Readers, this ball is in your court

Readers, engage! Two PlanCharlotte.org articles last week deserve wider play.

Honor the places you love

One is a way for everyone, not just planners, to honor the places they love in North Carolina.  Once again, the N.C. chapter of the American Planning Association (APA-NC) is sponsoring a Great Places in North Carolina contest. Find more information here.

APA members can nominate places in a variety of categories, such as Great Places in the Making (downtown Gastonia won that one recently). Non-APA members this year can nominate a spot for the Great Public Place award, or the Great Main Street award. Then online voting taps the Peoples Choice Award for each of those categories.

As it happens, I've been asked to be on the panel of judges - as a non-planner - so please, give me a great group of nominations from which to choose. And don't forget, a street is part of the public realm and so it should qualify for Great Public Place. Queens Road West, anyone? Or Camden Road, outside of Price's Chicken Coop? 


Consider different growth scenarios

The second way for readers in the Charlotte region to get involved is a series of workshops scheduled for March by the CONNECT Our Future initiative, a 14-county, three-year planning effort being led by the Centralina Council of Governments. Read more about it here.

The workshops begin March 6 (Thursday) in Statesville. Charlotte's is March 7 (Friday) at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church.  It's north of I-85, on Beatties Ford Road. (As you head that way, consider whether Beatties Ford Road has any spots eligible for Great Public Place. What about Five Points?)

Participants will hear about four different scenarios of the region's future, and the possible social, economic and environmental effects of each scenario. The four are: 1) continued suburban-form growth, 2) following current plans, 3) development of city centers and downtowns, and 4) regional transportation options.

D.C. planner: Affordability is cities' next big challenge

“Rock star planner” may be an oxymoron, but if there are rock star planners, Harriet Tregoning is one. Tregoning has been chief city planner in Washington, D.C., since 2007— a time of rapid growth and change in the District of Columbia. She's stepping down to run the Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

A looming problem in many U.S. cities is affordability, she said in an interview with Next City, but looking only at real estate prices masks the problem.  “I think the challenge for American cities for the next decade or more is indeed affordability, but it’s not just about housing,” she said. (Read the whole interview here.)

She noted that for the 8 million jobs lost in the recession, the average wage was $24 an hour. While that number of jobs has been created in recent years, their average wage was $11 an hour.

“Middle-wage jobs are declining,” she said. “Or if they’re growing, they’re growing at a much slower rate than the other categories (high-wage, and low-wage hospitality and retail jobs). So affordability needs to be broadened to talk about job creation, middle-income job creation. What are we going to do with our infrastructure to enable us to produce more employment?”

Two topics in the interview have specific resonance for Charlotte. Tregoning talked about the retrofitting of some

Weirdest city list ever?

Mural in downtown Kings Mountain. Photo: Nancy Pierce

We all love to look at those lists of "Best Places To ... " I plead guilty as charged. But this list is one of the weirdest I've encountered. It's the Movoto.com blog's Best Places to Retire in North Carolina.

No. 1 is -- wait for it -- Morrisville. Really. It's only 5 miles from an international airport, so that pushed it to the top. As if that is what everyone is looking for in retirement.

The rest of the Top 10, in order: Mount Holly, Apex, Holly Springs, Kings Mountain, Mint Hill, Stallings, Harrisburg, Sanford and Matthews.

Charlotte ranks No. 30, below -- among others -- Spring Lake (a suburb of Fort Bragg), Indian Trail, Gastonia and Goldsboro.

The criteria the website used? Cost of living, total crime, total amenities, weather, distance from nearest international airport.

As one colleague of mine, who happens to be retired, quipped: "That is the weirdest list that I have ever come across.  I wouldn’t want to retire in any of them. I notice that the picture used for Harrisburg is the Speedway, which, of course, isn’t in Harrisburg."

LaHood-Foxx love-fest?

Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx in 2012 as city's bike-share program opened.

When former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told President Obama he was leaving the job, he suggested Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx as his replacement. At least, that's what LaHood tells Chicago magazine, in a wide-ranging interview with Carol Felsenthal, "A Complete Q&A With Ray LaHood."

Here's the section about Foxx, who did indeed win the job of U.S. Transportation Secretary (and who snagged some noticeable face-time on national TV on Tuesday night during Obama's State of the Union Speech):

Q. Did you get the chance to consult with the president about who your successor as transportation secretary would be?

Absolutely. When I met with the President and told him that I wanted to leave, he and his team gave me lots of opportunities to consult with the White House.

Q. Did you suggest the name of Anthony Foxx [LaHood’s successor; previously mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina], or did you have other people in mind?

I did, but they knew Mayor Foxx because the Democratic Convention was in Charlotte and they liked very much working with him on that. One of the reasons I suggested him is because we worked with Mayor Foxx a lot on his streetcar and his light rail project…. He was a transportation leader so it was pretty easy to recommend him.

Photo credit: Mary Newsom, 2012

You call that an auto mall?

An auto dealership in an urban environment in Manhattan

I was in New York over the weekend for a meeting, and Saturday morning I went out for a quick walk beforehand. I was staying on West 55th Street so I decided to walk west toward the river.

By the time I got down to 11th Avenue I realized I had been walking past a large auto dealership. Sure enough, a look at signage told me this Mercedes dealership was taking up a substantial part of the block.

New York-style dealerships

Nearby was another new-looking, large building selling Audis. Across 11th Avenue was a building with the names for numerous makes of car - Ford, Volvo, Mazda, Jaguar, etc. I had stumbled on an urban auto mall! (It was the Manhattan Automobile Company.)

It seems developers - at least those who are not in Charlotte - are perfectly capable of designing auto dealerships, even facilities housing several dealerships - that sit right on a sidewalk along a city street, and do not require vast surface parking lots designed with the elegance of a Walmart superstore.

Back home in Charlotte, of course, the City Council just unanimously OK'd a rezoning to allow a vast expanse of auto mall asphalt within the quarter-mile walk zone of a to-be-built light rail station. (See "Don't derail transit areas with an auto mall," and "University City auto mall rezoning complete.")

This was after the appointed planning commission recommended it, and after the city planning department recommended it. Those decisions remain a bafflement to me. None of it matches the city's stated goals for its transit station areas. While in New York, I mentioned this transit-station-area rezoning vote to a former city planning director from another state who now teaches planning at a large state university. His jaw dropped. He was incredulous.

The said thing is, as these photos show, there are creative ways to have both auto dealerships and a pedestrian environment. I'm left to conclude that our local folks may just be too provincial to know better.

Mercedes-Benz Manhattan.

Not just unwalkable. Charlotte is 'least dense city in world'

 A new article from Wendell Cox at New Geography, "The Evolving Urban Form: Charlotte," is probably bringing glee to suburban real estate champions and heartburn to uptown boosters and those who support a more transit-supportive city.

" ... among the urban areas with more than 1 million population, Charlotte ranks last in urban population density in the United States (Figure 1) and last in the world," Cox writes. Wow. This, on top of the Walk Score analysis that found Charlotte the least walkable large city in the U.S. (See "Charlotte trails nation in walkability rankings.")

Cox is a long-time critic of cities' pursuit of public transit systems and of trying to focus development policies on more compact neighborhoods that allow people to drive less and walk more. His Wikipedia page says, "Cox generally opposes planning policies aimed at increasing rail service and density, while favoring planning policies that reinforce and serve the existing transportation and building infrastructure." It also says, "He has authored studies for conservative think tanks such as the Cato Institute, Heartland Institute, Heritage Foundation and the Reason Foundation, and for industry groups such as the American Highway Users Alliance, a lobbying and advocacy group for automobile-based industries."

Even if you don't agree with where he lands with his analysis, the simple numbers of urban density are worth noting. Of course, it's always worth remembering that the geography that any Metropolitan Statistical Area takes in can make a big difference in what you're calling "city" and that the MSA is different from what's deemed the "urbanized area." See "Boundary change boosts Charlotte metro population" and "Carolina metros, changes in the landscape."

Take a look. Comments welcome.

Update, 2:48 p.m. Jan. 8: One reader points out that using the larger geography of zip codes tends to mask pockets of higher density, and also points to the U.S. Census listing of the most populous counties, which includes population per square mile, as shown here via Wikipedia. I looked, and it shows Mecklenburg County (not the Charlotte metro region, not the "urbanized area") as in no way at the bottom of the density scores. Mecklenburg is denser than Maricopa County (Phoenix), San Diego County (Calif.), Miami-Dade County (Fla.), Honolulu County and Salt Lake County, among others. In other words, results depend a lot on which specific set of statistics one chooses to view.

North Carolina, land of lost opportunity?

As more researchers burrow in to the idea of economic mobility, the Equality of Opportunity Project (led by four economists, two from University of California-Berkeley and two from Harvard) has ranked the 100 largest U.S. cities on the economic mobility of children, looking specifically at the odds of a child reaching the top fifth income group if he or she started life in the bottom fifth. Here's a link to the rankings.

The big news for those of us in the Carolinas is that our two states are propping up the bottom of the list.

Four of the bottom five cities are in North Carolina. Another is Columbia, S.C. In order, starting at 100, are Memphis, Fayetteville (N.C.), Charlotte, Columbia, Atlanta, Greensboro, Detroit, Raleigh, Indianapolis, Columbus. Greenville (S.C.) is No. 11 from the bottom.

The study looked at "commuting zones" for cities, which is a different regional configuration than looking at Metropolitan Statistical Areas or just at city limits.

As this Salon.com article ("Class warfare in Dixieland") notes, the bottom of the list is dominated by Southern cities. It doesn't point out that all six of the Carolinas cities in the study are scraping the bottom of the list.

The big question - why? - is not addressed in the research. Theories abound, including in the Salon.com article.