, state and local) over 25 years is $12 billion. So ... how do you find that money?

Curran, CEO of the Bissell Cos., made clear that the committee's charge was to look specifically at roads, not at other transportation modes. They looked at 19 different revenue options, such as sales tax and gas tax increases, driveway taxes, impact fees, sin taxes and even parking surcharges. (The full list is on page 6 of the presentation on the committee agenda.) They assessed the options based on how related they were to driving, how much revenue they'd produce, how easy to implement and operate, political reality, etc.

The Roads Final Four:

Doubling the $30 vehicle registration tax from $30 to $60 = $18 million a year.
A half-cent Mecklenburg sales tax increase for roads = $81 million. Note, that estimate was before sales tax revenues plunged in 2009. A more recent estimate would be $55 million, Charlotte Department of Transportation chief Danny Pleasant said.
Tolls on all existing interstates in the county = $52 million a year. This, obviously, depends on the toll assessed and what revenue-splitting agreements would be forged with the federal and state governments.
A vehicle miles traveled (VMT) tax. Curran said this option has gotten plenty of national discussion and would likely have to take place nationally, but as federal and state gas tax revenues sink due to more efficient cars and and people driving less, the VMT tax will get more credence. Privacy concerns? "If any of us have our phones on in our car, we're being tracked anyway," Curran quipped.

As Curran and Pleasant discussed the toll roads situation, it got interesting. A multistate agreement is in the works, they said, with which other states would agree to help each other capture the cents-per-mile tolls if, say, a New York driver zipped through North Carolina on I-95 and didn't pay the tolls. New York would collect the money (how? that wasn't clear) and send it to N.C. Meanwhile, North Carolina is one of several states applying for a program to inaugurate tolls on parts of I-95. With more tolls and more states cooperating – and with innovations such as a High Occupancy Toll lane being planned for I-77 in north Mecklenburg – pretty soon you've got a VMT anyway.

One doubter about all this: Council member Michael Barnes. "There has never been the political will among elected officials to deal with it [funding transportation]," he said. "I am tired of it." Count him among skeptics who think council members will, once again, after discussion fail to enact any specific measures to fund the city's plans for transportation.

Bike-sharing in Charlotte - soon?

2011-09-12T12:12:00.002-04:00

A Charlotte City Council committee today takes up the question of what should happen next if Charlotte is to have (or not) a bike-sharing program. It also takes up an even more hot-potato topic: How to pay for the city's road needs.

For those unfamiliar with the term bike-sharing, those programs have sprung up in cities all over the country, as well as in other countries. For a small fee – typically paid online – you can become a member or pay for a temporary membership. That gives you the ability to take a bicycle from a bike station, ride it for a certain number of hours and return it to another bike station

In its August meeting, the committee heard a presentation from Alta Bicycle Share, a consultant group that manages the Washington bike-sharing program known as Capital Bikeshare. (Photo courtesy of Capital Bikeshare, taken from the City of Charlotte's website.)

If you click on the link in the first sentence of this item, you'll see that the committee agenda also holds a discussion on the sure-to-be-controversial topic of what revenue sources (read: tax or fee increase)

might be available to provide money for the Charlotte region's huge transportation needs. The agenda says "provide detailed information on a variety of potential transportation revenue sources."

The presentation will be a reprise of the recommendations from the Committee of 21, led by developer Ned Curran, which met in 2009 to look at the city's "road needs." It did not look at transit needs. It did not look at "street" needs. None of which is to say that the city doesn't need some work on its roads. It does. But in Mary's Perfect World, we'd talk more about streets, which is what you have in a city, and less about "roads," which are what you have between cities. And we'd mostly talk about "transportation" needs, which means looking at driving, transit, bicycling and walking, i.e., the Big Picture. We need to serve all those transportation forms.

The Committee of 21 looked at a gigantic list of possible funding, including such Big City ideas as charging a fee for driving into uptown. It rejected most of those. For instance, congestion pricing (the downtown fee) can work well where residents have plenty of good options for transportation other than driving. Charlotte is not one of those places.

Why is the Committee of 21 presenting a reprise? I asked committee chair David Howard that very thing when I chanced to run into him Saturday at the UNC Charlotte Student Union. (I was walking around campus for exercise; he was waiting for his daughter to finish an educational program on campus.) He said he asked for it to be put on the agenda, because it's a conversation the community needs to have.

The committee meets at 3:30 p.m. today in Room 280 of the Government Center.

City pedaling and wilderness paddling

2011-09-09T12:05:00.001-04:00

Bicycling and canoeing are kindred spirits in helping you explore your world, writes Joe Urban (a.k.a. Sam Newberg). In "Pedaling and Paddling in City and Wilderness," Newberg writes about his experience in a canoe in the northern Minnesota Boundary Waters and its perhaps not-obvious relationship to bicycling through a city:

"Just as the paddle is an “extension of your arm” in a canoe, the bicycle is an extension of your feet, enabling harmony and oneness with the street and buildings around you. As well, a canoe can cut almost silently through water, and a bicycle slices a quiet path through urbanity."

I shared the piece with a friend who's a retired UNC Charlotte professor who used to bicycle to campus from East Charlotte and who goes on wilderness canoeing trips each summer. He replied:

"The essay comparing canoeing and bicycling strikes a very strong chord with me. I would rather paddle in the Boundary Waters than be anywhere else on earth, except bicycling to UNCC. The two experiences are so similar in my basal reptilian brain that I dream about them as one thing: flying over the landscape a few feet above the surface with no visible means of support. Jung would have fun with that."

At long, long last, a park for Romare Bearden

2011-09-02T15:52:00.004-04:00

Bearden collage: Maudell Sleet's Magic Garden (1978)

It took years, multiple political strategies, a bond vote, patience, weathering a brutal and ongoing economic downturn, more patience, and – finally – a multimedia event under a tent on a hot asphalt parking lot. But Friday, ground was broken for a new park in uptown Charlotte: Romare Bearden Park.

It's notable for many reasons, including being the first significant honoring of a major 20th-century artist, Bearden, who was born in Charlotte. It's also the first major public park built in the heart of uptown in years. I am not counting Polk Place at The Square because it's tiny and because I'm still hacked off that the city knocked down the oldest retail buildings downtown for a not-so-wonderful park modeled on what looks like the U.S. Northwest mountains. The late Al Rousso's fight against the city to save his store got him elected to City Council. But it didn't save his store. Nor am I counting The Green because it is private space. Lovely, but private. Just try standing and taking photos of the condos, and you may find yourself getting kicked out, as I hear happened to some architecture students.
Romare Bearden Park is named for New York artist and Charlotte native Romare Bearden, born 100 years ago today about two blocks from the scene of Friday's ceremonies, in his great-grandparents' house at 401 S. Graham St. on the corner of what was then Second Street and is now Martin Luther King Boulevard. Bearden's parents moved North when he was a young boy, but he visited frequently and some of his later works evoke (and are named for) Mecklenburg County and the people he knew here, including Charlotte neighbor Maudell Sleet (above).

St. Michael's now-demolished church. Photo: www.bearden1911.org

That "multimedia" part refers to the agenda for Friday's events. Of course you had politicians present and past, governmental officials and reading from ceremonial proclamations. But we were also treated to the choir from St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church – where Bearden was baptized. The church, founded in 1882, was formerly at South Mint and West Hill streets (where the Panthers' stadium now sits) and is the oldest traditionally African American Episcopal church in the state. (For more information about Charlotte in 1911, at the time of Bearden's birth, visit www.Bearden1911.org.)

After the pols came playwright/poet Ruth Sloane reading dramatic excerpts from her original play, "Romare Bearden 1911-1988," commissioned in 2003, and accompanied by flautist Michael Porter. Then we followed the Johnson C. Smith University drummers out to watch Mecklenburg county commissioners' chair Jennifer Roberts knock out a section of the back wall of a row of buildings that until now had, miraculously, survived on Church Street between Third Street and MLK Boulevard.

I chanced to sit next to Charlotte developer David Furman, who recalled, "When we started marketing the TradeMark [condo tower on West Trade Street] we were marketing this park." That was six or seven years ago, he said. The park site was part of a multipart, still controversial land swap deal that was expected to bring a minor league baseball stadium uptown, to a neighboring and larger parcel that was the original site for this park. That deal has been mangled by the recession and long-running lawsuits.

But, Mayor Pat, do you back light rail?

2011-09-01T13:04:00.003-04:00

Photo of Third Street station courtesy Charlotte Area Transit System

(See update at end, 6:30 p.m.)

Ex-CATS chief Ron Tober sends along a link to a nice little video about the Lynx Blue Line and South End. It praises the way the light rail line brings neighborhoods together, helps people move about the city without cars and builds for the future.

The film (apparently made by Siemens, hence the talking heads from that company) quotes many Charlotte notables, including Charlotte Planning Director Debra Campbell, Duke Energy's North Carolina president Brett Carter, UNC Charlotte Dean of Arts + Architecture Ken Lambla, UNCC profs David Walters and Jose Gamez, Levine Museum historian Tom Hanchett ...

... and former Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory.

This is worth pointing out because McCrory, a seven-term mayor who is all but certainly running again for N.C. governor in 2012, has been a strong transit supporter. He has a national reputation for being a strong transit supporter. That much isn't really news for politics buffs. But here's a new wrinkle. His Republican Party in North Carolina now appears dominated by anti-transit conservatives.

During the recent General Assembly session, state legislators from Mecklenburg County made several stabs at outright killing any more state funding (and thus, any more federal funding) for Charlotte's light rail system, as well as trying to off the state's long-planned high-speed passenger rail between Charlotte and Raleigh. Last spring, McCrory said he had made calls to Republican legislative leaders about transit, but wouldn't say what he talked about.

This all leaves Mayor Pat with a dilemma. He can continue to tout his accomplishments as a moderate, pro-transit mayor, which will help him with independents and with any Democrats who have cooled on Gov. Bev Perdue. But that would definitely rile the people now in control of the state Republican Party, not to mention many legislators. Or he can play to his right and somehow distance himself from Charlotte's nationally praised light rail system, one of his most praiseworthy achievements.

I note that on this video, McCrory doesn't say anything that might be pulled out and used as a pro-transit film clip by enemies on the right, who kicked him around a lot when he was mayor, calling him a RINO (Republican in Name Only), or even a socialist, for supporting mass transit. On the film he says innocuous things, that cities should look to the future, and this "infrastructure" is a good investment.

(Update and rewrite, 6:25 p.m.) McCrory just phoned me back and was pointed in saying he supports mass transit "where it works." If the transportation experts and federal funding formulas say it would work in a certain place, McCrory said, then he's for it. He said he just asks, "What will the numbers look like?"

This is all consistent with his remarks as mayor. But, I asked him, a lot of N.C. Republicans oppose mass transit, so how will he handle that in his campaign? "I'll handle it exactly the same way I handled it as mayor," he said. Some Republicans won't like his answers, he said, and neither will some Democrats.

I've been wondering how McCrory, who is a deft politician, will handle this GOP-hates-transit dilemma. He's on the record now – at least with Naked City Blog – on mass transit. It will be in interesting political show to see how his campaign plays out on this particular issue.

Time-traveling to a lost era in city history

2011-08-31T10:58:00.012-04:00

I spent rather too much time yesterday looking through a new website that lets you view old maps of Charlotte a century ago, pegged to the 100th anniversary Friday of artist and native son Romare Bearden's birth. The site, www.bearden1911.org, (put together via a partnership of the Levine Museum of the New South and UNC Chapel Hill) superimposes old photos and information about Bearden on an old Sanborn map. You can see old building outlines, where the streets used to be. (Note the small lot sizes, compared with today.).

I got interested, also, in the companion site www.charlotte1911.org, another collaboration by the Levine's historian, Tom Hanchett and UNC. It uses 1911 Sanborn maps and city directory information to show you, for instance, where people holding different jobs were listed as living. You can locate where the boarding houses were, by race, as well as attorneys, mill workers and "bag agents." The slider bar lets you superimpose an aerial photo of today's buildings atop the century-old maps.

Of course, using this site, I scrolled out to see my own neighborhood – a subdivision whose official plat name is Pharr Acres. I'd heard it was "old man Pharr's farm." Yep, there on Providence Road, just south of Briar Creek, is a dot labeled "W S Pharr." Into the late 1970s the large, old farmhouse house still stood. Like so much else on the map, it's gone now, with a cul-de-sac subdivision in its place.

The Bearden site also offers some opportunity to mourn, including for the segregated world into which he was born, and for the loss to this city of a talent like his, when his parents moved North in search of a better life. As Levine historian Hanchett says in his article for the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute's website (disclosure: my workplace) "Bearden’s 1911 birthplace: A fateful time for Charlotte," a city where downtown neighborhoods had been comparatively integrated was hardening into rigid segregation during the years before Bearden's birth. A new city park was closed to black residents. Black passengers were ordered into the back of streetcars.

But as you look through the Bearden locations and see photos of what's there today, mourn this, as well: Most of it is gone. The good, the bad, the spacious front porches, stores, churches – almost everything. Including, in some cases, even streets What you'll see in photos showing today's scenes in the places where Bearden and his family lived is not newer buildings – after all, cities do evolve – but surface parking areas, empty grass-covered lots. It's one thing when old buildings are lost but replaced by newer ones that also over time contribute something to the city's life and, then, its history. That is not what has happened here. We've just lost the reminders of the past, without gaining anything. At least this online exhibit can, if only virtually, restore something of what went before.

Photo: Artist Romare Bearden, born in Charlotte 100 years ago, moved to New York. His great-grandparents are shown in the photo next to him, on the porch of their Graham Street home in Charlotte.

A drive through the layers of a city

2011-08-24T16:46:00.002-04:00

(A shopping cart, removed in recent days, at the desolate North Park Mall.)

I probably shouldn’t admit this, but when I took my new job at UNC Charlotte, the one thing I dreaded was my new drive to work. For more than two decades I’d commuted 4.2 miles to downtown from a neighborhood near Wendover Road along streets lined, for the most part, with half-century-old oaks. Depending on the hour and the traffic karma, it took as little as eight minutes up to (on rare occasions) 25.

My new drive is 12 miles, along streets decidedly unlike Providence and Queens roads and Morehead Street. Even apart from the extra time out of my day (it’s a 25- to 30-minute trip) and extra auto expenses to absorb, I was not looking forward to it. This new commute goes through neighborhoods that had little urban beauty even when new, and now are decidedly down-at-the-heels.

But I was wrong. What I lose in visual splendor is giving me a better-rounded view of the city.
The commute takes me through parts of Charlotte that of course I’ve seen before – I’m a journalist, remember – but never daily, or even weekly. And an occasional cruise up Eastway Drive is not at all the same as seeing it daily, because it’s those routine views that inevitably shape our understanding of and expectations for, the places we inhabit – what urban design writer Kevin Lynch (who worked in Greensboro early in his career) described as “mental maps.”

Knowing, intellectually, that Providence Road runs through some of Charlotte’s most affluent neighborhoods isn’t the same as absorbing, every day for years, the sight of tree-shaded sidewalks, well-watered lawns and well-proportioned four-lane streets. For years I’d drive through neighborhoods built as early 20th-century streetcar suburbs. Now I see car-oriented suburbia, much of it tattered. But despite its lack of obvious beauty, it offers something just as interesting, which isn’t easily found in those more static neighborhoods: a quality of visible transition through time.

I drive north to where Wendover becomes Eastway, then all the way to North Tryon Street, finally turning onto University City Boulevard. Along the way, I notice massive oak trees which don’t get near the publicity of Myers Park’s but are just as impressive. A few years ago I spotted chickens in someone’s yard across the street from the Aztec Apartments, and enjoyed the sight. This was before the chic urban chicken craze hit the city. Now, though, while I have looked daily since late June, I have not seen a single fowl there. On Tuesday night, however, I did see, near the Kilborne intersection, a white rabbit hopping along the grassy verge.

I drive past strip shopping centers of various ages, in varying degrees of transition, decay and stability, and marvel at how Eastway Crossing at Central and Eastway has kept up its rental spaces over decades. How will it fare after its Wal-Mart closes, once the new store on Independence Boulevard a mile away opens?

Nation Square, a new strip center on North Tryon Street.

I notice that the view of 50-year-old Garinger High School, designed by renowned local Modernist architect A.G. Odell, is all but obliterated by mobile classrooms plopped out front. I have become familiar with the extremely rough ~~Norfolk Southern~~ Aberdeen, Carolina & Western railroad tracks between Sugar Creek Road and The Plaza, possibly the bumpiest on any major thoroughfare in the city. I eye taquerias, Latino grocery stores and African braid salons, and today I caught a glimpse, as I zipped past, of a small business near Shamrock whose sign read: Cambodian Video.

Once on North Tryon Street – which has been a designated light rail transit corridor for, oh, about 13 years – I
marvel daily at how much new retail development has gone up in recent years that’s not at all transit-friendly: Amid mobile-home graveyards and the vintage Holiday Motel sit numerous newly constructed small strip centers and even a fast-food joint with drive-through windows.
I stopped one recent morning at one of the newest strip centers, Nation Square, which houses a handful of businesses including Panaderia Odalys, a Mexican bakery. I sampled cookies with guava and other sweets and was surprised to learn that Odalys is a small chain, with outlets in, among other places, High Point, Asheboro and other nearby Carolinas cities. Who’d have thought?

One of the bleakest spots is North Park Mall, where Eastway ends at North Tryon. Those jutting sawtooth skylights on its roof evoke the old Richway store of the mall’s founding in the 1970s. Richway later became Target, which left the mall more than a decade ago. A Kroger Sav-On became a Bi-Lo and now sits empty. The mall is all but derelict, with weeds and pockmarks in its parking lot. Right next to it, a much newer strip center seems fully occupied with small businesses – braid shops, salons, etc.

Baked goods at Panaderia Odalys at Nation Square

The overall condition of that section of east and northeast Charlotte is of concern, naturally. Some areas (that strip center on The Plaza at Eastway, for instance) all but shout “disinvestment.” But it’s the evidence of change – thriving ’60s and ’70s suburbia that has passed through down-at-the-heels and, in many places, into immigrant entrepreneurialism – that make this drive so much more interesting. With so many small-scale businesses, you see more evidence of changes than along the oh-so-sedate section of Providence Road lined with the big Myers Park churches or along Morehead Street, where most of what changes is Carolinas Medical Center consuming ever more land. It’s more intriguing to spot a new taqueria, an African grocery store or something called Cambodian Video.

My daily commute now shows me a living city, one changing visibly from decade to decade, its modest neighborhoods evolving with the outflows and inflows of different people from different places. I compare that with uptown Charlotte; for all its wealth of nightclubs, restaurants, museums, sports arenas and people, uptown’s virtually all-new development has mostly obliterated evidence of the multi-layered past. Cities have memories, made visible in the layers of buildings, pavements and history. We all need to be able to see the evidence of what went before us, what James Howard Kunstler called chronological connectivity. In his 1996 book, Home From Nowhere: he wrote: “Connection with the past and the future is a pathway that literally charms us in the direction of sanity and grace.”

For me, it's the places where small stores go in and out of business, where new signs sprout in Spanish or Vietnamese or English, that are making it easier to sense the past as I travel toward the future.

Bike-share idea moves forward in Charlotte

2011-08-22T17:41:00.000-04:00

Charlotte City government officials will discuss whether to push ahead with what's now a fledgling idea for the city to launch a bike-sharing program, preferably in time for the Democratic National Committee in September 2012.

The City Council's Transportation and Planning Committee this afternoon (Monday, Aug 22) heard a presentation from Alison Cohen, president of Alta Bicycle Share, which operates the Washington, D.C., bike share program, Capital Bikeshare, launched in September 2010. Also at the meeting was John Cock of the affiliated Alta wing, Alta Planning + Design.

Bike-share programs let customers pay (via memberships, or kiosks) to rent bicycles temporarily from a system of stations around the city. In Washington, yearly membership is $75, which buys you an electronic key you insert to free the bike from its locked slot at the station. Day-pass users ($5) get an unlocking code to use. The first 30 minutes of a ride have no other fee bu the longer the ride, the more it costs.

It's important to have places for bicycle riders to ride, Cohen said. Washington went from 3 to 50 miles of bike lanes in the last 10 years and saw bicycle commuting rise 86 percent, 2000-2009. The average distance of a Capital Bikeshare ride is 1.2 miles, Cohen said. (Charlotte is up to 50 miles of lanes, city bicycle coordinator Ken Tippette said.)

Today's meeting had no specific proposal on the table for council members; it was an information session arranged by Tippette with the encouragement of City Council member Edwin Peacock III, who chairs the council's Environment Committee and who described his experience using Capital Bikeshare when he was in Washington recently for a National League of Cities meeting.

Cohen said the D.C. bike share program is the nation's largest to date, although New York City plans to launch one in 2012 with 10,000 bikes. Other cities with programs: Denver, Minneapolis, Boston – even Spartanburg, S.C., which has only two bike share stations according to Cohen. Also in the works are programs in Chattanooga, Tenn., San Antonio and Miami. And yes, you read that right. Spartanburg.

Council members David Howard, Patsy Kinsey and Nancy Carter had questions for Cohen and Cock, but no one pooh-poohed the idea. At the end of the meeting, Howard, who chairs the committee, asked Assistant City Manager Jim Schumacher to talk with City Manager Curt Walton about what, if anything, the city should try to do.

Reading the tea leaves, as we pundits try to do, I predict the city will explore some sort of small-scale bike sharing program limited to center city and possibly one or two nearby neighborhoods, and will look for private sponsors to help with costs. A year is a short time frame for setting up a full program, but with enough push it could be done. After all, if you were in Charlotte in 1994 for the Final Four you saw center city enthusiasts create a fake nightlife scene, setting up bars inside vacant buildings. It worked. Doubters saw the huge crowds of people willing to come uptown for a night out, and it helped spark more authentic night life uptown. Setting up a real, if small, bike share program might have the same kind of inspirational effect.

The council committee also, with little discussion, unanimously recommended approval of the Center City 2020 Vision Plan, which goes to the full council Sept. 12 Here's a link to the draft of the plan, and here's a link to some commentary from my UNC Charlotte colleague David Walters and me. Also, here's a previous Naked City Blog item from me.

If I'm nuts, then Joe Nocera is too

2011-08-17T16:02:00.000-04:00

I couldn't help but laugh when I read New York Times' op-ed columnist Joe Nocera's piece on Monday, "What Is Business Waiting For?" In it he suggests that U.S. business leaders should consider hiring more people because that, in the end, will help the economy and thus, their business. "If enough companies started hiring — while wrapping their actions in the mantle of patriotism — even Carl Icahn might have trouble complaining about it," Nocera writes.

I proposed a similar idea deep in a column I wrote last December for The Charlotte Observer, "Is the U.S. entering a 'hate the rich' era?"

I wrote: "If you're a 'rich person,' especially if you run a company, should you be worried? Who knows? The wealthy still seem to have Congress in their pocket. But maybe now is the time to start heading off rising animosity. I know that some wealthy people truly do care about their country and their community. So prove it: CEOs could decide it's an act of patriotism to start hiring workers. Why not challenge fellow CEOs to a patriotic campaign to fill jobs, akin to Warren Buffet's push to get billionaires to give half their wealth to charity?"

The commentariat, both online and in my email inbox, beat me up severely for saying I hated the rich – even though I specifically said I didn't – and for being so ignorant about business as to suggest such a dumb thing. Maybe I was just too far ahead of the curve?

And speaking of hostility toward the rich, check out Pulitzer-winning Steven Pearlstein's "Blame for financial mess starts with the corporate lobby" from the Aug. 13 Washington Post. It's blistering.

Density pays off better than sprawl

2011-08-11T10:10:00.000-04:00

A Colorado study for the Tucson-based Sonoran Institute by Asheville's Joe Minicozzi concludes that across the board, downtown commercial and mixed-use buildings outperform their big-box counterparts when comparing tax revenues per-acre. The study looked at properties in and around Glenwood Springs, Colo. (Hat tip to Planetizen.com for the link.) Minicozzi looked at both property tax and sales tax revenues.

I wrote a year ago about Minicozzi's analyses of property in Sarasota County, Fla., and Asheville. It's another way that public officials should think about "growth" as they decide which projects to approve and which ones not to. In that previous posting, Minicozzi added a reply to some of the commenters, saying:

"When we ran the model in Asheville, our numbers show that our downtown continually out performs suburban low-density time and time again. A conservative estimate on multi-family services of government (sewers, water, schools, etc.) shows the costs roughly to pencil out to $16k/unit in compact development vs. $28k for low density. The simple way of thinking about it is that mile of pipe picks up more people in compact development, than it does in the low density stuff."

I recall that about 10 years ago, the town of Pineville outside Charlotte, a place known regionally for extreme sprawl retail, opted to reject a Wal-Mart Supercenter after running the numbers and concluding it would cost the town more in police and other services than the town would recoup in property and sales taxes.

In checking out the Sonoran Institute website, I noted this article from the Bozeman, Mont., Daily Chronicle in which a Sonoran Institute official points out that impact fees were a vital tool for the city. "There simply is no substitute," he said. The article is about a spat among city officials and developers over the city's hefty impact fees, which the city charges to cover the cost of roads, water, sewer and fire protection. "For the average single family home, impact fees cost $11,516," it says. " In Missoula, it costs $3,638 in impact fees for the average home."

In most of North Carolina developers pay no impact fees. The N.C. legislature must approve any city or county's impact fees on a case-by-case basis and hasn't OK'd any in several decades. That's just food for thought for anyone paying property taxes.

The feel-good story that isn't

2011-08-10T13:35:00.024-04:00

If you read the recent Charlotte Observer article, "All signs point to Peachtree Hills on the rebound," you read about much admirable work from the City of Charlotte and nonprofit groups. The city committed almost a half-million dollars to help the foreclosure- and crime-plagued subdivision.

According to reporters Kirstin Valle Pittman and Peter St. Onge, the city improved curbs and sidewalks, helped residents form a strong neighborhood group and helped win a $75,000 grant for a new playground. Charlotte-Mecklenburg police have worked hard, too, and report crime down 70 percent over last year; residential break-ins are down 88 percent. And home values are rising. The average selling price this year is $77,300, up from $68,670 last year. The nonprofit groups Self-Help and Habitat for Humanity are hard at work. Durham-based Self-Help has bought 33 Peachtree Hills homes, to refurbish and sell to buyers whom the group believes can avoid future foreclosures. Habitat has built seven new homes and bought five foreclosure houses for resale.

It's a nice, feel-good story. Except.

Except that it exposes a huge flaw in the process by which development takes place in Charlotte. It makes you wonder: Why city officials in their right minds would vote to approve the building of mile after mile after mile of rock-bottom-cost subdivisions, right next to each, other across a large arc of west, north and east Charlotte? Having so much low-cost housing in close proximity made the whole area vulnerable to foreclosures and the attendant problems when the national blight of subprime lending, mortgage fraud, financial market misdeeds, and then unemployment hammered Charlotte.

A 2007 Charlotte Observer article ("New suburbs in fast decay") noted that from 1997 to 2007, starter homes (so-called because their low prices attract buyers just starting in home-ownership) accounted for one-half of all single-family homes built in Charlotte between I-85 and the northern city limits. They made up fully a third of all single-family homes in Charlotte built south of I-85. By late 2007 – BEFORE the big crash in late 2008 – the Observer's analysis found more than 50 neighborhoods with elevated foreclosure rates of 15 percent to 61 percent. Virtually all were new starter-home subdivisions.

Could it happen today? Have Charlotte's leaders – from pols to planners – learned from what happened during that decade from the late '90s until the crash, when that vast cluster of low-income housing spread across the city's northern edge?

I fear that, yes, the same thing could happen today. Part of the reason is the way growth is managed (or not) in Charlotte; part of the reason is just the way land prices work. If the market magically revived (not likely for a while, to be sure), dozens more subdivision-building bottom-feeders could probably erect multiple subdivisions of the cheapest materials, in the worst places, all next to one another. In most cases no rezoning is needed, because most undeveloped property in Charlotte years ago was zoned for single-family subdivisions (R-3, R-4, etc.). An estimated 75 percent of the subdivisions built in Charlotte in those boom years needed no rezoning; elected officials had no chance to say yes or no. All the developers needed was to follow the city's subdivision ordinance and meet the standards in the zoning ordinance. Auto-pilot insta-growth.

As it happens, the developer of Peachtree Hills, built starting in 2003, did need a rezoning. Triven Properties got a rezoning from R-4 (four houses per acre) to R-6 (CD), almost exactly 10 years ago. The City Council on Sept. 17, 2001, voted unanimous approval for the rezoning.

So, what should change? It's not an easy question to answer. One reason is that low-cost new development gravitates toward places where land costs are lower. Putting up more low-end development tends to create more of the same, just as putting up high-end development drives up land values. Should government intervene in this process, and if so, how best to do it?

And the problem isn't low-cost housing per se. It's the large-scale clustering of housing all aimed at the same income level – in typical suburban-sprawl layouts that force every resident to own a car and drive everywhere. In any event, elected officials aren't allowed to – and shouldn't – decide rezonings based on the price level of the proposed housing. And there IS a huge need in Charlotte for dwelling places that more people can afford. (I do keep wondering, though, why this problem isn't also being addressed at the wage-level end, instead of only at the housing-cost end. Low wages are the He Who Shall Not Be Named in Charlotte's whole community housing discussion.)

It seems to me any answer must come from multiple places: revamped subdivision and zoning ordinances, maybe removing the no-rezoning-needed incentive that exists now for sprawl development on greenfield sites and giving more incentive to the infill, mixed-use development that the city prefers but that today must jump though multiple hoops.

I'm not saying I know what the answer ought to be. But this I am sure of: More smart people in this city ought to be trying to find some answers – and now, while development is slow and there's time to explore and, yes, while the sector of the development industry that depends on suburban-sprawl subdivisions is in a weakened condition, which levels the playing field with other development players.

It's admirable that so many people, with public and private dollars and unmeasurable volunteer time and energy, have tried to help Peachtree Hills and other such subdivisions, such as Windy Ridge, and that their efforts seem to be succeeding. But the true measure of success ought to be figuring out how to avoid building any more neighborhoods that will simply replicate the problems of Peachtree Hills.

Photo: Windy Ridge, another foreclosure-plagued Charlotte subdivision. (Photo: Keihly Moore / Liz Shockey, UNC Charlotte)  

Envisioning a new downtown Charlotte

2011-07-31T11:59:00.005-04:00

Lunching outdoors in the center of Charlotte. Photo: John Chesser, UNC Urban Institute

Baseball stadium - yes or no?

The new plan for downtown/uptown/center city Charlotte says yes. No surprise there: One group helping fund the plan is Charlotte Center City Partners, the nonprofit tax-funded downtown advocacy group whose CEO, Michael Smith, was a key architect of the land swap that helped make the stadium plan work. Or, at least, it worked on paper, until the 2008 recession meant most of the land swap's moving parts stalled out.

The plan also calls for a large new convention center expansion and new convention center hotel. Again, no surprise. The City of Charlotte is another funder of the plan.

And it calls for an uptown shopping center. Yet again, no shock. The idea of an uptown shopping center has been dangled by governments and developers for years, although one school of thought exists – expressed notably by architect/consultant Michael Gallis – that that ship sailed years ago, when the city OK'd a contentious rezoning to let SouthPark mall, some 5 miles south of the middle of town, expand to build a Nordstrom and Neiman-Marcus.

But, as I wrote in an op-ed for the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, (picked up Sunday by the Charlotte Observer), building large-footprint "catalyst" projects works against what downtown Charlotte really needs now. It needs what planners call "urban fabric," and what laymen would just say are interesting streets for window-shopping, walking and living. Can you get easily to stores that sell things you need and want? Does it have a lively feel to it, a sense of possibilities, encounters, discoveries?

Urban fabric, to be strong and endure, needs to be more like silk than burlap – fine threads pulled together, not big chunks of things that, once broken, unravel the whole fabric. It needs some large projects and buildings, to be sure, but it also needs the possibility of smaller things.

It's all but impossible now, though, for small-scale things to happen in downtown Charlotte. The small old buildings have mostly been demolished, for a variety of reasons which I won't go into now. (One lovely exception is Latta Arcade and Brevard Court, but they aren't large enough to make a difference, and they're inside a passageway, not along the sidewalk.) Downtown is a collection of too many big-footprint things too close together: NFL stadium, NASCAR Hall of Fame, Charlotte Convention Center, large office towers, multiple museums, two large libraries, a huge performing arts complex, etc. No single one of those is a bad thing; many of them add to the city's quality of life. But they're too big to be that close to each other. And too much of what lies in between has been demolished.

That's why downtown Charlotte has no hope in our lifetimes of resembling the beloved downtown Asheville, or to look at larger models, Back Bay Boston, Georgetown, San Francisco, New York (except for a few overdone big-block developments in Midtown) or most other loved and well-visited cities. Even downtown Raleigh – with its preserved buildings and revitalization that inches, block-by-block – has a better chance, long-term, of providing the true urban feel that distinguishes a city from a collection of development projects.

The new plan doesn't really address that problem with real solutions. It doesn't address the incongruity of recommending a new skyscraper at a redeveloped Charlotte Transportation Center and the impact that will have on land prices a block away, down a Brevard Street that it recommends as a "shopping and entertainment" street. I don't know how much of this is the fault of the consultants, or how much of it results from their having multiple bosses in this project, which include the city. Over the years the city's leaders have been sadly ignorant of how their decisions can undermine their own goals. Note how the city's approval of the multistory EpiCentre has effectively sucked a huge amount of the restaurant and bar market into one very big block. So much for that Brevard Street idea – one the city has been pitching for several years. (Compare the EpiCentre to Raleigh's Glenwood South area, where multiple blocks along Glenwood Avenue have been animated by similar restaurant/nightlife development.)

The plan has a lot of feel-good words like green, sustainable, diverse, welcoming, vibrant, etc. It also has many good suggestions for projects that would help downtown Charlotte. It's welcome, and important, that the plan emphasizes that "center city" isn't just the land inside that horrible freeway noose, but that we all need to think of "center city" as, well, the center of the city, which includes a ring of excellent neighborhoods. It calls for capping part of the freeway for a park. It calls for much more emphasis on bicycling – a City of Bikes. It pushes for better transit connections, stronger links among higher education institutions, and an Applied Innovation Corridor from South End up to UNC Charlotte.

Read the draft plan (warning, it's in multiple chapters that must be downloaded separately) at http://www.centercity2020 .info.

Disclosure: I've only skimmed most of the full draft. I read thoroughly a synopsis CCCP provided for journalists and board members.)

If you've read this far, you're probably an urban design junkie and would enjoy seeing this online gallery I pulled together, of selections from the 1966 Odell Plan for central Charlotte. Take a look here if you get a kick out of Corbusier-like, mid-century Modernist city planning.(One drawing is reproduced below.)

For reasons I can't fathom, city officials still feel compelled to bend a knee to this plan. Why? It was a bad plan. It pushed for the highway- and auto-mobile-focused, single-use-zoning development that got downtown into this mess to start with.

Finally, my UNC Charlotte colleague David Walters, who heads the School of Architecture's Masters in Urban Design program, has his own take on the proposed 2020 Plan. He calls it a failure of nerve.

1966 Odell plan looks up East Trade Street toward an envisioned new convention center and hotel

Cities and freeways: Carmageddon or Carmaheaven?

2011-07-25T21:34:00.002-04:00

I've been blogless too long. (Didja miss me?) First up on my list of readable stories to share: The Carmageddon miracle.

Carmageddon was the feared massive traffic tie-up expected in Southern California when the 405 Freeway had to close down for the July 16-17 weekend. Guess what? No traffic problems. People stayed home. (Experts who have studied the phenomenon of induced traffic were probably not surprised.) The Los Angeles Times has a wrap-up here: " 'Carmageddon's' good karma." (Link thanks to Planetizen.com). And Planetizen's own Tim Halbur weighed in, noting that the whole episode illustrated the folly of depending too much on one transportation mode alone – automobiles.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, credited with coining the term "Carmageddon," dubbed what happened "Carmaheaven." The New York Times' Timothy Egan called the whole weekend an "urban epiphany." His description: "No, the big lessons of Carmageddon are not about transportation. They are about something else, something less easily quantified. They are about the small salves in life that make a day easier, or even memorable. When millions of Angelenos decided to hold a block party, or go to the park, or ride a bike, or play soccer, or spend half a day at the farmers market, or take advantage of free admission at some museums, they found a city far removed from that awful commuter stress index."

And along those lines, this article, "Livable cities don't have freeways," refers to a Brown University study that found a city’s population can decrease 18 percent because of the building of a major highway. (See this interview with Brown's Nathaniel Baum-Snow.) That's one of the ways, notes conservative economist Edward Glaeser, that the government has disproportionately subsidized suburban sprawl.

Back to the Future? UNC Charlotte urban design Professor David Walters has a piece on the website of the UNCC Urban Institute (disclosure: that's my new employer) looking at how, despite admirable progress in many ways, many of the development problems facing the Charlotte region in the 1990s are still with us. Maybe, Walters suggests, he'll start kicking up a fuss again and bring on more of that 1990s'-style hate mail.

Biking, in brief (briefs?)

2011-07-11T15:22:00.000-04:00

I don't have time to post this but I can't resist. My friend and excellent writer Jay Walljasper envisions a future in which "Bikes will be 'incredibly sexy and utterly normal' " His point is this:

"So how do we get more Americans to bike? The biggest obstacle right now is that people see bicyclists as an exotic species—macho, ultra-fit, almost entirely young, white and male, clad in Lycra or spandex, who ride like madmen all over city streets. Some of us admire them, some revile them, but most people can't imagine joining their ranks.

Yet, the reality is that most bikers today are ordinary people: office workers commuting, schoolkids going to piano practice or a soccer game, moms with a trailer on the back, grandparents getting exercise."

But -- and you have to follow the link to see the photo -- while riding on his bicycle to the July Fourth fireworks in Minneapolis he encountered an Underwear Bike Ride.

Now, I'm thinking about how incredibly hot it gets in Charlotte in the summertime. Who'll dare to organize the Charlotte version of a bicycling in briefs event?

How friendly to pedestrians is your Charlotte 'hood?

2011-07-08T15:58:00.007-04:00

SOURCE: Carlton Gideon, UNCC Urban Institute, City of Charlotte

One advantage of being surrounded by people who crunch data for fun (and for degrees, but not for profit, at least not at UNCC's Urban Institute), is that they'll just pop up with some cool factoids and maps.

Geography grad student Carlton Gideon from Wilmington just wandered in with this map showing which Charlotte neighborhoods are the most pedestrian-friendly. The measures used come from the City of Charlotte's 2010 Quality of Life Report, research for which was done by UNC Charlotte's Metropolitan Studies Group. The Pedestrian Friendliness Index was based on the total length of sidewalks in each NSA (neighborhood statistical area) compared to the total length of streets. The index ran from 1 to 2. In the Quality of Life study, a 0 to 1 measure was Low pedestrian friendliness, 1.1 to 1.3 was Medium, and 1.4 and higher was High pedestrian friendliness.

The report doesn't tally up how many neighborhoods ranked "high" in pedestrian friendliness although my guess is: not many.

What Gideon did was show, on the colorful map atop this posting (click on it for a zoom view), the gradation of neighborhood friendliness.It's interesting to note, for instance, that one of the most pedestrian-friendly areas is a large suburban subdivision, Highland Creek. It's the big blue neighborhood in the northeast corner. The lighter blue neighborhood just south of it includes the University Place area. The UNCC campus area, alas, is the orange pie-shaped neighborhood just south of that. Plenty of sidewalks on campus, but the rest of the area is sadly lacking. Also interesting is the comparatively better rankings of neighborhoods in the farther fringes. Maybe, Gideon theorizes, they were built after the city began requiring sidewalks on both sides of streets in new subdivisions?

You can see below his color-coded pedestrian-friendliness map superimposed on a Google satellite view of the city, where you can zoom in or out. If that doesn't work for you, take this URL http://webpages.uncc.edu/~jcgideon/test2.kmz and paste it into the search window of Google maps:

View Larger Map

Taking issue with New Yorker's Lemann on cities, and other random links

2011-07-04T11:44:00.017-04:00

It seems a healthy chunk of that segment of New-York news media that isn't picking through the compost heap of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's case remains obsessed with New Yorkers' love-hate relationship with bike lanes. John Cassidy of The New Yorker magazine a few months back ranted on a blog "Rational Irrationality," about the expanding lanes. Here, "R.A." of The Economist skewers Cassidy's economic arguments, in "Tragedies of the commons/The world is his parking spot.

Just last week (June 27), the New York Times ran an overview of the ways many European cities are trying to make driving and parking so uncomfortable that people choose to walk, bicycle or take transit. Of course, this is a technique that needs to be imported to the U.S. with caution. Many U.S. cities, especially in the Sun Belt, make is all but impossible to walk, bicycle or take public transportation. And even in New York (see above) not all are thrilled with the idea that a bicycle lane might – gasp! – remove parking spots.

Also in the New Yorker (June 27 edition), Nicholas Lemann of the Columbia School of Journalism reviews a series of books dealing with cities, "Get Out of Town/Has the celebration of cities gone too far?" (Subscription needed to read the full article.)

Lemann gives an overview of, among other things, the city-suburb wars, of Richard Florida's Creative Class theory, of Edward Glaeser's new book, "Triumph of the City," and of "Aerotropolis," a new book written in part by UNC sociologist John Kasarda, who helped mastermind the still-underperforming Global TransPark in Kinston, N.C., though Lemann doesn't mention that infelicitous angle. As an aside, the state-funded creation of the TransPark, in a rural part of Eastern North Carolina, shows the degree to which Glaeser may be right about the importance of cities in generating wealth.

For a smart guy, Lemann is remarkably shallow in some of his analyses. For instance, he says Glaeser is not an admirer of Jane Jacobs. To be sure, Glaeser (showing his own shallow analysis), contends that Jacobs' fights to save Greenwich Village turned the village into a low-density, high-priced haven for the wealthy, because the preservation prevented skyscrapers. (Here's my own take on Glaeser's book, a review of "Triumph of the City," for OnEarth.org.) Has Lemann read anything other than Jacobs' "Death and Life of Great American Cities"? Her next book, "The Economy of Cities," listed in Glaeser's bibliography, clearly prefigures much of Glaeser's own economic theory in "Triumph": that cities and the proximity they create allow innovation to happen.

Lemann concludes by saying that in 20th-century America, many more people found what they were seeking in American suburbs than in cities: "They tended their gardens, washed their cars, took their children to Little League games, went to PTA meetings and to religious services." Come again? Other than the part about gardens, is he saying city dwellers didn't do or value any of those things? As an academic at Columbia University, surely he's heard of the work of Kenneth T. Jackson, an urban historian at Columbia, whose "Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States," explained how the federal government's policies starting in the 1920s subsidized suburban development and hindered development inside established cities. (Glaeser also makes this point, with some vigor.) In other words, we'll never know how many Americans would have moved to suburbia had the economic playing field been level.

Still up for more reading: The New York Times had an intriguing article Sunday, "Detroit Pushes Back with Young Muscles," about how Detroit – which many Americans associate with urban blight exponentially worse than any other U.S. city – has instead become a magnet for creative young entrepreneurs. In the past 10 years, "downtown Detroit experienced a 59 percent increase in the number of college-educated residents under the age of 35, nearly 30 percent more than two-thirds of the nation’s 51 largest cities." And the long list of initiatives to attract and nurture entrepreneurs is impressive. Anyone taking notes at the Charlotte Chamber, and in city government here?

Happy Fourth of July.

Even ugly parks find friends

2011-07-01T16:59:00.002-04:00

Always, the more you learn about a place the more you realize your first impressions were off-kilter, or incomplete. The large park in downtown Sofia known as Bulgaria Square (or now, Youth Park), that I had supposed would be underused because of its unattractive design – the National Palace of Culture building in the middle of the park (see photo) is like a bad nightmare of Brasilia – was in fact well-peopled. Might it have had more visitors? Probably. But on the June evening I visited, it had a heckuva lot more people in it than many Charlotte parks would have. Being in the center of a large, high-density and walkable downtown does help a public space overcome bad design.

Bulgaria Square is the site for which a group of local architects, 2020 Sofia, have engaged a planner from New York's well-respected Project for Public Spaces in hopes of devising a plan for enlivening the park and – what I think may be even more important – for getting a lot of community involvement in helping plan and manage improvements. Here's an overhead view of the park, taken from the terrace of the Sky Plaza Restaurant on the top floor of the National Palace of Culture. (The restaurant itself seemed a relic of the 1980s – so dated as to almost be fashionable again. And the cream puff cake was outstanding!)
There's an ugly sort of monument, barely visible in the upper right part of the photo. PPS planner Elena Madison told the conference that at the PPS workshop on the park, some participants had suggested it become a site for rock-climbing. My Lonely Planet travel book noted that the "Monument to the Bulgarian State," built in 1981, has been walled off because it has been falling apart for years. The book recounts: " ' Be careful there,' one local warned. ' You can still get hurt by communist society!' "

Another piece of hideous Modernist-style design, the Tsar Boris Park, holds the controversial Monument to the Soviet Army, which had recently been – take your pick of terms here – defaced, vandalized or graced with guerrilla art. Here's a link to a photo and article. Someone with a good sense of humor sneaked in by night and painted the Soviet heroic figures in the colors of Superman, Santa Claus, the Joker, Ronald McDonald, etc. Some people were outraged, in part because of a general lack of upkeep throughout Sofia has made graffiti both common and pernicious. Hooliganism. Vandalism. Or maybe social commentary? You be the judge. Whatever the case, a private group cleaned the monument up within a few days, leading to grumbles about why no one could clean up all the graffiti just as quickly.

The park containing the defaced-then-cleaned monument seems to be a semi-formal skateboard park. There are skateboard amenities, and the afternoon I visited a reasonable number of kids looking to be ages 12-18ish, clambered on the monument and swigged from what looked, from a distance, to be a large plastic bottle of Sprite.

The conference was sponsored by the Johns Hopkins International Urban Fellows Association, and drew about three dozen planners, architects and academics from around Europe, plus New Zealand. The topic – management of public spaces in Sofia - is of course one without any simple answer or conclusion. But, as I wrote, it's one that's by no means limited to former Communist nations in Eastern Europe.

A problem of plenty: Parks without people

2011-06-27T11:59:00.003-04:00

Central Hall, a public market building, restored 11 years ago

Sofia, Bulgaria – Can a city have too many parks and green spaces? Most people would say, of course not. But after a Saturday afternoon walk through central Sofia, I began to wonder. I saw numerous parks, many with almost no people in them, a few of them well-maintained but others with knee-high weeds and in trashy ill-repair.

To be sure, it was a chilly day for June, with a few spittings of rain. Yet tour buses were parked at the gold-domed Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, and I walked past at least a half-dozen weddings at churches around the center of town. After a bit of wandering I found a great shopping street, Vitosha, jammed with people. So people were in central Sofia. They just weren't in many of the parks.

I'm here for a conference of the International Urban Fellows Association of Johns Hopkins University, a yearly gathering of architects, urban planners and scholars from around the world. This year's topic is public spaces, and how the city of Sofia should design and manage them, a concern for cities around the world. (Disclosure: the university has paid my travel expenses.)

Lack of maintenance and calf-high grass are problems in U.S. cities, too, as they've whacked park maintenance budgets more efficiently than they've been whacking their weeds in recent years.

But more is going on than money problems. Poorly designed public spaces are a problem plaguing many cities, Sofia and Charlotte among them. (And here's a clever online tour of some Seattle-area places that aren't as welcoming as you'd want.) Though Charlotte and Sofia's histories have almost nothing in common, they seem to have arrived at some common problems: Lack of money to maintain existing public spaces. Open spaces surrounded by monumental-style and unwelcoming urban redevelopment – problems that arose in the U.S. from misguided urban "renewal" and bad private development, and in Sofia from Communist governments apparently reading the same bad-design manuals as U.S. planners and architects, and then similar bad private development. And a shortage of public will when government funds run short.

Central Sofia has multiple parks and squares in the center of town. But reread Jane Jacobs on what parks need to succeed: A diversity of uses around them, so that people walk through them at all hours of the day and evening, going to work, to stores, to school, walking the dog, taking kids to playgrounds, and so on. Sofia's mammoth institutional buildings in the center seem, to my eyes, to make that important diversity of uses harder to achieve at some of the parks. Not to mention that traffic patterns aren't welcoming to pedestrians.

You'll find similar problems throughout suburban-style American, as well as in center cities that were too aggressively "renewed" (one of those terms that describes the opposite of what it really did, like subdivisions named Quail Ridge or Meadowood, which memorialize natural features they destroyed).

Some quick background: Bulgaria is a country of 7.3 million – fewer than North Carolina's 9.5 million, and shrinking into the bargain. It's north of Greece, south of Romania and east of Albania. Sofia, the capital, is in the western part of the country, in a plain surrounded by mountains, with a beautiful Vitosha mountain looming in the south, offering skiing in winter and hiking in summer. Sofia's population is about 1.2 million. It is expanding its subway system and has, at least in the center of town, a large network of streetcars, as well as bus service.

Under communism (1945-1989/1990), people had little need to take any private interest in "public" domains, such as parks. The government did all that, and public spaces were well-maintained, if somewhat forbidding (you didn't walk on the grass, noted one speaker, who described his amazement the first time he saw people picnicking on the grass at New York's Central Park). And the government certainly had no interest in providing public spaces where the public was going to interact with one another and possibly decide to do something like rally for democracy, a la Tahrir Square in Cairo.

Today the municipal government simply can't keep up with the maintenance and restoration needed. Sidewalks are cracked and treacherous. I'm reasonably sure-footed and I can't count how many times I've stumbled. Cars park on sidewalks, apparently with impunity, causing the pavement to crumble and sending pedestrians into the streets to dodge traffic. Yet the concept of nongovernmental agencies and citizen activism is in its infancy. After all, under Communism one didn't want to take that kind of risk. Things are changing, but slowly.

We've heard from a number of Sofians who are working to improve their city, through private nonprofit groups, with art and cultural programs, and through new city plans. Some of what we're hearing can apply to many U.S cities, not just in Bulgaria or Eastern Europe. More to come.

All together now: "An attractive place for investment"

2011-06-26T05:22:00.003-04:00

SOFIA, Bulgaria – I'm sitting in a conference room in an ancient Balkan city, and other than the fact that the remarks are in Bulgarian (and being translated), you'd think I was listening to any Chamber of Commerce official in Charlotte, or Raleigh, or Atlanta.

Petar Dikov, the city architect for this Bulgarian capital, is showing slides labeled, “Sofia – an attractive place for investment,” and later, one that lists the No. 1 strategic goal as “maintaining a high level of economic growth through development of a knowledge-based economy.”

Sounds like home to me.

Dikov, who was named to his post five years ago, notes that he said, "The first priority is infrastructure. The second priority is infrastructure. The third priority is infrastructure.” Also sounds familiar, especially after a series of slides showing plans for streets and roads, including what looks like a ring highway with a northern chunk missing. (Of course, I don't know at this point whether it's missing because it hasn't been built, or because there's a mountain or something in the way.)

He goes through a list of all the attractions Sofia has – dozens of theaters, universities and cultural attractions. It's within 10 kilometers of skiing, within 20 of a large artificial lake. Sofia is a “modern European metropolis with dynamic economy and rich cultural life.” Check. Substitute the word "Atlanta" or "Nashville" or "Houston" and the speech would be the same.

But then, he notes that corruption here is a problem. You wouldn't hear THAT in the good old generic Chamber of Commerce talks in the U.S.

I'm here attending a conference of the International Urban Fellows Association of Johns Hopkins University – a yearly gathering of urban planners, architects and scholars from around the world, all of whom have spent a semester or a year at some point in the past, studying at Hopkins.

I'll write more, later, on the conference's key theme: the management of public spaces (parks, streets, greenways) in Sofia, a city where for decades people depended on the communist government to do all that. (To be continued.)

A Ponzi scheme in suburbia?

2011-06-21T17:10:00.002-04:00

First blog of the New Era.

First up - Is suburban development a Ponzi scheme? In "The growth Ponzi scheme, part 1" from New Urban Network, writer Charles Mahron makes this claim: The typical American pattern of development doesn't support itself. He writes: "The great experiment of suburbanization that America embarked on following World War II has no precedent in human history. As it enters its third generation, the flawed assumptions that were overlooked are now coming back to bite us in a cruel way."

I think Mahron is onto something, and I know he's not alone in questioning whether the country and its governments – federal, state and local – can afford to support the immense and spread-out infrastructure we've created in the pat 50 years. I know that Charlotte's Department of Transportation and its Fire Department looked at the cost-savings to be had in fire and emergency services when streets are in a connected network versus cul-de-sac-collector-type patterns.

But has anyone seen any academically rigorous studies that look seriously at this question? It's easy to hypothesize. Which is why we all do it.

Is LEED truly leading? This article in Miller-McCune, "Is LEED the Gold Standard in Green?" tells of a lawsuit against the well-known Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating system by a New York engineer named Henry Gifford. He contends the energy savings for LEED-certified buildings can be drastically overrated.
Why is this important? As the article notes, the building sector consumes 49 percent of all energy produced in the United States, and 77 percent of all the electricity produced in the nation is used to operate buildings." Building more energy-efficient buildings is a huge need. And if the only real rating system available doesn't, after all, save as much energy as it claims, well, that's a problem.

LEED, for its part, has been addressing some of the criticisms since before the lawsuit. It has begun requiring certified buildings to track predicted energy savings versus actual savings, and it's re-inventing its rating program.

For those of you who enjoy reading academic and professional journals, here's an article in the NCMedicalJournal.com, "Barriers to Municipal Planning for Pedestrians and Bicyclists in North Carolina." The Cliff's Notes version: There isn't enough money, and priorities are elsewhere, and it's worse in rural areas than urban ones.

As always, a link to an article doesn't necessarily mean I agree with all of it – only that I think you'll find it interesting and provocative reading.