The power of metros to N.C.'s economy

Dan Barkin, a senior editor at Raleigh's News & Observer, on Wednesday posted an eye-opening statistic about North Carolina's economy on "The Editor's Blog," which he shares with other top editors at the N&O newsroom.

In "Metros dominate NC economy," he writes that the seven largest metro areas generate nearly 70 percent of the state's economy.  The Charlotte metro area alone is responsible for a quarter of the state's economy. The Triangle (Barkin added together Raleigh-Cary and Durham MSAs) tally 22 percent.  That means, he points out, that Charlotte and the Triangle are nearly half the state's economy.

A few things to note: First, the so-called urban/rural split in the state is a lot squishier than it may seem. Those "metro areas" (a.k.a. Metropolitan Statistical Areas) tend to include places that to most people would seem rural, and in some cases they're bizarrely drawn. Examples: Marshville in eastern Union County,or Cat Square in Lincoln County. The counties are in Charlotte's Metropolitan Statistical Area, but some of the smaller communities don't feel very

Triangle's transit tussle - and its 'expert' trio

And speaking of public transit, which I often find myself doing, Rob Perks of the Natural Resources Defense Council last Friday posted a good summation of the situation in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill region, where two of the three counties have voted for a sales tax to start building a system of rail and bus lines throughout the region. But Wake County continues to balk.

And read on to learn about my research into a panel of three ostensibly unbiased "experts" that may have been a stacked deck.

First, here's a link to Perks' blog, "The Tussle over Transit in the Triangle." It's a good summation of the situation. Be aware that given Perks' job and beliefs, it's commentary, as opposed to a news article.

The situation: Wake County commissioners, dominated by Republicans, have stalled and stalled. Then they hired a three-person panel of "experts" to look at the local data and provide advice. One of the experts is Sam R. Staley, well known in planning circles as an anti-Smart Growth voice. He's a research fellow at the Reason Foundation, a libertarian public policy think tank. Among those on Reason's board of directors is David Koch, the billionaire oil industry mogul and conservative activist whose money in part has helped bankroll the Tea Party, among other political endeavors. But I digress.

Another of the three experts is Steve Polzin, director of the mobility research program at the Center for Urban ...

Charlotte council to vote on three preservation projects

The Cohen-Fumero house, designed by Charlotte architect Murray Whisnant

The Charlotte City Council at tonight's meeting is expected to vote on designating three buildings as historic landmarks. The first is the Cohen-Fumero House. Read more about it at the PlanCharlotte article, "Can Charlotte learn to love Modernist homes?" 

For Charlotte, it's an unusual selection:

• First, it's in East Charlotte, not a part of the city that's been graced with many landmark buildings.

• Second, it's a mid-century Modernist home, an architectural style that while attractive to a younger, hipper population around the country, doesn't get the love from the more traditionalist sectors in Charlotte, a city with a comparatively large bloc of traditionalist sectors.

But in its favor is this: Landmarking historic properties is easier in parts of the city that are not seeing intense development pressure. That's why so many historic properties in uptown were wiped away; the dirt under them was too valuable for new development.

Some personal disclosure here: I'm friends with the original owners, artists Herbert Cohen and Jose Fumero, who in the 1950s and 1960s hosted much of the Charlotte "Creative Class" in their living room for Sunday dinners. They've been together for something like 50 years, which in itself is worthy of note. And I'm friends with the architect who designed the house for them, Murray Whisnant. Whisnant, a Charlotte native who also designed the Rowe Arts Building at UNC Charlotte, has been a creative force in the city for decades. 

The other two properties are mills: The Defiance Sock Mill in the Third Ward neighborhood, and the Louise Mill, built in 1897 in the Belmont neighborhood.  Charlotte is (finally!) seeing an impressive collection of renovated and adaptively reused mills dating to its textile-industry past. Among the notable projects:
Atherton Mill in South End, Highland Mill in NoDa, the Charlotte Cotton Mill uptown, and Alpha Mill in uptown/Optimist Park. (I'm not sure where one neighborhood ends and the other begins.)

To see the reports on the historic properties on tonight's City Council agenda:
Click here for the Cohen Fumero House.
Click here for the Defiance Sock Mills.
Click here for the Louise Cotton Mill.

Least walkable city in U.S. is - wait a minute, that's us!

Uptown is one of Charlotte's most walkable areas, along with First and Fourth wards. Photo: Nancy Pierce

(Friday, Nov. 15: I've updated this with comments from Charlotte transportation officials. To see that expanded version, visit the article in PlanCharlotte.org: "Charlotte trails nation in walkability rankings.")

Want to guess the large U.S. city rated worst for walkability by Walk Score, the national rating system?

That would be the Queen City. Take a look at the 2014 report. New York rated No. 1, followed by San Francisco, Boston, Washington and Miami.

But what does this ranking measure? The Walk Score website says it "measures the walkability of any address using a patent-pending system. For each address, Walk Score analyzes hundreds of walking routes to nearby amenities. Points are awarded based on the distance to amenities in each category. Amenities within a 5-minute walk (.25 miles) are given maximum points. A decay function is used to give points to more distant amenities, with no points given after a 30-minute walk.
Walk Score also measures pedestrian friendliness by analyzing population density and road metrics such as block length and intersection density. Data sources include Google, Education.com, Open Street Map, the U.S. Census, Localeze, and places added by the Walk Score user community."

If I read that correctly, Walk Score doesn't measure the existence of sidewalks (although Charlotte wouldn't rank very high in that regard either). So this city's typical Sun Belt-all-spread-out, low-density development means anything you'd want to walk to is probably farther away than in a more densely developed area.

Charlotte also would ran low in block length and intersection density - which essentially measures how well networked the city is with plenty of streets and street corners.Many parts of Charlotte developed during the cul-de-sac era, when streets intentionally did not connect to anything.
Even uptown, which at least had a strong grid when it was laid out a couple of centuries ago, has seen many instances of streets being eliminated to accommodate large-footprint projects such as ballparks, stadiums, convention centers and parks.

I'm seeking comment from Charlotte Department of Transportation officials, but I doubt this ranking will surprise them. 

Can light rail reshape this auto-oriented corridor?

I have auto-related uses on the mind this week, because at a 4:30 meeting today the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission is going to recommend yay or nay on a proposed auto mall (a collection of car lots from different dealerships) in the University City area. You can download the agenda for that meeting here.

(Update, 5:20 p.m.  The planning commission's zoning committee unanimously recommended that the site be rezoned for an auto mall. Two commissioners who had earlier expressed opposition to the rezoning, Tom Low and Deb Ryan, weren't at the meeting. The City Council makes the final decision.)

The city planning staff has switched from recommending against the rezoning to recommend for it, if some design and site plan issues are resolved. Interestingly, their issues earlier were not because it's for a large chunk of auto-oriented uses within a quarter mile of a planned light rail station area, where the overall city policy calls for transit-oriented (i.e. walkable, compact, mixed-use) development. Instead the staff focused on design issues. (See the commentary on PlanCharlotte.org, "Don't derail transit areas with an auto mall.")

Yesterday, I  had occasion to drive on North Tryon Street, from the UNC Charlotte Center City campus to the main campus on University City  Boulevard.  I decided to count the auto-oriented businesses on North Tryon Street up to the corner of U-City Boulevard.  I started at Atando Avenue (where the idea occurred to me), so the count starts there.  Want to guess? The answer is ....

Regional planning and sticker shock

Will stickers on a map matter? Photo: City of Charlotte

After suggesting in print that people should attend last Thursday's regional planning workshop, part of the CONNECT Our Future effort, it was only fitting that I, too, go. And a good time was had by all. Except ...

We were assigned tables as we went in, and I ended at a table with two other Marys - Mary Hopper, recently stepped down as director of University City partners and a former chair of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission, and Mary Clayton, a transportation planner with Parsons Brinckerhoff. Also at the table were three UNC Charlotte urban design grad students, and a handful of other folks.  I am not sure that the table was representative of the population at large, but whatever. It was a good collection of people.

Our table moderator, Nadine Bennett, a planner with Centralina Council of Governments, which is administering the $5 million federal grant that funds CONNECT, asked us all to talk a bit about who we were and what we thought the region's biggest issues are. Just about everyone said "transportation." And just about everyone said, "We don't want to become another Atlanta."  One of the graduate students was, I am not making this up, from Atlanta, and she was particularly forceful on this point.

Bennett said that she had been the moderator for, I think, 17 different tables during a two-month series of workshops in 14 counties and at every one of those tables, people had said, "We don't want to become another Atlanta."

What's up (or not) with a zoning ordinance re-do?

It's been almost three months since a consultants' report concluded the city's zoning ordinance is seriously in need of updating. (See my PlanCharlotte.org article, "Report: Charlotte ordinance confusing, lacks modern tools" from July.

What's happening next?  Planning Director Debra Campbell discussed that at an Oct. 7 meeting of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission, an appointed advisory board to the city's Planning Department and City Council. 

Campbell said the planning staff is discussing how to link the zoning ordinance assessment process with their planning process. The planners want to look at whether a revised zoning ordinance would mean revising the way plans are done, which today are the "Euclidian model," Campbell said. For non-planners, that means based on single-use zoning districts.  (The term "Euclidian zoning" isn't about Euclidian geometry, but is named for the 1926 Supreme Court case, Village of Euclid, Ohio, v. Ambler Realty Co., which ruled that land use zoning is constitutional. The Euclid zoning ordinance was based on single-use districts, a type of land use generally considered suburban or rural, not suitable for large cities.)

 

"Our plans are very use-based," Campbell said. "They're colors on a map." In other words, local plans tend to map large areas and, with color-coding, delineate land uses should go where. Instead, Campbell said, "I want them to focus on both use and character." Sometimes, she said, getting too deep into the planning process can seem dry and boring to the general public. "In general people want to be involved with what’s it going to look like, what’s it going to feel like?"

Laura Harmon, the department's director of development services, said the staff would have a better idea of how to link plans and the zoning ordinance "in the next month or two."

Said Campbell: "If there's a fatal flaw that I have, it's that I like to go slow ... I like to bring folks along with me."