Month: July 2014

Foodies get their due, in new urban study

Foodies around the N.C. Piedmont visit downtown Shelby, for Alston Bridges Barbecue. Photo: Nancy Pierce

Foodies can take a bow. A new report released by Sasaki Associates says it found that 82 percent of city-dwellers appreciate their city’s culinary offerings, reports Anthony Flint for CityLab.com. Almost half the respondents said a new restaurant is the top reason they’d explore different parts of their city. And the majority said they consider food and restaurants the most outstanding aspect of cities they love to visit.

Sasaki is a Boston-area architecture, planning and design firm. Its report was a survey of 1,000 people who live and work in Boston, Chicago, New York, Austin, San Francisco, and Washington. They were asked what they like and don’t like about the area where they live in terms of architecture, activities, parks and open space, and transportation.

Architects might not want to read this next paragraph:

When asked what kinds of buildings people admire as they’re walking down a downtown street, 57 percent said they stop to admire buildings that are historic. Only 19 percent admire buildings that are modern. And in a rebuff to the mine-is-bigger-than-yours tower developers, just 15 percent said they admire the tallest buildings. In addition, 54 percent of respondents said they agreed the city should invest in renovating historical buildings as a way to improve their city’s architectural character. Only 22 percent “would like more unusual architecture (get Frank Gehry on the phone!)” and only 17 percent said they’d like to see more skyscrapers and iconic buildings.
East Charlotte offers many ethnic options.

And Charlotte’s stadium- and arena- and ballpark-besotted uptown boosters might be interested in this:  

When asked what would make them want to visit a new part of their city, participants overwhelmingly (46 percent) said “a new restaurant.” Just 16 percent said they would do so for a sports event.

Coincidentally, I’ve been having an email exchange with Nancy Plummer, one of the founders of the now-venerable Taste of the World festival in east Charlotte. You buy a ticket, board a bus and visit three or four of the ethnic eateries in and near Central Avenue. Next one is Oct. 2. To learn more, click here. Plummer and her colleagues on the Eastland Area Strategies Team founded the event in 2005, a time when many local residents were worried about the influx of immigrants into neighborhoods in east Charlotte, among other areas. To counteract the fears, Plummer and others decided to use food as a way to bring visitors to their part of the city. It worked remarkably well. The most recent tour sold out in 14 days.
People, cities and food. It must be a good recipe.

Proposed bill would hobble transit across North Carolina

A bill being considered in the N.C. General Assembly would bar N.C. counties from raising sales taxes to fund both education and public transportation. The taxes could fund one or the other, not both.

The bill – House Bill 1224 – acquired some surprise provisions in the last few days. One provision would kill the plan to ask Mecklenburg County voters in November to OK a quarter-cent sales tax increase to pay for teacher raises and offer a bit of help for arts organizations.

The bill would cap any county’s local sales tax at 2.5 cents, and Mecklenburg is already at the cap. See “Senate bill would scuttle November sales tax referendum.”

The effect on transit hasn’t gotten much publicity in the Charlotte region, although it can’t afford to build its long-planned transit system with only the half-cent transit sales tax it’s had for 14 years. But in the Triangle, it’s a different story. Transit advocates are worried. (Update July 25: The bill was amended to get rid of the either-or provision. It still would cap a county’s sales taxes, effectively barring Mecklenburg from its planned sales tax referendum for teacher pay and creating a dilemma for Wake County. Here’s a summary of the bill’s process. It passed the N.C. Senate on July 24, and now sits in the N.C. House Finance Committee.)
Some background, although be forewarned, it’s complicated: In N.C., no city or county can raise sales taxes unless the state legislature gives them permission. But N.C. legislators in 2007 gave all N.C. counties permission to raise sales taxes a quarter-cent, if county voters OK’d. (That’s the tax increase Mecklenburg commissioners were hoping to use.) That money could be used for any county use. In addition, in 2009 the legislature gave three Triangle-area counties permission to ask voters for a half-cent sales tax for public transit. The heavily congested Triangle has been planning a rail transit system for years, but had no way to fund it.

Voters in Durham and Orange (Chapel Hill) counties approved the transit tax. In Wake County (Raleigh), a Republican-dominated board of county commissioners has not put the issue to voters. However, Wake commissioners had been expected to decide next month whether to put a quarter-cent sales tax for education to a November referendum.
 
The Senate bill now would allow sales tax income to be spent on education, or on public transportation, but not both at the same time. Huh? Yes, it’s confusing. This article from WRAL-TV is helpful: Senate seeks to curb local tax use. So is this one, from the Raleigh News & Observer: Senate bill would ban N.C. counties from raising sales taxes for both education and transit.

The N.C. Senate was to vote on the bill today; the vote was postponed until Monday.

WRAL’s Laura Leslie quotes a Raleigh-area legislator,Sen. Josh Stein, D-Wake, who said he was puzzled by the bill:

“Why wouldn’t we allow it, if they chose to designate a quarter-cent to transportation and a quarter-cent to education? Why must it be one or the other?” Stein asked. “What if they have needs for both?”

Raleigh-area transit advocates worry the bill could devastate plans for multicounty systems. “This is a really bad bill that could kill the transit referendum for Wake County,” Karen Rindge with WakeUP Wake County wrote in a message to supporters. Another source, speaking on background, told WRAL: “It pits transit against education, and transit’s going to lose every time.”

In Charlotte, meanwhile, the 1998 half-cent transit tax doesn’t bring in enough money to build anything beyond the Blue Line light rail, now operating, and the Blue Line Extension, under construction. No nearby counties have stepped forward to help make the Charlotte Area Transit System a regional one.

Of course, tax policy experts will tell you sales taxes are harsher on the poor than property taxes, because the poor spend a larger proportion of their income on food, clothing, and other taxed purchases. So why not just raise property taxes to fund both education and public transportation?

In my experience, no matter how practical that idea may sound, the question is about as welcome as an ex-boyfriend at a bridal shower. In other words, you aren’t likely to hear any pols — local or state — asking it.

Local transportation planner: Outerbelt warning was prescient


My posting Tuesday on the death of long-time Atlanta Regional Commission executive Harry West, “Atlanta’s ‘Mr. Region’ (who warned against our outerbelt) has died” brought this memory from longtime local transportation planner Bill Coxe, Huntersville’s transportation planner who previously the transportation planner for Mecklenburg County, back when there was enough unincorporated county land to make work for a county transportation planner.

Coxe wrote:

Saw your blog on Harry West’s passing. Had the following knee-jerk reaction:

As a transportation planner intimately involved with Charlotte’s outerbelt since its original environmental study in 1979, I vividly remember Mr. West’s comments at that conference. And time has proved him true. This billion-dollar infrastructure project causes the market to distribute land use in its wake. And since it turned land that had been used to row-crop food into land that is used to row-crop homes that are followed by row-cropped retail centers, it in turn demands more infrastructure investment. But the distances involved now make the cost of that provision daunting.

I also recall XX [Coxe named a local planner; I’m checking with that person to make sure Coxe’s memory is accurate] making a presentation on his research that indicated outer loops did not bring more development to a metropolitan region, simply caused it to occur in a different fashion. Don’t know how you could ever prove or disprove this thesis.

Coincidentally, 1998 was also the year of the 2025 Transit/Land Use Plan, which recommended using rapid transit investment as a tool to engender a more compact and economically viable land use pattern.

Atlanta’s ‘Mr. Region’ (who warned against our outerbelt) has died

2009 photo of unfinished I-485 at Old Statesville Road. Photo: Nancy Pierce

Sad news from the Saporta Report in Atlanta: Harry West, longtime (1973-2000) executive director of the 10-county Atlanta Regional Commission, died Monday morning, reports Maria Saporta.

West, writes Saporta, “probably did more than any other person in metro Atlanta to create a regional mindset.” Read more about his role here.

I met West several times over the years, but his most memorable visit to Charlotte, at least in my memory, came in March of 1998. He spoke at a regional conference on the then-unfinished I-485 outerbelt loop. The conference was sponsored by the Centralina Council of Governments, the now defunct regional advocacy group Central Carolinas Choices and – perhaps amazingly – the Charlotte Chamber.

It was a time when some community leaders worried that building the outer loop would create so many miles of low-density sprawling development that Charlotte would go the way of Atlanta.

As I wrote in an April 11, 1998, column for the Charlotte Observer, West described what Atlanta’s Perimeter Highway, I-285, had meant to the city and what Charlotte might learn from Atlanta’s experience.

I-285 was finished in 1969, he recounted, and was intended to maintain a strong center city. Instead it attracted development, and what Atlanta got was sprawling growth “that doesn’t allow you to do anything but use your car,” as West put it.

Then came his advice: “If I thought you would listen to me,” he said, “I’d tell you not to build it.”
He didn’t mean not to build any more streets or roads or highways. He meant not to focus our transportation plans
around a loop highway. As I wrote then:
“He advised a serious focus on land-use planning along I-485, and requiring development that doesn’t force you to drive everywhere. ‘Decide what you want and stick to it,’ he said. ‘Don’t change it, don’t bend to the market forces.’

“Did he realize he was in Charlotte, the ‘Growth Is Good’ center of the universe? Market forces here eat land-use plans for breakfast.”
After the conference the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission did a land use study of all the outerbelt interchanges and set “plans” for those that had not been built yet, or that did not already have plans. The plans looked like colored blobs of single-use zoning: office parks in this area, shopping centers over there, single-family subdivisions here and apartment complexes over yonder.
None of those interchange plans, even if they had been followed, would have made any difference in stopping the outward-oozing sprawl. Almost all the the new development was designed so driving is the only way to get around. So much for the cure of congestion. Harry West understood that, and he tried to tell us. But we were not in a mood to listen.

Life along any urban highway. Do highways just induce traffic? Photo: iStock

  

Charlotte history, hiding behind a wall

Can you find the Jane Wilkes statue behind the brick wall along Morehead Street? (See below) Photo: Mary Newsom

One of the best statues I’ve ever seen sits atop Rome’s Gianicolo Hill. A series of Busts of Important Men lines an avenue, and there is the obligatory statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian hero of the Italian unification movement in the 19th century.

But a short walk away is another statue. It’s Anita Garibaldi. She is sidesaddle, atop a rearing horse, holding a small child in her left arm, close to her breast. With her right, she aims a pistol at the sky. What a woman!

Anita Garibaldi. Photo: “Blackcat” via Widkimedia Commons


Charlotte, in some ways being even more traditional than Rome, does not memorialize its women with statues. Heck, it barely memorialized anyone with statues – at least, not until the Trail of History project came along, since representational statuary today is about as fashionable among artists as bustles, spats and top hats. 

That’s a group of local donors and history buffs who are working to erect a series of statues of historic personages along the Little Sugar Creek Greenway. Their first was a monument to Capt. James Jack, who rode from Charlotte to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1775 carrying (according to local legend) a copy of the May 20, 1775, Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. Meck Dec skeptics say he only carried the Mecklenburg Resolves, adopted May 31, 1775. Whatever.  There’s a guy on a charging horse, in a pool of water across Kings Drive from Central Piedmont Community College.
Now Trail of History monument No. 2 is up, and by golly, it’s a woman: Jane
Renwick Smedberg Wilkes. Read more about her here. She was a New Yorker who married her first cousin, John Wilkes, and moved to Charlotte in 1854. After the Civil War she was active in founding the first two civilian hospitals in Charlotte, including Good Samaritan, the now-demolished hospital for blacks during that segregated era.

Jane Wilkes. Photo: Tom Hanchett

The statue, designed by Wendy M. Ross of Bethesda, Md., depicts a woman with a slight smile (and not brandishing a pistol). It’s the smile of someone who is possibly about to ask you to support a project for which she is raising funds, and whose smile is also a bit stern, as if to show that even if you do not give her any money, she will not rest until you – and others – make her project a success.

While it’s excellent that our monuments are honoring one woman among the seven people planned to have statues (see the list here), it’s a bit odd that this statue is hiding behind a very long brick wall along Morehead Street, where it crosses Little Sugar Creek. Why have a wall between the sidewalk and a public park area? That seems to me inappropriately suburbanistic for this part of the city.  Plus, it obscures the existence of the statue and the nice flowers planted around it. When you are walking on the Little Sugar Creek Greenway on the other side of the creek, you have no idea the monument to Jane Wilkes is even there.

I asked Mecklenburg County Park and Recreation Department greenway planner Gwen Cook for details on the design of the garden. She relates, via email: “At Robert Haywood Morrison Gardens [the formal name for the small garden in which the statue resides], the wall is an essential element of the garden. The noise from Morehead Street is terrible. You couldn’t hear yourself think, and if we hadn’t got that right, we’d have no garden. We had to add the wall to manage the ambience of the garden.” She said the garden, but not the statue, are on maps along the greenway.

The only way I knew the statue was there was having read about it in the Charlotte Observer. As her great-great granddaughter, Margo Fonda of Charlotte, told the Observer, “Jane Wilkes was from a time when women didn’t vote, didn’t hold jobs and stayed in the background, but she did incredible things. And she was really humble about it, not even acknowledging it in her autobiography. The idea of a statue to her is really cool.”

*Once you get behind the brick wall, you discover Jane Wilkes’ statue. Photo: Mary Newsom