Month: January 2009

Stimulus: $30B for roads, $10B for transit

You’d think $10 billion extra for transit would have people cheering. Not so. The draft stimulus package details, released today, has three times as much money for roads and bridges as for non-automobile transport. And only a puny $1 billion for inter-city rail and an equally puny $1 billion for New Starts, which won’t go far around the country.
The TransportPolitic blog here has a link to the pdf of the bill. This link takes you to a version of today’s release, courtesy of Talking Points Memo.
Will the $30 billion for roads and bridges go for new construction or repairs? Hasn’t been decided yet, apparently.
This TwinCities Streets for People blog notes that another chunk of stimulus money $31 billion, would go to modernize infrastructure with an eye to long-term energy savings, which might well include some transit projects.
Also note that a big chunk of the stimulus ($79 billion) is aimed to help states avoid service cuts, with the majority of that money aimed at education.
LaHood in trouble?
TransportPolitic also had this nifty tidbit about Transportation Secretary-designee Ray LaHood’s background. “Today’s [Wednesday’s] Washington Post broke the devastating news that just last year, Mr. LaHood sponsored $60 million of earmarks, at least $9 million of which went directly to campaign donors. $7.8 million of that money went to Caterpillar, a company from his district. “

(For Charlotte old-timers, the Post’s story was written by former Charlotte-Observerite Carol D. Leonnig, who used to cover Mecklenburg county commissioners before moving to DC to cover, among other things, the Scooter Libby trial.)

How government created suburbia

OK, the headline is a lot broader than this brief posting will be. (And there are links to some interesting reading at the end.)
But please indulge me in a tiny bit more on the suburbia discussion. Several commenters point out, rightly, that Levittown, one of the first large-scale suburban developments, wasn’t a government project but a private one, and that’s right.
However, if you burrow into history, you find that starting in the 1930s, when the government began backing mortgages, its rules specifically encouraged suburbia’s single-family housing and discriminated against urban neighborhoods, especially those with racial or ethnic minorities. In thrall to “modern” planning philosophy, the rules discouraged mixed-use neighborhoods. Banks and other lenders wouldn’t lend in areas that the government discouraged — hence the phenomenon of red-lining, which lasted into the 1970s and 1980s.
None of that means that there isn’t a market for large-lot suburban homes. There is. But that kind of development needs to pay more of its own way. And where were the wails of “socialism” when the government (and private lenders) were actively discriminating against urban neighborhoods, where you couldn’t get a loan to rehab or add on? Read Jane Jacobs. Read Kenneth T. Jackson’s “Crabgrass Frontier.” Etc.
OK, new topic. Three interesting links:
First, a piece about the weird ways traffic works, courtesy of “Jumper.”
Second, a link to a piece in Grist about Charlotte’s transit system, courtesy of reader William Howard. (Grist bills itself as “environmental news and commentary.”
And this month’s Atlantic magazine has a piece from last November’s CNU (Congress for the New Urbanism) conference in Charlotte on transportation.

‘Well-intentioned meddlers’

Thankfully, the state border make[s] it much for (sic) difficult for well-intentioned meddlers like Mary to “save” us by destroying our homes and property values.

That’s from a comment on the previous posting, which linked to “What Will Save the Suburbs,” about whether current suburban development can ever be successfully re-used after today’s incarnations move and change.

My apologies to aforementioned commenter, but come on! How do you think present-day suburbia came to be? It took massive government “meddling.”

The current single-family-only subdivisions would be completely unnatural if we had that mythical “free market.” It takes constant government meddling, in the form of zoning laws and code and zoning inspectors, to keep some folks in those subdivisions from opening nail salons or small coffee shops in those houses, or renting out the bonus room above the garage to a grad student, or splitting their McMansions into quadraplexes and rooming houses to avert foreclosure. It took government “meddling” to create single-use suburbia and meddling is required to maintain it. Just try subdividing your large lot into three smaller ones and putting some apartments on one of the lots. Better yet, just try taking your lot in Morrocroft neighborhood near SouthPark and building high-rise condos – which you almost certainly could sell, or could have until last year.

One huge reason suburbia is hard to convert is because it was built under government rules that didn’t allow mixing uses. So there are no stores inside single-family home subdivisions, and no apartment buildings or condo buildings either. Other government rules have mandated a certain number of parking places for businesses, hence the big asphalt oceans left behind when the big boxes bail out or go belly-up.

Sure, some of suburbia is built by choice – mostly by people who learned to tailor their development techniques to match what the zoning laws required, and now they’d just as soon not have to re-learn new techniques if the old ones are A.) Legal and B.) Making money.

Suburbia is just as much a product of government intervention as the newer, mixed-use and transit-oriented developments. Different rules, yes, but rules just the same.

What will save the suburbs?

About four different readers pointed me to this intriguing blog posting at the New York Times by Allison Arieff, “What Will Save the Suburbs?”

I hope all our city council members, city staff, county commissioners, planning commissioners take time to read it. Arieff points out that unlike the development of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the postwar suburbia is going to be difficult to re-purpose (ugh, horrible word). Yet in Charlotte, you can still build a three-houses-per-acre single-family subdivision without any City Council rezoning needed — auto-pilot growth .

Empty big-box stores are just one of the problems. (I wonder if the book she cites, Julia Christensen’s “Big Box Reuse” mentions that one old K mart in Charlotte was reused as a charter school.)

The difficulty of re-purposing development that was badly designed to start with is one major hurdle for attracting any serious uptown retail: There simply aren’t enough good sidewalk-front spaces clumped together to attract enough stores. After all, retail loves to be near other retail. (See “shopping centers.”) If you don’t understand what I mean about good sidewalk-front spaces, take a field trip to downtown Asheville.
Maybe this development downturn will inspire the city of Charlotte to finally look with purpose at the kind of by-right development (meaning no rezoning needed) it’s allowing.

Did developers slow naming of CDOT director?

Let’s see, Charlotte Transportation Director Jim Humphrey left in late 2007. So why did it take until 2009 for the city to name a replacement? Today City Manager Curt Walton announced he was promoting Interim Director Danny Pleasant, who came to CDOT as deputy director in 2002.

A good source tells me one reason for the delay was nervousness in the development community about Pleasant, whose initiatives in the department have pushed the envelope for good community design. Apparently City Manager Curt Walton was able to get the City Council members comfortable with Pleasant as CDOT director.

As deputy director, he oversaw transportation planning that is putting more emphasis on walkable streets, bicycling paths, connectivity. One of his responsibilities was the six-years-in-the-making effort to rewrite the design guidelines under which streets widths and sidewalk widths and other such essential rules are written. Those urban street design guidelines came under criticism from the development community who didn’t like the requirements for wider planting strips, required street trees and shorter block lengths.

Pleasant has a master’s in urban planning, is a member of the Congress for the New Urbanism, the American Institute of Certified Planners and a fellow of the Institute of Transportation Engineers.

Calif. city manager: Scrap zoning

Rick Cole writes that zoning codes are the problem, not the solution, in the effort to build and maintain great cities. He writes:

“The American Dream” of single-family tracts, shopping centers and business parks owes more to zoning mandates than to market economics. Zoning was imposed on the American landscape by an unholy alliance between Utopians preaching a “modern” way of life and hard-headed businessmen who profited from supplying that new model, including an auto industry steeped in the ideology that “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.”

Cole is a former mayor of Pasadena, Calif., and now city manager in Ventura, Calif. Instead of zoning, he says, use “codes” — something more and more municipalities are doing. Then he has a good analysis of the terminology of “form-based-codes” (a cumbersome term that addresses the how, but not the why you’d have one) vs. “smart codes” (a term that’s been adopted by lots of developers whose projects were anything but smart).

A number of smaller municipalities in this region have adopted codes that are akin to the form-based code. Charlotte isn’t one of them.

Build roads, repair roads or fund transit?

There’s plenty of chatter about whether federal economic stimulus money should go for transit, for road-building, for repairs or building new. But there’s also a big push to target the about-to-be-written federal transportation bill. A coalition group called Transportation for America is warning: ”Now is not the time to squander money on projects or plans that do not help save Americans money, free us from oil dependence and create long-term jobs.” Here’s a link to a blog item on it from Smart Growth Online. It quotes an Associated Press article:

”Now is not the time to squander money on projects or plans that do not help save Americans money, free us from oil dependence and create long-term jobs,” warns a diverse Transportation for America coalition of environmental, urban design, housing and other groups, launching a campaign to make sure the 2009 federal transportation bill allocates a fair share for mass transit and infrastructure repair instead of funding mostly new roads, reports Associated Press writer Sarah Karush. The effort [has been] joined by Pennsylvania and Virginia Democratic Governors Ed Rendell and Timothy M. Kaine, and former Maryland Democratic Governor Parris N. Glendening, now the Smart Growth Leadership Institute president.

”That’s always difficult politically,” said Governor Rendell about his state’s fix-it-first approach, but recalling the deadly August 2007 collapse of the I-35W Mississippi River Bridge in Minneapolis, he asked, ”How many more Minnesotas do we have to have as a country?”

Governor Kaine cited a decline in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and an increase in transit demand, telling the writer, ”The key is to provide choices, so you invest in everything.” And Governor Glendening said, ”Make sure that infrastructure really builds for the future. That’s about transit, that’s about walkability, that’s about ‘fix it first.’ ”

No crime ‘czar’ but guess what!

There was so much hoopla over the so-called “crime czar” that the county was going to hire, that many top county honchos decided the term “czar” was part of the problem.  So it was a bit of a surprise when County Manager Harry Jones – in introducing top aide Michelle Lancaster, who’s apparently going to be the supervisor for a yet-to-be-hired and less-well-paid “senior manager for state justice services” – called her “new crime czaress Michelle Lancaster.”

Here’s the article from today’s paper explaining what was about to happen. If April Bethea (who’s sitting next to me here in the front row) posts a new story I’ll add a newer link.

Oh, and commissioner Harold Cogdell is against recidivism. Well that’s a relief!

Hot air about saving farmland?

Commissioners Dan Murrey and Dumont Clarke now talking about promoting local food, and preserving farms.

It would help provide wholesome food and affordable food, Murrey says, and also help energy efficiency.  “It is not energy efficient to fly asparagus from Chile in the middle of the winter,”
Murrey says. (Hmmm, the asparagus I buy in the middle of the winter comes from Peru.)
One teeny problem amid all this good feeling (and I’m a big proponent of local food and helping farmers and preserving farmland).  Mecklenburg has almost no working farms left, and even worse, has no mechanism for keeping the handful of remaining ones from being developed. Unless the county intends to buy all the farms – even this tax-and-spend librul thinks that isn’t workable – there’s no mechanism for stopping their almost inevitable development.  Tools such as buying development rights and urban growth boundaries have been left on the table* and there’s no move from anyone to resurrect them. (*Except in Davidson. It has its act together.)