A myriad of municipalities – the Gaston v. Union bakeoff

For years, as a public policy geek and former state editor, I’ve believed Union County, just southeast of Charlotte, has more municipalities than any other county in North Carolina. A frenzy of incorporations in the 1990s and early 2000s pushed Union ahead of Gaston County, which had held the record — at least as far as we knew.

But after doing a bit of research (for something else) I have learned that we in the N.C. Piedmont cannot hold a candle to the coastal county of Brunswick. At least, not if the N.C. League of Municipalities website can be trusted.

Check this out:
http://www.nclm.org/resource-center/municipalities/Pages/By%20County.aspx

Brunswick County has 19 incorporated municipalities, outstripping Union’s paltry 15.

And Union has 15 only if you count Mint Hill, almost all of which is in Mecklenburg County. Robeson County has 15 municipalities, and though two (Maxton, Red Springs) are split across two counties, they are predominantly in Robeson.

Gaston has only 14, and that includes two municipalities straddling the county line: Kings Mountain believes itself to be
part of Cleveland County. High Shoals is in Gaston and Lincoln counties.

Wake County also has 15 municipalities, according to the league’s list. But that list counts Durham (Durham County), Clayton (Johnston County) and Angier (Harnett County), and it splits Zebulon between Wake and Johnston counties and Wake Forest between Wake and Franklin counties. Both of those towns think of themselves as Wake County places. Subtract Durham, Clayton and Angier and Wake has 12 municipalities.

Bottom line: Brunswick County wins the most municipalities title. Its smallest is Bolivia, population 146, and Bald Head Island, 160. 

The power of metros to N.C.’s economy

Dan Barkin, a senior editor at Raleigh’s News & Observer, on Wednesday posted an eye-opening statistic about North Carolina’s economy on “The Editor’s Blog,” which he shares with other top editors at the N&O newsroom.

In “Metros dominate NC economy,” he writes that the seven largest metro areas generate nearly 70 percent of the state’s economy.  The Charlotte metro area alone is responsible for a quarter of the state’s economy. The Triangle (Barkin added together Raleigh-Cary and Durham MSAs) tally 22 percent.  That means, he points out, that Charlotte and the Triangle are nearly half the state’s economy.

A few things to note: First, the so-called urban/rural split in the state is a lot squishier than it may seem. Those “metro areas” (a.k.a. Metropolitan Statistical Areas) tend to include places that to most people would seem rural, and in some cases they’re bizarrely drawn. Examples: Marshville in eastern Union County,or Cat Square in Lincoln County. The counties are in Charlotte’s Metropolitan Statistical Area, but some of the smaller communities don’t feel very
urban.

Second, the statistics raise the question of how best to help the state’s struggling rural areas. If their economies are sinking, what’s the best way to help them? Does pulling power and resources from the areas where the economy is healthier work? Can they be more closely tied to the metro areas, through linkages of commerce, transportation and education? If the economy in an area is dying, when should you apply CPR or a feeding tube, and when (if ever?) do you remove the feeding tube and the heart-lung machines?

I don’t have the answers and I’m not sure anyone does. And a community that’s hurting is, of course, different from a patient in a hospital. But one answer that the data do appear to point to is that policies that damage North Carolina’s urban areas will likely be damaging a massive chunk of the whole state’s economic health. 

Triangle’s transit tussle – and its ‘expert’ trio

And speaking of public transit, which I often find myself doing, Rob Perks of the Natural Resources Defense Council last Friday posted a good summation of the situation in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill region, where two of the three counties have voted for a sales tax to start building a system of rail and bus lines throughout the region. But Wake County continues to balk.

And read on to learn about my research into a panel of three ostensibly unbiased “experts” that may have been a stacked deck.

First, here’s a link to Perks’ blog, “The Tussle over Transit in the Triangle.” It’s a good summation of the situation. Be aware that given Perks’ job and beliefs, it’s commentary, as opposed to a news article.

The situation: Wake County commissioners, dominated by Republicans, have stalled and stalled. Then they hired a three-person panel of “experts” to look at the local data and provide advice. One of the experts is Sam R. Staley, well known in planning circles as an anti-Smart Growth voice. He’s a research fellow at the Reason Foundation, a libertarian public policy think tank. Among those on Reason’s board of directors is David Koch, the billionaire oil industry mogul and conservative activist whose money in part has helped bankroll the Tea Party, among other political endeavors. But I digress.

Another of the three experts is Steve Polzin, director of the mobility research program at the Center for Urban …
Transportation Research at the University of South Florida. A Tampa Bay Times investigation in 2009 found that the center has frequently been critical of passenger rail travel, while promoting alternatives (highways and bus rapid transit) that it has been paid millions to study.  Read it here: One of rail’s biggest critics gets millions to study and promote alternatives

The article notes the CUTR’s history of opposition to rail transit projects. Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio (who didn’t run for a third term in 2011) was critical of CUTR. She told the Times that CUTR’s objections to rail have held the area back and predicted they’d be recycled, again, to weaken public support of a light rail proposal headed for a 2010 vote. [That 2010 vote for a 1-cent sales tax for transit in Hillsborough County lost 58 percent to 42 percent.]

“I’ve been very disappointed in the role CUTR has chosen to play,” Iorio said. “I do believe academic think tanks can play a very important role in shaping public policy. But CUTR is such a waste of a resource. It’s one of the reasons why we haven’t moved forward with rail. It’s really been a shame.”

The third expert is Clarence W. “Cal” Marsella, former general manager of the Regional Transportation District and the public face of its multibillion-dollar and nationally praised FasTracks rail project.

Here’s an account of the panelists’ recommendations from the Raleigh Public Record.

Of course, transit and transportation scholars can legitimately disagree about the wisdom of one public policy course over another, and they can provide research data to support a wide spectrum of conclusions. That’s legitimate.  But for the Wake commissioners to name two prominent rail transit critics to a three-person advisory panel might be raising some eyebrows in the Triangle. 

Here are some links to Raleigh News & Observer articles on the three-member panel:

New urban workers want rail transit
Wake transit plan – which never got first look from commissioners – needs ‘second look,’ Triangle Transit chair says.

 

Charlotte council to vote on three preservation projects

The Cohen-Fumero house, designed by Charlotte architect Murray Whisnant

The Charlotte City Council at tonight’s meeting is expected to vote on designating three buildings as historic landmarks. The first is the Cohen-Fumero House. Read more about it at the PlanCharlotte article, “Can Charlotte learn to love Modernist homes?” 

For Charlotte, it’s an unusual selection:

  • First, it’s in East Charlotte, not a part of the city that’s been graced with many landmark buildings.
  • Second, it’s a mid-century Modernist home, an architectural style that while attractive to a younger, hipper population around the country, doesn’t get the love from the more traditionalist sectors in Charlotte, a city with a comparatively large bloc of traditionalist sectors.

But in its favor is this: Landmarking historic properties is easier in parts of the city that are not seeing intense development pressure. That’s why so many historic properties in uptown were wiped away; the dirt under them was too valuable for new development.

Some personal disclosure here: I’m friends with the original owners, artists Herbert Cohen and Jose Fumero, who in the 1950s and 1960s hosted much of the Charlotte “Creative Class” in their living room for Sunday dinners. They’ve been together for something like 50 years, which in itself is worthy of note. And I’m friends with the architect who designed the house for them, Murray Whisnant. Whisnant, a Charlotte native who also designed the Rowe Arts Building at UNC Charlotte, has been a creative force in the city for decades. 

The other two properties are mills: The Defiance Sock Mill in the Third Ward neighborhood, and the Louise Mill, built in 1897 in the Belmont neighborhood.  Charlotte is (finally!) seeing an impressive collection of renovated and adaptively reused mills dating to its textile-industry past. Among the notable projects:
Atherton Mill in South End, Highland Mill in NoDa, the Charlotte Cotton Mill uptown, and Alpha Mill in uptown/Optimist Park. (I’m not sure where one neighborhood ends and the other begins.)

To see the reports on the historic properties on tonight’s City Council agenda:
Click here for the Cohen Fumero House.
Click here for the Defiance Sock Mills.
Click here for the Louise Cotton Mill.

Least walkable city in U.S. is – wait a minute, that’s us!

Uptown is one of Charlotte’s most walkable areas, along with First and Fourth wards. Photo: Nancy Pierce

(Friday, Nov. 15: I’ve updated this with comments from Charlotte transportation officials. To see that expanded version, visit the article in PlanCharlotte.org: “Charlotte trails nation in walkability rankings.”)

Want to guess the large U.S. city rated worst for walkability by Walk Score, the national rating system?

That would be the Queen City. Take a look at the 2014 report. New York rated No. 1, followed by San Francisco, Boston, Washington and Miami.

But what does this ranking measure? The Walk Score website says it “measures the walkability of any address using a patent-pending system. For each address, Walk Score analyzes hundreds of walking routes to nearby amenities. Points are awarded based on the distance to amenities in each category. Amenities within a 5-minute walk (.25 miles) are given maximum points. A decay function is used to give points to more distant amenities, with no points given after a 30-minute walk.
Walk Score also measures pedestrian friendliness by analyzing population density and road metrics such as block length and intersection density. Data sources include Google, Education.com, Open Street Map, the U.S. Census, Localeze, and places added by the Walk Score user community.”

If I read that correctly, Walk Score doesn’t measure the existence of sidewalks (although Charlotte wouldn’t rank very high in that regard either). So this city’s typical Sun Belt-all-spread-out, low-density development means anything you’d want to walk to is probably farther away than in a more densely developed area.

Charlotte also would ran low in block length and intersection density – which essentially measures how well networked the city is with plenty of streets and street corners.Many parts of Charlotte developed during the cul-de-sac era, when streets intentionally did not connect to anything.
Even uptown, which at least had a strong grid when it was laid out a couple of centuries ago, has seen many instances of streets being eliminated to accommodate large-footprint projects such as ballparks, stadiums, convention centers and parks.

I’m seeking comment from Charlotte Department of Transportation officials, but I doubt this ranking will surprise them.