Month: April 2016

Density and parking: W.W.J.J.(Jane Jacobs) D.?

View of proposed development from Caswell Road. Image from documents filed with City of Charlotte

I’ve spent the last few days re-reading parts of the writings of Jane Jacobs, in advance of a talk I’m giving Thursday in the NoDa neighborhood (6 p.m. at the Evening Muse, free and open to the public) as well as the 100th anniversary of her birth May 4, 1916. (See an inspiring list of Jane’s 100th events at janes100th.org.)

So when I read about neighborhood opposition — and more significant, opposition from District 1 City Council member Patsy Kinsey — to a proposed development in the Elizabeth neighborhood on the basis of density and a worry about parking, I was primed to consult Jacobs’ writing. WWJJD? What Would Jane Jacobs Do? Spoiler: I think she would be OK with the development but would be more worried about what she called “the self-destruction of diversity.”

Ely Portillo’s article in The Charlotte Observer lays out some of the opposition. The proposal (see the rezoning documents here) is for a 60-foot-high development of 123 apartments, with 15,000 square feet of shops and restaurants, at a triangular corner at East Seventh Street and North Caswell Road.

Portillo quotes neighborhood association member Melanie Sizemore saying that while developers and the neighborhood have worked together they haven’t resolved all the issues. Two big sticking points: density and parking. They’re afraid the number of proposed parking spots isn’t generous enough and will mean congestion in the surrounding neighborhood.

Today, Charlotte Agenda writer Jason Thomas, referring to remarks at Monday’s public hearing, opines that it shows “just how lost our City Council is.” (See “The City Council is making baffling decisions on urban planning.“) Thomas praises it as beautifully
designed and well-thought-out and compares it favorably to other recent apartment projects the council approved, including one right across Seventh Street, that he says are uglier.

But the supposed need for more parking? Listen to Jane Jacobs, a brilliant observer of and thinker about cities: “The destructive effects of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building,” she wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. This is in the book’s introduction, in which she excoriates planners for cluelessness and for oblivion to reality as they blindly follow theories of how cities should work and ignore evidence that their theories are flawed. “… Planners … do not know what to do with automobiles in cities because they do not know how to plan for workable and vital cities anyhow — with or without automobiles.”

One of those failed planner theories is that density in cities is bad. Jacobs’ book proves the opposite: It’s essential to a healthy, functioning city.  But during the 20th century the “density is bad” theory embedded itself in the minds of well-meaning, “progressive” planners and neighborhood advocates. So did the idea that traffic congestion and lack of parking will kill a neighborhood. Jacobs’ observations showed how that’s another fallacy. In recent decades many planners themselves have abandoned the “density is bad” theory. But it’s clearly foremost in some people’s minds.

(An aside: Jacobs’ assumed that cities would have demolition protection for older buildings and the courage to impose height limits, which are tools used to protect the needed diversity of building age and scale. But demolition protection and height limits are lacking in Charlotte.)

Is Thomas fair to expect all City Council members to be urban designers or planners? That would be nice, but it’s unrealistic. That’s why the city pays a whole department of people to advise them on such matters and to ensure that city ordinances produce the kind of development the city’s plans call for.

Quick quiz:

1. Are the plans what they should be, or are they vague feel-good statements?
2. Do the ordinances produce what the plans call for?

OK, you score 100. The policies set forth in many of the plans are vague (“Protect and enhance the character of existing neighborhoods.”). And the ordinances don’t produce what the plans call for. The city hired consultants (Clarion) who told them so. Three years ago. Moving at a pace that makes glacial melting look rapid, the city is only now starting work on rewriting its zoning ordinance.

Why not, in the interim, apply a few patches for areas that need them? I’m thinking of places facing rapid demand for new buildings, where the old multifamily zoning allows developments that deface the sidewalk experience: South End, Elizabeth and Plaza Midwood for starters. Patches could be some tailored-to-the-area zoning overlays, or they could boost the urban design standards in a few of the zoning categories such as MUDD and TOD.

But back to Jane Jacobs. What was that about the self-destruction of diversity? She noticed that successful, popular neighborhoods with a diverse set of buildings, businesses, homes and uses tended over time to lose that blend:“Self-destruction of diversity is caused by success, not by failure. … The process is a continuation of the same economic processes that led to the success itself.”
As a neighborhood becomes more popular, she wrote, the new development will tend to be whatever is most profitable. That’s how capitalism works. Over time, the neighborhood loses its diversity. “So many people want to live in the locality that it becomes profitable to build, in excessive and devastating quantity (emphasis mine), for those who can pay the most. These are usually childless people, and today they are not simply people who can pay the most in general, but people who can or will pay the most for the smallest space.”

Does that sound familiar?

What’s a city and what’s a suburb, and what’s their future?

Large totems mark the “center” of the Ballantyne development in south Charlotte. Photo: Google Street View

I’ve long been interested in how people use the terms “suburban” and “urban,” because their definitions seem to wobble all over the map. Thanks to the state’s formerly easy annexation law, the city I live in, Charlotte, has large areas well inside city limits – places that in another metro area would be separate municipalities or unincorporated sprawl. People here call them “suburbs,” though by some definitions they’d be “city,” not “suburb.”

But the issue of suburban vs. urban living is just as lively here as anywhere. So I’ve been interested to read two recent articles that tackle that broad topic, though in different ways.

First, Josh Stephens’ review in the California Planning and Development Report of the latest Joel Kotkin book, The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us, dissects, or at least tries to dissect, what Kotkin means by “the rest of us.” Who is his “us”? And why does he assume that everyone who lives in a suburban-form landscape does so by choice, rather than because of housing affordability or job location or doubts about schools?  Hat tip to Planetizen for alerting me to this excellent piece, Fetishizing Families: Review of ‘The Human City.’

Next is an analysis from Daniel Hertz in the sometimes wonderfully contrarian City Observatory, about DuPage County, Ill., just outside Chicago. In “A Mystery in the Suburbs,” he looks at the county, where growth in recent decades has been of the ubiquitous automobile-centric, focused on highways pattern focusing on highways. Once robust, in recent years DuPage has seen some siphoning off of economic energy, as companies move back to downtown. 

This put me in mind of Ballantyne, a large suburban-style development at the far southern reaches of Charlotte city
limits built over in the past 20 years. There is, in fact, more mixing of uses in Ballantyne than in most 1980s or 1990s developments, but it’s in the style of houses here, shopping center there, offices across the street. It’s jammed with cars and not at all walkable unless you like to get mowed down on multilane freeway interchanges or giant thoroughfares. The developers have just announced a vast new development at the far western edge of the city.

Hertz writes:  … The spread-out nature of development means that no one bus line can have easy access to many homes or businesses either—and even someone who steps out of a bus relatively close to their destination has to navigate roads and parking lots that aren’t designed for walking. Partly as a result, the buses simply don’t come that often: at best, every 15 minutes at rush hour, which may be on the edge of acceptability for show-up-and-go service in the afternoon or late in the evening, but is a burden for someone who really needs to be on time for a job. Other buses come much less frequently, even at rush hour.”

Gee, does that sound like anywhere I know? Charlotte’s development pattern has made bus service difficult with the never-adequate funding available.

Hertz goes on: “Someone who wanted to commute to their job in DuPage County by transit would discover 26 rail stations which are probably within walking distance of neither their home nor their job, and a network of buses that aren’t much better, most of which come too infrequently to be reliable for very time-sensitive trips like a commute, and which require getting to and from stops that are located on roads that are hostile or dangerous for walking.

“In other words, the decisions of planners and developers over the last several decades have created a land use pattern that essentially locks in transportation choices for all future residents, who are now stuck commuting in ways they say they’d rather not. And DuPage, like other car-dependent suburbs around the country, may be losing some of its economic base as a result.”

Is that the future of Ballantyne, 30 years out? Will Charlotte, seeing massive population growth, continue to wave into being more large, suburban-style developments at the edge of the city where transit service is at best iffy, and whose future may be less than anyone would wish?