Month: October 2013

Can light rail reshape this auto-oriented corridor?

I have auto-related uses on the mind this week, because at a 4:30 meeting today the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission is going to recommend yay or nay on a proposed auto mall (a collection of car lots from different dealerships) in the University City area. You can download the agenda for that meeting here.

(Update, 5:20 p.m.  The planning commission’s zoning committee unanimously recommended that the site be rezoned for an auto mall. Two commissioners who had earlier expressed opposition to the rezoning, Tom Low and Deb Ryan, weren’t at the meeting. The City Council makes the final decision.)

The city planning staff has switched from recommending against the rezoning to recommend for it, if some design and site plan issues are resolved. Interestingly, their issues earlier were not because it’s for a large chunk of auto-oriented uses within a quarter mile of a planned light rail station area, where the overall city policy calls for transit-oriented (i.e. walkable, compact, mixed-use) development. Instead the staff focused on design issues. (See the commentary on PlanCharlotte.org, “Don’t derail transit areas with an auto mall.”)

Yesterday, I  had occasion to drive on North Tryon Street, from the UNC Charlotte Center City campus to the main campus on University City  Boulevard.  I decided to count the auto-oriented businesses on North Tryon Street up to the corner of U-City Boulevard.  I started at Atando Avenue (where the idea occurred to me), so the count starts there.  Want to guess? The answer is ….

Looking ONLY at the right side of the street heading north (so I didn’t count Parks Chevrolet, Young Ford, etc.) I counted 32 used car lots, car rental businesses, auto parts stores, tire stores (new and used), repair shops, etc. If you want to count the Auto Bell car wash, make it 33.

Interesting side note: The auto junkyard was among the nicer-looking businesses along this stretch, due to its screening, landscaping, etc. The used tire stores were the junkiest.

My point here is that the new light rail line will plow through territory that is already heavily aimed toward automobile uses. And most of that territory carries zoning that already allows very nontransit-friendly uses. (See this, about a gated apartment complex at U-City Boulevard and North Tryon – no rezoning needed. Multifamily is fine at a transit station area, but large surface parking lots and a gated development are not.) Until the land use zoning in the area changes – and especially the standards for form and design – it will be difficult for the city to transform the area into a walkable, mixed-use and mixed-income neighborhood.

Regional planning and sticker shock

Will stickers on a map matter? Photo: City of Charlotte

After suggesting in print that people should attend last Thursday’s regional planning workshop, part of the CONNECT Our Future effort, it was only fitting that I, too, go. And a good time was had by all. Except …

We were assigned tables as we went in, and I ended at a table with two other Marys – Mary Hopper, recently stepped down as director of University City partners and a former chair of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission, and Mary Clayton, a transportation planner with Parsons Brinckerhoff. Also at the table were three UNC Charlotte urban design grad students, and a handful of other folks.  I am not sure that the table was representative of the population at large, but whatever. It was a good collection of people.

Our table moderator, Nadine Bennett, a planner with Centralina Council of Governments, which is administering the $5 million federal grant that funds CONNECT, asked us all to talk a bit about who we were and what we thought the region’s biggest issues are. Just about everyone said “transportation.” And just about everyone said, “We don’t want to become another Atlanta.”  One of the graduate students was, I am not making this up, from Atlanta, and she was particularly forceful on this point.

Bennett said that she had been the moderator for, I think, 17 different tables during a two-month series of workshops in 14 counties and at every one of those tables, people had said, “We don’t want to become another Atlanta.”
In other words, regardless of the interesting, lively, cultural vibe in Atlanta, its image in this part of the country is of one giant traffic jam and minimal public transportation.  Not sure that’s accurate, but that’s obviously what people envision.

The workshop exercise itself  involved placing stickers on a big map of Mecklenburg County, showing where we think new metropolitan centers (towers), activity centers, transit-oriented centers, etc., should be.  We had a small number of “walkable neighborhoods” that we could stick here and there on the map.  It was never clear why we couldn’t work toward making every neighborhood a walkable neighborhood. And it wasn’t clear why we were restricted to Mecklenburg County, because if anyone understands the reality that a metro area’s issues are not hemmed in by county lines, it would be the regional planners at the Centralina COG.

It was fun placing the stickers. Without a young child in the house my exposure to stickers has dropped and you forget how much fun they are. But as with most regional planning exercises of this sort, whether it was the RealityCheck 2050 workshop last June, or last week’s event or even the drawing up of area plans, I emerge frustrated. From what I see, in this city in this state, what’s in a plan seems to make little difference in shaping what ends up happening.

Do plans matter?

That’s for a lot of reasons. One is that national tax policy as well as the financing availability for developers both play a big role in how developments are structured. It is even tougher than before the downtown to get financing for mixed-use developments.

Another obvious reason that plans don’t get followed is that the plans themselves can be disconnected from the legal requirements for developers. Ordinances address such things as setbacks, allowable land uses, how many buildings can sit on how much land, etc. Those things shape the results. Some cities create land use plans that have the force of law. Others adopt a comprehensive plan and then systematically amend their ordinances to enable what the plan calls for.

Charlotte doesn’t do it that way. It adopts plans, then hopes developers will follow them. Unless the plans are 20 years out of date. In which case the planners may recommend in favor of a development that doesn’t follow the plan. Plus, sometimes plans have vague language which means nobody can tell if a development is following the plan or not. In any case, regardless of what plans say or what planners recommend, it’s elected officials who decide rezonings.

Less obvious: by-right zoning

A less obvious reason that plans may make little difference is that a lot of development takes place with no rezoning needed. Consider the vast, 733-student, gated and fenced apartment complex going up about a half mile from the planner University City light rail stop. No public notice or rezoning took place because the land was already zoned to hold suburban-form apartments.

Multifamily is a good use for a transit station area. But this design is not. Transit station areas are supposed to have walkable streets and connecting streets (walkability is closely related to short, connecting blocks, says Jeff Speck, author of Walkable City.) Transit station areas are not supposed to feature a 733-space parking lot between the light rail station and the residences, nor large wooded buffer areas — a suburban-style design. (An updated zoning ordinance could have prevented this.)

Charlotte’s Sharon Road West light rail stop. No other counties have opted in. Photo: Nancy Pierce

Last Thursday night, I had to leave before all seven tables reported out, but after five tables, all had recommended dramatically improving the area’s public transportation choices.Is that going to happen? A 14-county region means dozens of elected officials, and so far, none of those counties has offered to pay for public transit, because it would mean taxing the voters. If there’s a groundswell in the region for a transit tax, it’s not loud or well-reported on.

To be sure, the Salt Lake City region’s remarkable series of transit construction projects (building 70 miles in seven years) is reported to have emerged from a regional planning process, Envision Utah.

Can CONNECT produce any region wide consensus the way Envision Utah did? I’m hopeful. But not optimistic.

What’s up (or not) with a zoning ordinance re-do?


It’s been almost three months since a consultants’ report concluded the city’s zoning ordinance is seriously in need of updating. (See my PlanCharlotte.org article, “Report: Charlotte ordinance confusing, lacks modern tools” from July.

What’s happening next?  Planning Director Debra Campbell discussed that at an Oct. 7 meeting of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission, an appointed advisory board to the city’s Planning Department and City Council. 
Campbell said the planning staff is discussing how to link the zoning ordinance assessment process with their planning process. The planners want to look at whether a revised zoning ordinance would mean revising the way plans are done, which today are the “Euclidian model,” Campbell said. For non-planners, that means based on single-use zoning districts.  (The term “Euclidian zoning” isn’t about Euclidian geometry, but is named for the 1926 Supreme Court case, Village of Euclid, Ohio, v. Ambler Realty Co., which ruled that land use zoning is constitutional. The Euclid zoning ordinance was based on single-use districts, a type of land use generally considered suburban or rural, not suitable for large cities.)

 

“Our plans are very use-based,” Campbell said. “They’re colors on a map.” In other words, local plans tend to map large areas and, with color-coding, delineate land uses should go where. Instead, Campbell said, “I want them to focus on both use and character.” Sometimes, she said, getting too deep into the planning process can seem dry and boring to the general public. “In general people want to be involved with what’s it going to look like, what’s it going to feel like?”
Laura Harmon, the department’s director of development services, said the staff would have a better idea of how to link plans and the zoning ordinance “in the next month or two.”
Said Campbell: “If there’s a fatal flaw that I have, it’s that I like to go slow … I like to bring folks along with me.”