Month: July 2008

In the category of things found while looking up other things, here’s an interesting front-page piece in Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times, “Americans may be losing faith in free markets.”

The writer, Peter G. Gosselin, quotes several experts, including Kevin Hassett, at the American Enterprise Institute.

William Galston of the Brookings Institution in Washington says, “We’re at a hinge point. The strong presumption in favor of markets, which has dominated public policy since the late 1970s, has been thrown very much into question.”

Even the American Enterprise Institute’s Hassett concurs in the existence of the backlash. “There may be a backlash against markets at the moment,” he says, though he goes on to say he doesn’t see any alternative view of how things should work.

They cite the convergence of issues: a housing meltdown that resulted from an unregulated corner of the mortgage market (high-risk loans), the price of gasoline (generally blamed on the laws of supply and demand and oil market speculation), disappearing U.S. jobs and worries about retirement investing based on the assumption the stock market will always rise.

“We’re [he means Americans] not ready to throw out markets altogether,” says economist Robert E. Litan of the Brookings Institution and the Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City, Mo., “but we want government to do something about the excess.

(Note: Reworked as of 1:58 p.m. to more clearly reflect Peres’ remarks.)

This has to be a quick post, as I’m buried in other matters today.

I caught up with Mark Peres yesterday. Peres is the founder/editor/publisher of Charlotte Viewpoint, a nonprofit online magazine that aims to offer intellectual discourse about Charlotte, especially center city.

“I’m optimistic about the current pessimism,” Peres said. (Or words to that effect. I wasn’t taking notes.) Um, why? Because, said Peres, maybe the current pessimistic scenarios — including but not limited to Wachovia’s problems, although like most of us he doesn’t wish more harm to befall one of the city’s two Big Banks — might tamp down on speculation and “get us back to more sound management principles.”

Interesting point. But is there really any pessimism around here? Charlotte’s relentless optimism, or some might say boosterism, is as deeply rooted and unquenchable as kudzu.

So feel free to start commenting on optimism/pessimism/boosterism or even kudzu. (I remember reading about one farmer who kept his cattle alive during a horrible drought when he learned they’d eat kudzu.)

Finally, feel free to keep jawing to one another about NoDa, as the comments are fun. But warning: I’m deleting comments that insult others or use words I decide are outside the bounds of polite discourse.

OK, here’s the piece I promised, about lane merging. Note: I don’t do this, because the social opprobrium would be overwhelming.

The situation I’m talking about isn’t merging onto freeways. (On freeways, one should whenever possible change lanes or slow down to allow the merging vehicle onto the highway. ) I’m talking about when there’s an unexpected obstruction in one lane of a multi-lane road or street, such as a stalled car, a moving van or construction.

Just for a minute, think of this situation as a traffic engineer might, viewing the pavement in each lane as “vehicle storage space.” If something up ahead is causing traffic to stop or slow dramatically, why should all the vehicles line up in one lane only? That just backs the tie-up even farther down the street. If both lanes were used, with each vehicle fairly and equitably alternating merging, once the obstruction was reached, it would cut in half the length of the clog on the street.

In reality, though, as so many previous comments have shown, people don’t act the way engineers view the world. We use our driving as a status quest. People want to be the cutters-off, not the cuttee. They think people who try to cut in front are greedy and ill-mannered. Sometimes, especially when the only vehicle zooming to the head of the formerly empty lane is a gas- and space-hogging Hummer, they are probably right.

Second, this is nothing I thought up in Boston. I noticed it some years back here in Charlotte. In Boston, in such a situation what they do is honk their horns. This is both useless and nuts. I mean, do they think the stalled car will, Lazarus-like, revive itself, or the moving van will decide to go away and come back at midnight, if only it hears some beeping horns?

Stay tuned to this space, and tomorrow or the next day I’ll explain why, contrary to what most drivers think, it really isn’t rude when — seeing a merge coming up — you drive all the way to the front of the empty lane instead of hanging in the long, long line in the other lane.

Not that I would do this, mind you. I don’t want to get shot by some road raging nut. I’ll explain more later. Today column-writing for Saturday Viewpoint page comes first. In the meantime, some interesting reading to keep you busy:

The end of suburbia? Joel Kotkin says (in the L.A. Times) “not yet.” Link.

Kotkin’s responding, in part, to an article in the March Atlantic magazine, that created a lot of buzz, from Christopher Leinberger, positing that McMansion suburbs will become the next slums. Link.

Now, here’s a critique of Kotkin’s piece, by Bill Fulton of the California Planning & Development Report. Link.

This month’s Atlantic has an interesting and provocative piece on crime in Memphis, with a mention of Charlotte, pegging the rise in crime in suburban areas to the rise in Section 8 housing vouchers and the demolition of old-line housing projects. Link.

Interesting developments in Sacramento, chronicled by the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ tells how the six-county Sacramento region agreed on a plan for growth — including that some areas simply wouldn’t allow development — and is making it happen. Link.

Here’s Witold Rybczynski on the legacy of Buckminster Fuller. Link.

Also, a piece from former Maryland governor Parris Glendenning saying Americans are tired of feeling like victims. Link.

And finally, here’s something you’re unlikely to see out of Charlotte-Mecklenburg: “The county board of supervisors in Loudoun County, Va., has voted to ban itself from accepting any campaign contributions from developers or builders.” Link.

Three cheers for Jim Bartl.

Ever heard of him? If you’re a builder you probably have. Bartl is code enforcement director for the county’s Land Use and Environmental Services Agency. He’s been working for years, slowly and deliberately, to get the county’s and more significantly, the state’s building codes — which dictate the county’s — to be more flexible and to recognize changes in the way developers and planners want to build projects.

It’s because of Bartl that North Carolina adopted a rehab code for older buildings, so owners of older buildings no longer have the devil-or-the-deep-blue-sea choice of either spending a fortune to bring old buildings up to modern codes, or to tear down and build new.

Now, the codes are changing for live-work units. A live-work is a place where you can live AND have a business. A century or more ago, this was common and perfectly legal to build. You could open a business and live above it. The jargon is “vertically integrated.” It’s an urban form dating at least to the ancient Roman empire. But those buildings have been hard to build legally in places such as North Carolina, where codes were written as though everyone would build only new, suburban-style, single-use-zoning developments. Even when zoning allowed them, as in Cornelius, the building codes made it difficult to build economically and created odd rules about which floor you had to live on, and work on.

Bartl knows that traditional neighborhood development, or transit-oriented development, or whatever you want to call it, needs codes that allow such live-work spaces.

“Until now,” writes Bartl in a memo, “there was no provision for any use other than residential in the IRC [International Residential Code]. Since live-work units mix in a commercial use (the “work area”), they were driven out of the IRC, into the International Building Code (IBC). This incurred an increase in code-related construction requirements (use separation, construction type, egress, fire prevention) far in excess of any low risk hazard present in the work function. The added requirements drove the construction costs up, and inevitably drove the units out of the affordable housing range.”

Finally, last year, he reports, the International Code Council Final Action Hearings approved a live-work code change to both the IBC and IRC. The change will be incorporated in the 2009 IRC and IBC, and likely will be available in North Carolina in a few years. Until the, he states, the county department will accept residential project live-work proposals, using the ICC-approved live-work code.

Note: If you’re planning to build something based on this blog posting, please contact Bartl or his department for the fine-print rules that I have probably oversimplified here.

Scrolling the e-mail inbox, I found this invitation for free gelato on Tuesday, as well as an hour of imagining what could be ….

The Civic By Design forum — a monthly discussion group about urban matters — on Tuesday evening is offering free gelato, purchased from Dolce, with its July forum: ” The Pantheon Project: What If Charlotte … “

Consider the Pantheon in Rome, a 2,000-year-old building that remains an architectural marvel, and a transcendent place to experience:



When: The event will be Tuesday (July 8), 5:30-6:30 p.m. at the Levine Museum of the New South, 200 E. Seventh Street (Free parking at Seventh Street Station parking deck).
What: Imagine some of the world’s best urban places were suddenly placed in today’s uninspiring locations all around Charlotte. Local planner Blair Israel came up with a great location, and Tom Low’s recent visit to Rome inspired an idea. What if the Pantheon — including its surrounding piazza with fountain, teeming neighborhood of stores, gelato bars, churches, businesses, homes, etc. — were to rise out of the pavement at Kings Drive and Morehead Street, where the Little Sugar Creek Greenway is being developed.

How would you transform that spot into a civic destination so compelling that people would flock there from all over and it would become a gathering spot for centuries?

Bonus: RSVP by today to brenda@dpz.com and you’ll get gelato at the event. (Or maybe even if you don’t RSVP).

For a map and 360-degree view of the site, go to this link.

People’s pocketbooks and wallets drive behavior. Remember the idea New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed, modeled on a program in London? If you drive your car into the most congested areas of Manhattan, you have to pay a daily fee. The revenue would go toward improving public transit services.

The idea collapsed this spring in the New York state legislature. Now, reports the New York Times, $4-a-gallon gas is accomplishing some of the same goals anyway. One big difference, of course, is that high gas prices are reducing traffic everywhere, not just in the most congested areas. And there’s no extra revenue for public transit.

Meanwhile in London, where congestion-pricing godfather Ken Livingstone lost his re-election for mayor, new mayor Boris Johnson, a Conservative, is looking again at the the most recent congestion-pricing zone extension in the western part of the city and says he doesn’t want any more extensions.

“I am not going to be having any more congestion charges,” he was quoted as saying in The Guardian. “What I am determined to make happen is a modal shift towards bicycling and walking, not just in inner London but also in outer London.”

The program overall has been popular with Londoners, who saw congestion diminish and liked what they saw. The betting — from one of Livingstone’s deputy mayors whom I met in Cambridge — is that it’s so popular that even the conservative Johnson won’t scrap the whole program. And note that, unlike so many of the more conservative pols in the U.S., even Tory Johnson wants more people walking and bicycling.