Month: September 2012

When planners gather …

WILMINGTON – As soon as I get my sandwich at Pender’s Cafe on Front Street I’ll be heading to the large new-ish Wilmington Convention Center for a session on greenway planning at the annual convention of the N.C. Chapter of the American Planning Association. I’ll be here until mid-day Thursday, blogging from some of the sessions. So check back in during the next two days.

For now, must chow down and then rush back to the center.

Greenways: Lessons from other cities (2:35 p.m.):

I’m now listening to planners from Wilmington describe their city’s cross city trail – which will be 15 miles when complete, from downtown Wilmington east to Wrightsville Beach.  It’s the only greenway in the city now, although a greenway plan is under way now to plan for more.

Wilmington greenway planners traveled to Greenville, S.C., to study that city’s Swamp Rabbit trail, which when complete will run 17.5 miles from Greenville to Travellers Rest. Now it’s about 13.5 miles. They found community advocacy was key in making that greenway happen. A regional advocacy group, Upstate Forever, pushed for trail acquisition and helped provide volunteers for cleaning up the abandoned rail bed the trail runs on.

The Swamp Rabbit Trail is sponsored in part by the Greenville Hospital, which dedicated $100,000 a year for 10 years, considering it a way to improve community health.

Some of the trail’s innovative marketing ideas: Organizers now sell coordinates along the trail. If something special happened on the trail, you can buy a sponsorship for that spot. And when trail officials realized that restrooms and parking along the trail were sometimes hard to find, they partnered with businesses and institutions and now the interactive trail maps show where you can use a restroom or find a parking place.

Another tidbit: In North Carolina, a state law protects property owners along greenway trails from liability.

If you ask the public, they might answer

(Update, 9/19/12 at 1 p.m.: A more complete version of this article, with photos, “Neighbors deliver earful on zoning ordinance,” is now available at PlanCharlotte.org.)

You’d expect a room full of developers, developer consultants and lobbyists invited specifically to  bellyache Tuesday afternoon about Charlotte’s zoning ordinance would have had plenty to say. And they did have comments. But it was the group who followed them, about two dozen neighborhood activists and non-developers at a later public comment session, who all but scorched the paint off the walls.

“My concern is that this whole process will turn the zoning ordinance over to the developers,” said Bea Nance of the College Downs neighborhood in northeast Charlotte.

“We’re no match for the developers with money,” said John Wall of the Hidden Valley and North Tryon Street neighborhood.

“The problem is, there are no teeth in plans. They mean nothing,” said Susan Lindsay of east Charlotte.

“Quite honestly, the staff doesn’t support their own plans,” said Cindy Schwartz of Dilworth. “We never see them oppose anything.”

The two forums were held Tuesday ….
to solicit comments from the public about a zoning ordinance assessment. The city Planning Department has hired Clarion Associates of Chapel Hill and Denver to look at the city’s zoning ordinance and at whether it helps or hurts in implementing city policies and plans, and then offer ideas for reorganizing, restructuring and updating the ordinance. A 4-6 p.m. public comment session was aimed at developers and other regular users of the ordinance. A 7-9 p.m. session was aimed at other members of the public.

As consultant Matt Goebel of Denver repeated several times, the consultants aren’t writing a new zoning ordinance as part of the project. It’s an assessment, not a rewrite, he said.

Nevertheless, participants at both sessions questioned why more public input wasn’t included in the project. At the night meeting, even the consultants’ intent to get city planning staff to edit a draft of the assessment report they’ll write in the next few months raised suspicions and complaints among several people in the audience.

“You’re getting paid out of public dollars,” Susan Lindsay said. “I’d like to see what you have to say without the staff editing it.”

Not all the comments were in agreement with each other. Bea Nance said plenty of residents like having grass and trees and weren’t necessarily interested in more public transit service. ” ‘Suburban’ is not a bad word, people,” she said.

It’s not that the earlier session, with developers, was filled with the bluebirds of happiness. Among the issues raised, in addition to a wish for more public input, were:

From developer David Furman: A suggestion that, especially in more well-developed areas, measuring development intensity by counting units per acre isn’t particularly effective. A better measure, he said, would be to use what planners call Floor Area Ratio, which measures the square footage of the building compared to the size of the site.

From developer and consultant Karla Knotts: It’s difficult to look things up in the ordinance the way it’s presented on the city’s website. Also, she said, “Unless you know you’re in an overlay district there’s no way to know you’re in an overlay district.”

From lobbyist Joe Padilla of the Real Estate and Building Industry Coalition: Some broad-brush restrictions, such as height limits, would be more effective if they were tailored to different parts of the city instead of imposed one-size-fit-all.

Add your own input. Take an online survey: Click here, or visit the city Planning Department department web page for the project by clicking here.

Funnertime in the city

From guerrilla urbanism such as Matt Tomasulo’s Walk Raleigh project, to International PARK(ing) Day, in which people take over a parking place and transform it into an instant park, to this experiment at a London bus stop (be sure to click that link and watch the video; it’s charming), the idea is clear: Make cities more fun.

Call it tactical urbanism, or guerrilla urbanism, or just call it a fad. But it’s bringing a welcome touch of whimsy and creativity to the urban design field. Ideas are popping up all over the world, with help from social media.

So, has whimsy-challenged Charlotte gotten into the act?  If UNC Charlotte urban design student Keihly Moore gets here way, the city will. She’s organizing a PARK(ing) Day event in Charlotte for Friday.  Disclosure: Keihly is my graduate assistant at PlanCharlotte.org, and is a master’s student in urban design and architecture (dual degree) at UNC Charlotte. She also writes for the PlanCharlotte website.

With approval from the city’s Department of Transportation, Keihly and collaborators with the UNC Charlotte School of Architecture and the Charlotte Urban Farm Project will take a few spots in South End on Camden Road near Park Avenue – where the Food Truck Fridays event is held – and convert them, temporarily, to a park. Here’s her diagram.

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She plans sidewalk-chalk activities, among other things. Read more about it by clicking on this link. It’s all volunteer-led, with no budget to speak of. If you’re interested in helping, you can email Keihly (it’s pronounced KEE-lee.)

If you know of more tactical urbanism – maybe we should call them Random Acts of Urbanism? – let me know.

Europe’s great untapped revenue source: property taxes

The piece I’ve been working on for most of the summer, about the financial health of cities, was accepted and published today by TheAtlanticCities.com.

Europe’s Great Untapped Revenue Source: Property Taxes 

Its key point: Headlines about financial crisis focus on nations, but it’s on city streets that the trauma plays out. And local government experts say for cities in the U.S. and Europe, things are going to get even worse before they get better. And in Europe, economists are urging more reliance on property taxes, which typically make up far less of a local government’s revenue stream.

The article emerged from a conference in Paris sponsored by the Johns Hopkins University International  Urban Fellows Program.

Among the many lessons I learned there was this small observation: In Paris, when a regional planning agency offers a lunch to a visiting conference, it will include pate de foie gras. Not what you’d see at a Council of Governments or MPO meeting in the U.S., I think.

N.C. court to counties: ‘Raise taxes, already’

In August,the N.C. Supreme Court threw out Cabarrus County’s adequate public facility ordinance. Here’s the Charlotte Observer article on the ruling: “Ruling favors developers.” You can download a copy of the ruling here, courtesy of Joe Padilla at the Real Estate and Building Industry Coalition (REBIC). 

The ruling is of interest, of course, but as a practical matter APFOs, as they are known, were already virtually dead in North Carolina, as Mae Israel wrote in June for the UNC Charlotte website I run, PlanCharlotte.org. (See “With ordinances dead or in limbo, planners ponder next steps.“)

Under APFOs,  the local government sometimes assessed a fee on development if, for instance, local schools were already overcrowded and the county did not have the money to build new ones, or the planned new schools weren’t yet built. Or the developers would delay building until new schools opened.

Since the ordinances were invented as a way to help counties (and a few municipalities) find some money to pay for the schools, parks, etc., the question arises: How does a fast-growing county like Cabarrus pay for the services its thousands of new residents require? A number of studies have shown that typical suburban-style large-lot subdivisions don’t generally bring in enough property tax revenue to pay for the services they use. (More expensive houses, obviously, produce more property tax revenue, and at some price point the housing will start to pay for itself.)

 It’s unusual to live in a state where developers essentially pay no impact fees. Whether that’s fair or not depends, of course, on what “fair” is. Typically the cost of building, which would include impact fees, is mostly passed on to buyers, although sometimes it can work backwards and affect what developers are willing to pay for the land they buy instead of raising the price point of the houses.

But in opposing both impact fees and the adequate facility ordinances, the state’s Home Builders Association and related lobby groups say it’s more fair to spread the costs around the community rather than imposing them directly on developers and buyers of new houses. The Charlotte Observer article quotes Gary Embler, past president of the Cabarrus County Building Industry Association, who “praised the ruling, saying: ‘Public education is the responsibility of the community at large, not just those building new homes.’ “

The community at large? That would be the general county taxpayers.

The question of which is more fair – impact fees for some or higher taxes for all – a meaty tax policy question. But no one should be surprised if this ruling means property taxes will rise to pay to build more schools, maintain more streets and provide more police and fire services. Did the high court just tell counties to raise taxes and stop whining?

Taxpayers lose $4 billion on sports venues

One of many links someone shared with me last week during the DNC, when I was too busy hopping from event to event to sit reading links, is this from Bloomberg.com, which adds up some VERY BIG sums of what U.S. taxpayers really pay to subsidize sports stadiums and arenas: “In Stadium Building spree, U.S. Taxpayers Lose $4 Billion.”

With groundbreaking Friday for the Charlotte Knights ballpark in uptown Charlotte, it’s particularly timely reading. Bloomberg reporters looked primarily at tax-exempt muni-bonds issued for places including Charlotte’s Time Warner Cable Arena, where the NBA Bobcats play.

The reporters write: “During the past decade, studies by Grant Long; Robert Baade of Lake Forest College near Chicago; Victor Matheson, an economist at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts; and others have found that stadiums are poor municipal investments. Nonetheless, political leaders are still willing to offer taxpayer-funded aid to team owners – including muni-bond financing – to lure or avoid losing a franchise and the civic pride and event-related jobs that go with it.”

The link takes you to a 2006 article in Growth and Change: A Journal of Urban and Regional Policy, where the article abstract says: “The evidence presented here is that the presence of a new or renovated stadium has an uncertain impact on the levels of personal income and possibly a negative impact on local development relative to the region.”

Note: The Knights ballpark is getting direct subsidies from Mecklenburg County worth some $20 million (depending on how one values 8.6 acres uptown for $1 a year), $8 million over 20 years from Mecklenburg County, and $7.25 million from the City of Charlotte. I’m fairly sure tax-free municipal bonds aren’t being used. If someone knows different, please alert me.

Many people say the money is worth it: Bringing baseball to uptown Charlotte will enliven the city and spur development, they say.

And if you were uptown during the Democratic National Convention you saw an event that would not have happened if George Shinn had not taken his Charlotte Hornets elsewhere, and the city decided it really did need a new uptown arena.

But isn’t it better to have those debates when you know the full cost of things? Are sports arenas the best use of $4 billion in U.S. treasury funds or should there be other priorities? Depends, I suppose, on how much you love pro football, basketball and baseball.