Month: February 2012

Author: Redevelop in increments

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

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?

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

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

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.